I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
Let’s not forget one of the biggest investors is a right-wing billionaire who runs a corporate intelligence agency that contracts with the DoD. And the only proof we have that he doesn’t collect data on Brave’s users is the questionable word of the devs.
Brave has been off limits for me ever since I saw my QAnon nutjob father using it lol.
I would appreciate if we don’t bring politics into the conversation. They are completely subjective and only serve to stray away from the original point.
Edit:
Yes, I’m aware I’m in the wrong here.
Privacy is a political subject.
Brave is literally a grift. Too many people are falling for it.
Too many people only care about the openweb or shitty companies in the comments. They have no fucking willpower, no patience, and no follow through. Their complaints are utterly meaningless because they utterly refuse to stick to their guns.
There’s one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.
Yet, they use Brave.
Ehh there is only so much a single person can care about. If you have a life and aren’t effectively an activist/lobbyis by profession you can’t care about politics both local and global, preserving nature and ecolody, world hunger & disease, and a million other things like which software company is less evil all at once and follow through 100%, supporting all of the causes meaningfully.
Not to mention we have to make compromises, too.
There’s one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.
Hard disagree. Firefox had its fair share of controversies, it’s still technically funded by Google (while not accepting donations), and Mozilla Foundation as a nonprofit is pretty questionable too.
The leadership of Mozilla Corporation is shit too like any other corp; they lay off engineers and give themselves huge bonuses.
It takes them years to even acknowledge simple bugs, let alone actually getting to fix them.
A huge part of why Firefox lost the “browser wars” is also that they failed to make it easy to build into other apps so it could work more like Electron, while also pissing off users with surface changes that break their workflow.
Overall it’s better than Chrome especially if you care about privacy, but it’s not a huge win.
I turn on youtube and see no ads
Just use uBlock Origin.
What are the better solutions for iOS users?
Someone mentioned Firefox Focus.
Not on iOS. Every browser on iOS is effectively just a skin for safari. There is no true Firefox for iPhone, or chrome for that matter.
If you’re using an iPhone, you willingly surrendered your freedom of choice. This is what you paid for.
As I stated in a previous post, if you are using an iPhone you’ve basically given up on having privacy. For ad blockers you could use AdGuard and Safari, it’s better than nothing. You could also use something like Mullvad VPN, it has DNS ad blocking.
That’s the most ridiculous statement I’ve seen today. iOS has infinitely better privacy than Android lawl
An iPhone is a give-up on privacy because you don’t get alternatives. If you don’t like your stock OS on an Android phone you can just switch OS (for example GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, ect.). If you don’t like the normal YouTube app you can just sideload a different one. You don’t get this kind of freedom with an iPhone. A prime example of this is when, during the Hong Kong Riots where Apple pulled an app that assisted protesters.
Never used it, I saw some twitter comments from it’s CEO and this guy isn’t trustable.
I go with Firefox and sometimes epiphany. Last one tries to accomplish the level of the well known ones but is mostly years behind. That’s sad, because I really like it.
Might I add brave’s BAT wallet is garbage. You had to sign up to some random exchange and upload your ID (I didn’t), but even that you couldn’t even backup your wallet into a new install, so hope that you would never have to format or reinstall or change devices - it’ll be a pain to restore, if it was even possible.
Firefox over brave any day.
Brave always marketed itself as hardened privacy browser and the second I saw their shitcoin immediately bells went off.
Either way, I use Librewolf on PC and Mac and lately been giving Arc a try on Mac and I like it.
Even worse for privacy, it uses the Chrome engine.
Firefox + Startpage is really cool. I like how their searched don’t include the search parameters in the url + the built in proxy
Even if they were amazing, it would still be worth using Firefox instead to suppport an alternative to chromium.
How about the Opera Browser?
Don’t touch opera, avoid it like the plague
I have installed it on all my devices. Firefox is standard from now, becouse of its open source culture etc.
Proprietary, controlled by the Chinese Government, spyware, Chromium.
They got sold to a Chinese firm and it appears that much of the core development team abandoned the project and restarted under the name Vivaldi.
Vivaldi
If you absolutely have to use a Chromium project, then Vivaldi is the one, but at the end of the day it is still unfortunately Chromium.
I would recommend waterfox. I use it on windows, it doesn’t run great on Linux so far so on my Linux machines I use Firefox.
If nothing else, I would recommend Firefox over Brave for the sole reason of the latter being yet another Chromium browser. It would be nice if we could eat away some of the browser marketshare from Google.
Brave is not spyware. That website you linked is horrible and full of misinformation. They also claim that Firefox, and even Tor Browser, are spyware. They act as if any and all connections a browser makes are automatically bad and used for spying/tracking.
I won’t disagree with the other criticisms of Brave that you made, but just wanted to point that out. That website is just highly unreliable and makes verifiably false claims about the browsers it reviews.
Brave is not spyware
It is officially spyware now: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-services-without-user-consent/
Just commenting to let you know I’ve clarified a bit in the post. Also, stock Firefox is spyware so.
Stock as in out-of-the-box.
Edit: If you want to downvote this go ahead, but at least know that it’s true. Without changing ANY settings, Firefox is spyware.
Brave was also made by a guy who got kicked out of Mozilla for being homophobic. The cryptocurrency stuff is brave also a major scam, it’s a crypto that must first be converted into another crypto before it can be converted into real money. How is that a “currency”?
I’ll keep using and promoting it. I consider it better than Mozilla/FF anyway. Deal with it and stop telling people what they should and shouldn’t do.
I used to use Brave, then used Bromite but that got abandoned. I think there’s another fork of it, but ultimately I just use Firefox which has worked better for me overall.
Browsers are a big attack vector for exploits and security is very important. Firefox releases patches regularly and I don’t have to worry about it being abandoned like some others. I disabled whatever telemetry / sponsored stuff they have enabled by default and feel it’s a good balance of security & privacy + doesn’t have the DRM crap chromium is trying to add.
Their extension support is nice too.
