As a piece of software, nothing. It’s an open source browser, and has an added bonus of having many privacy settings on by default. Not even firefox can say the same, it comes with telemetry, pocket and whatnot out of the box.
But there are some fair criticisms about the company and its administration. For example, there was an incident years ago when you signed on a crypto exchange, it would swap the sign on link for their own referral link. They claimed this was an error and quickly patched it, but I don’t buy it.
You’ll quickly notice that a lot of people on lemmy passionately hate brave. So expect a strong bias and, as a result, truths but overblown, half truths and misinformation. Don’t ignore what they say but double check them.
nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
Tl;dr Brave’s ceo (founder?) has donated to legislation to abolish gay marriage in California.
Brave adds referral links to cryptocurrency urls.
And it is apparently collecting money for YouTubers and not paying them (I did not fully read that article myself)
cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world 4 months ago
What an absolute fuck-head
UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Aight, found this. Apparently the twat donated 1000 dollars to some proposal in California that would ban gay marriage.
You know? Honestly, I don’t care about that. They’re free and open source. They have to make SOME money somehow. Referrals cost the seller rather than the customer. While this does count as an advertisement, it is still very low profile. So uk…I don’t really mind that.
I just found this page talking about this. It’s a forum, where a guy is asking “isn’t it pirating when we watch YouTube videos without ads due to Beaver’s ad blocker?”. Yea, so it’s more a question of adblockers hurting YouTubers rather than Brave doing well that.
nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
I was reading another comment, apparently they were swapping their referral link in place of your own.
UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 4 months ago
WAIT, WHAT?!!! That’s like cartoon level conning!
Carighan@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Didn’t they also click ads when you clicked a link, invisibly in the background?
pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
that’s pretty much adnauseum except it doesn’t prentend
uis@lemm.ee 4 months ago
How does it even work?
cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Before displaying a page it searches the content and injects a referrer tag to the end of URLs that match certain things. This is done instantly.
E.g. If there’s a Binance URL on the page it’ll add something like
?ref=bravebrowserBinance will pick up that tag and give them money for any sign ups. Brave do this for any crypto services they have affiliate accounts with.