Submitted 1 year ago by dantheclamman@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.spacebar.news/p/stop-using-brave-browser
TL;DR: The ceo is a bigoted asshole, Brave is chromium, it was initially funded by Peter Thiel and they’re literally just trying to make their own adsense network.
The self-proclaimed privacy focused browser is tracking your browsing and want to serve you personalized ads, and use that tracking data for their AI training.
And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. And they seemingly unironically called it “Basic Attent Tokens”…
I see no reason to use any other browser than Firefox and maybe Librewolf.
Firefox on desktop is awesome. Firefox on mobile is painful.
I am forced to use Chromium on my work laptop because MS Teams doesn’t work (all the features) on Firefox.
I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
The fact that their founder wants to ban gay marriage is enough reason for me to avoid it like the plague.
He fucking what?
He made a thousand dollar donation in support of proposition 8, a constitutional amendment in California that strips gay people of the right to marry. He then proceeded to argue that such a donation does not make him a bigot or an enemy of LGBTQ+ people, because he’s a delusional piece of filth.
Reeeee!
I dont know why anyone would leave chrome and land on something like brave.
If youre ditching chrome, which you should, go to an actual different browser and use Firefox.
Also, if you going to completely ditch chrome/chromium, also stop using Electron apps (which have chromium/Chromium Embedded Framework on them!)
That’s gonna be quite difficult, unfortunately
What if the apps aren’t for online use?
Streaming services seem to lower bitrate when I’m using Firefox vs Brave, so Brave is my go to for streaming.
I use Firefox for everything else.
Firefox and gecko are just not as smooth. I don’t know how you don’t notice this, especially on Android.
Brave is the only browser I know that can play youtube videos in the background on mobile. Please tell me another browser that can do that. The UX is just really good.
Why not use NewPipe?
Vivaldi can do that, there is an option in settings. Firefox mobile does that with an addon.
Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seem to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don’t buy the argument that it’s easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It’s not as complicated as people make it out to be. It’s not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they’ll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine’s direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! 😄
I use it as my hardened Firefox doesn’t play well with some government and bank sites
I was using Chrome as a secondary because unfortunately “designed for Chrome” is a thing now, and got sick of Google’s bullshit and thought I was doing better by going to Brave. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Brave has its own large ethical holes.
When I need a Chromium browser I use Vivaldi. I quite like it!
Ungoogled Chromium is a great option for a back up. It’s lightweight and works well
I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
I’ve tried Firefox several times but always end up back on chromium due to compatibility; a lot of sites don’t play well with anything but chrome anymore and this is very much something intentionally caused by Google, who have basically taken a page out of Microsoft’s playbook but with a much more mature product that is going to be substantially harder to replace then IE was
Brave is a marching band of red flags. It claims privacy while injecting ads, affiliate codes and crypto into the browser. It’s kind of sad to see someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side and pretend this is all fine. It isn’t.
Best advice I could give for anyone who wants privacy is use Firefox or a branch of it. Firefox is out of the box the most privacy conscious mainstream browser and add-ons make it more so. If you want absolute privacy you could even use a derivative like Tor Browser.
someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side
LOL, he inflicted Javascript upon the world. He never knew better and was always on the dark side.
JavaScript is a victim of its own popularity. It was originally meant to be scripting glue to do little actions in the browser while the real work was done in Java (LiveConnect) apps. But Java got jettisoned, JavaScript became more important and became the thing we love and hate today.
Louis Rossmann also recommended Brave in one of his videos. Quite sad.
I like a fair amount of his videos but he has a big ole bag of bad takes
These people talking as if not all the crypto bloat would be opt in lol. It just take 30 seconds or even less to turn off everything of that.
I have absolutely no problem how Brave got the reputation it has. It’s business model is disgusting and extortionate, it’s like paying for warez.
it’s got crypto.
I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
Yeah, fuck this guy.
First, I have been online for almost 30 years. I’ve led an open source project for 14 years. I speak regularly at conferences around the world, and socialize with members of the Mozilla, JavaScript, and other web developer communities. I challenge anyone to cite an incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.
So I hid my hatred from everyone for 30 years successfully. Now that everyone finds out that I donated to a cause to strip them of rights everyone wants to say I’m hateful? Give me one example where I displayed hatred…how about the time you donated to strip people of their rights? That might be a big one for me.
Is there proof he donated? Was it specifically a donation against gay marriage? Has he donated to other causes as well?
Anytime I see a lynch mob forming, I always get a bit skeptical of the details. Context matters as well.
This guy could be a grade A sack of shit, but I haven’t seen many links to proof, just people regurgitating the same stuff over and over.
Can we talk about technology already and stop talking about what happen between 2 persons in a room PLEASE???
At some point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see. Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave, and that’s what’s wrong in general with the “but the UX is so nice” mentality.
Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave
It starts to feel astroturfed at a certain point. The last week or so has been crazy.
the hateful browser
Holy shit man imagine if we judged every huge project by one asshole at the top. There wouldn’t be a single thing to enjoy in this world.
This article is useless trash. There is no real technical argument here except “founder bad”.
I do have reasons for not using Brave, but it’s to do with the annoying defaults and the crypto integration. They default whitelist Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook garbage that I have to go and toggle off.
Given the level of effort and extensions like Facebook container on Firefox, I just prefer the better experience for me. This bullshit about getting on identity politics agendas I find abhorrent and repulsive. This author’s a stupid fuckhead.
Firefox is king 👑
“If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong.”
I stopped reading here. If you would like to present objective technical arguments, please try not to sound like a 5 year old “I’m right, you’re wrong, blah blah”.
Use Brave or use Firefox. They both work great for privacy, but I find Brave is easier to configure to be private.
So the CEO is a raging alt-righter. Glad I never used his product then.
Today I learned that people take it VERY PERSONALLY when you criticize their chosen browser. 😂
Vivaldi? Trusting a closed sourced application for privacy? What?
Long time Brave user here. This made me uninstall Brave and move to Firefox. Thank you !
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Besides this I cannot find another good reason not to use brave. Nobody point to a specific line of code that ruins privacy, not enough reasons.
I use Brave as a backup browser. My main one is Firefox.
You can turn off the crypto stuff. You don’t have to use Brave Shields (in browser ad blocker). It can be turned off. Now you can use uBlock Origin or another ad blocker.
About the CEO, I can’t see nothing about his beliefs reflecting in his work. Looks like he kept them separated. I’m not for said beliefs.
Thanks. Whenever I raised the issue of homophobia or his general support of right-wing causes that threaten people’s privacy (see the aftermath of Roe v. Wade for example), I got downvoted, be it on the PrivacyGuides sub where they adore the browser, or right on this sub just weeks ago.
Oh boy, this comment section is gonna be spicy. I can already smell the smoke from the Brave enthusiasts heads exploding.
I just use Firefox and DuckDuckGo
I ditched Beace ages ago when the ad and crypto bullshit really ramped up, and finding out Peter Thiel was involved and Brendan Eich was a bigot, were more than enough to keep me away from Brave.
I currently use Arc on desktop because it makes my life as a busy dev much easier to organize, and Safari on iOS because every browser on there is just Safari anyway. iOS Safari + custom DNS to block ads. Works for me.
I’d use Firefox but Arc’s organization features have become insanely useful.
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
That has nothing to do with the software. And that's a tiny donation. I'm not going to stop using an excellent tool because one of the guys in charge is a bigot. If that were the case, I wouldn't be able to eat, drink, breathe, make a phone call, or do anything really. There's a lot of people out there. Some of them are bigots. We should work to reduce their influence but we can't boycott literally everything. Every alternative to Brave has at least one bigot involved in it, I guarantee it.
Brave’s replacement for ads doesn’t reward users in a meaningful amount
Not enough > 0, which is what you get without adblock. And I'm fine with occasional non-targeted and unobtrusive ads to help fund a service I use.
Brave’s BAT was built around the cryptocurrency ecosystem
Who gives a shit except crypto bros? And who gives a shit about crypto bros anyway?
Brave was also caught up in a privacy scandal in 2020, when it was revealed that the browser was adding affiliate codes to some URLs typed into the address bar.
Are these affiliate codes tracking you? No? Who gives a shit? It's more money for Brave, same webpage for you.
That should have been enough to swear off Brave as a privacy-centric browser forever, considering the entire point of affiliate links is to collect data about the user and traffic source. For example, when you click an Amazon affiliate link in a web article, the publisher can see the exact products you purchase in the timeframe the tracking cookie remains active
Brave blocks cookies by default. Unless they specifically made an exception in their own browser for these codes, then this carefully-worded paragraph is just bullshit.
Much like the rest of this article. Bunch of poo-flinging. "Brave is involved in crypto, here's all the bad things crypto has done, that's why you shouldn't use Brave". Stupid guilt by association and a lot of hot air. Bringing a smoke machine to make people think there's fire.
There's a lot of effort going into making Brave seem like a bad browser and I don't know why.
I agree that you shouldn’t use Brave browser cause of things they’ve done in the past but, oh Jesus, that article is so stupid it reminds me the Hogwarts Legacy boycott.
Brave sucks!
I used Brave on mobile for a full week about a year or so ago at the suggestion of a coworker before realizing it gave me nothing over Firefox and added the bizarre crypto angle to everything.
This was during my (thankfully brief) crypto interest phase and I tried to see if I could accumulate any of the BAT coins the browser would give you for viewing ads…that never worked somehow so I accumulated zero, which was certainly one thing that led to me getting fed up with it and going back to Firefox.
Beyond that, the interface was weird, it was prone to crashes, and it was generally a hassle. 100% flash-in-the-pan cash-grab effort.
Okay, so the creator of Brave might be a bigot and some of the stuff it does with crypto currency is a little sketchy? And the ads it replaces with the blocked ads are somewhat invasive?
So disable the crypto stuff and use ad-blocking software along with its own adblocking functions.
If a mechanic fixes my car and does a really good job, but he might have some shitty opinions of gay people, as long as he fixes my car I don’t care about what he might think of gay people.
Everyone needs to be aware that there’s propaganda everywhere. microsoft and google REALLY want you to use their browsers and people are tired of the data MS Edge and chrome collect.
I for one, hate that chrome constantly connects other shit to your google account with just one accidental click sometimes. Edge does the same shit, but brave is the only chromium based browser that doesn’t deceptively do shit like that.
I still like firefox better and I only have brave for those rare instances where firefox won’t work on a website. And I don’t actually believe that the creator of brave is actually a bigot. Pro-liberty, Pro-privacy and anti-surveillance types are always getting smeared as bigots when they aren’t.
I started using Brave about a year ago… I didn’t know any of this.
The Prop 8 stuff is enough of a reason for me. Firefox it is, I guess.
Veedem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just use Firefox.
Nothingwise@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Firefox + uBlock Origin + arkenfox user.js gives you privacy, security and anti-tracking. The only way to fly IMO.
XpeeN@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Librewolf
khoi@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
What about Privacy Badger? Is uBlock better?
Ziglin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Why not add Snowflake while we’re at it?
overkill0485@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Is this applicable for Firefox mobile?
nocturne213@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I bounced between the two for years, i guess i am going back to Firefox full time.
rndll@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The only reason I haven’t switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn’t have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it’s not a priority. 🤷
GuyDudeman@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Same. I had no idea about brave and I started using it full time on all my devices like a month ago. Guess I’m going back to Firefox. Which was fine.
FatCat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Firefox and mozilla aren’t your friend.
They like to play the “user and privacy friendly” company. Meanwhile they are hemoraging users, and laying off staff needed to actually build a great browser.
Mozilla ceo pay increase + layoffs in 2020:
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated “I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That’s too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.”
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
cikano@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They don’t need to be my friend to be better than the chromium browsers though, so I don’t know what this has to do with anything
AlbinJose6723@eviltoast.org 2 months ago
It’s not good tho 🙃
envious92@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’ve switched on Desktop a year ago. Also with Android. But Firefox on Android has an odd bug that I cannot get rid of. Pages are really slow to load on initial render. I’ve noticed it gets stuck on the SSL cert verification step, sometimes around 5 to 10 seconds before it starts painting the page.
I’ve tried disabling all add-ons, logging out of Firefox sync, disabling the built in HTTPS everywhere, and literally any custom settings I’ve added. But I can’t get past this issue and seemingly no one else has it.
Chrome doesn’t present this issue.
AnonStoleMyPants@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Yup got the same thing. Annoying as hell. The loading bar always goes to like quarter of the way and stays there for a couple of seconds and the continues. After that it’s fine, but it is always the first page you load after closing Firefox.
AlecSadler@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Same issue here! I thought I was alone. It annoys me to no end and weirder still, issue doesn’t present itself with Firefox for Windows running behind the same IP.
Firefox Focus also doesn’t seem to present the issue. Just the primary Firefox browser for Android. And honestly, often enough that it’s nearly unusable.
If you ever figure it out, please let me know.
Nhof@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You’re not alone, I’ve been using Firefox on Android for two years now, and I’ve had this problem from the beginning. The first time I launch Firefox and load a page it stops a quarter of the progression bar for ten seconds, and then loads fine. Once pas that everything works perfectly. It’s very annoying and I don’t know why this happens.
fruity@lemmy.world 1 year ago
+1 for that issue, you are not alone :)
DONTBANTHISACCOUNT@kbin.social 1 year ago
I use chrome on my mobile device... Is that bad?
BaroqueInMind@kbin.social 1 year ago
Might as well take shits with the door unlocked; same level of exposing yourself.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just use Firefox. Mozilla isn’t good but it’s not evil
provomeister@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
It’s not really bad per se, it’s the default on most Android devices these days. The problem is that almost all modern browsers are Chromium-based which give Google a lot of power to implement changes (see manifest v3 & web DRM). Personally, I’m trying to slowly reduce my usage of Google products. I’m using Firefox on desktop and a mix of DDG+Fennec on my phone.
FatCat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Doesn’t Firefox do telemetry and other shady shit out of the box? Ofc you can turn it off but I don’t get the fanaticism over this browser.
Knusper@feddit.de 1 year ago
Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.
Some examples:
And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.
Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.
Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.
You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.
But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.
astropenguin5@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah it’s not perfect out of the box but after turning off telemetry and adding some add-ons like ublock origin and such it’s one of the best short of going full on tor/mullvad. And still less fanaticism than brave lol
nostalgicgamerz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just moved from Brave to Firefox when that “AI training” story came out. I think it’s faster than brave now
voxl@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
On mac? Love safari? But also want good adblock? Use Orion! It’s safari, but with support for chrome and Firefox extensions! Fuck yeah!
I always loved safari, and always got weird looks for it as a web developer (but after a month or two they love me for it because I always find non-chrome bugs because those peasants only use chrome), but that browser is so damn good guys… on mac, that is. Not sure if it even exists yet for linux/win.
mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.