• Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    246
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    23 hours ago

    I think a lot of people don’t know any of the controversy related to brave and just use it because they know it as the most private chromium browser

    • uncouple9831@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      13 hours ago

      They were pushed heavily by the type of “privacy enthusiasts” who think being homophobic is fine.

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      147
      arrow-down
      41
      ·
      edit-2
      20 hours ago

      I know of the controversies, I just don’t think they’re all that big when you actually examine them.

      Homophobia

      I’m part of the LGBT community and I just think there are bigger fish to fry. One of the guys involved made a $1k donation to an anti-prop 8 campaign like 15 years ago. That’s it. That’s the controversy. Like, yea it’s shitty, but there was a lot more hate toward the community back then. People have grown and changed their views a lot in the years since. If we boycott every single company or individual who ever did anything even remotely homophobic, no matter their actions since, we’d essentially have to be living in a commune growing and making literally everything ourselves. Btw, this same guy is the one who developed JavaScript and I don’t see even remotely the same level of hate for that, so it really feels like people are just being selectively upset.

      Cryptocurrency

      It’s opt-in. It asks you once, and then never again. It was developed at a time when crypto was popular and was a feature people wanted. It was seen as a good thing when it first came out. Public opinion on crypto has soured, but plenty of people who wanted it still use the feature on brave. They have no good reason to scrap it. Especially because, again, it’s opt-in only. Don’t like it? Cool, don’t use it. They aren’t pushing it on you. But people hear the word crypto and immediately break out the pitchforks.

      Do you even know what the goal of their cryptocurrency was? I think it’s safe to say its failed at this point, but the goal was to completely rework how ads function on the internet. It would have killed the modern advertisement methods where ads are shoved in your face and you get nothing for it. Instead, it would have directly paid you a tiny amount any time you saw an ad, with you being able to choose how many you saw, or even if you saw any at all. Then you’d either be able to either keep the money for yourself, or donate it to websites/content creators of your choice. Take away the crypto part of it, and that’s actually a pretty admirable goal in my book.

      Ad affiliate links

      Brave’s biggest, actual, controversy is that they replaced some affiliate links with their own. Specifically links to binance.us, which is a crypto market. When it was found, Brave changed their code extremely quickly and claimed it was a bug. Now, companies have often lied through their teeth and claimed malicious actions were a “mistake” or a “bug”, so maybe that is the same case here. But considering it was one site only, it was fixed almost immediately, and when you look at how it was actually replacing links (suggested auto fill in the address bar, pulled from browsing history) I am leaning toward it actually being unintentional.

      Conclusion

      I think people just like to hate things, and will find any reason to continue to do so as long as their little corner of the internet tells them they should hate it. People most vocal with their complaints rarely take the time to dig into the facts and see if it’s really as bad as they claim; or they fully know it’s not as bad, but never want to let the truth get in the way of a good ol’ fashion, hate-boner, circle-jerk.

      Is Brave the best browser? Hahahaha no. It’s still a chromium fork and has been a little too eager to integrate AI in my opinion. But it’s FAR from the worst and is the probably the best privacy focused browser for those that don’t understand technology and struggle to use third-party ad-ons. It’s just a little ridiculous that while there are legitimate things to complain about, most people’s arguments seem to always stem from the 3 topics above.

      Now cue the downvotes because I’m clearly some crypto fascist boot-licker for daring to believe “nuance” isn’t a made up word.

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        44
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        15 hours ago

        A couple points: Brendan Eich, the one that made the prop-8 donation, is the current CEO of Brave, not just “one of the guys involved”. In a related problem, I find it a little difficult to believe that someone who doesn’t still hold their anti-gay views would be quite so eager to take cash from Peter Thiel (via his Firm Founder Fund) and I especially do not want to be involved with a browser supported by Thiel when the terms of his investment are private (like, does he have access to brave’s user data? We’d like to think no, but boy are they shaking hands with the devil while asking us to trust them.)

        Another big piece of criticism that was excluded: Brave created a bunch of profiles for content creators without telling them then used those to solicit donations on behalf of those content creators, then not only refused to refund users who were deceived they kept all the money they said would go to the content creators.

        I think people just like to hate things, and will find any reason to continue to do so as long as their little corner of the internet tells them they should hate it.

        Trying to present aspects of this as overblown is possibly true - their affiliate link scam was just to binance.us and that gets left out of a lot of this, but at the same time that’s a damned difficult thing to sell as just having been a mistake when it was auto-replacing the links to something they were the beneficiaries of.

        Btw, this same guy is the one who developed JavaScript and I don’t see even remotely the same level of hate for that, so it really feels like people are just being selectively upset.

        Well sure, but he’s not actively the CEO of javascript, and as far as I’m aware hasn’t ever been involved with javascript since it was rolled into the OpenJS Foundation.

        (Also: Brendan Eich shared a bunch of covid conspiracy theory / misinformation stuff. Sure that’s a minor point, absolutely everyone sure was doing that back then and why should we judge, but still it’s not a great look.)

        • pr0sp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          18
          ·
          15 hours ago

          Trying to present aspects of this as overblown is possibly true - their affiliate link scam was just to binance.us and that gets left out of a lot of this, but at the same time that’s a damned difficult thing to sell as just having been a mistake when it was auto-replacing the links to something they were the beneficiaries of.

          And this is why an Open Source browser is so important. Because we can audit it. You are saying like it is a bad thing to audit it.

          (like, does he have access to brave’s user data? We’d like to think no, but boy are they shaking hands with the devil while asking us to trust them.)

          You can audit it. actually there is this video doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNg4Ox2Hvc

          • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            13
            ·
            edit-2
            15 hours ago

            A wireshark audit isn’t relevant to their reasons for having included the link redirect in the first place, and even a full code audit wouldn’t turn up a user datasharing agreement with Thiel? Obviously auditing OS software is a good thing, I never made any claims about that being bad or presented like it wasn’t possible?

            I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say here, none of that refutes any of the points I made.

            • pr0sp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              18
              ·
              15 hours ago

              datasharing agreement What kind of data they could be collecting if they just connect for checking the version and 1 or 2 connections more, as shown in the wireshark scan? Really, oh a computer downloaded Brave, big deal. Even assuming the worst that everything goes to Thiel it just doesn’t matter because it is not relevant for tracking.

                  • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    9
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    14 hours ago

                    No, your formatting is messed up and I don’t understand what you wrote.

                    … Not that your evident degree of maturity means that I’m eager to continue to interact, I just thought you should be aware.

      • fizzle@quokk.au
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        44
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        19 hours ago

        Wow this is so… sane.

        Being childish and reductive I wanted to downvote anything supporting Brave, but I find you’ve challenged my views on this.

        That said, I think I’m just going to re-frame my dislike for Brave users by assuming they’re all crypto-weirdos.

      • PsychoWiz@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        14 hours ago

        I agree with you on all these. The only problem I have with Brave is they choose to exclusively shit on Firefox recently as their marketing strategy, while there are apparently much much bigger fish to fry. I thought their whole mission is to stop people from using Chrome, not another way more privacy focused browser.

      • NoiseColor @lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        arrow-down
        7
        ·
        20 hours ago

        That’s really well said.

        In the end they are just browsers. It’s great to have people that inform others and lead them to better alternatives and Firefox has many of them who are very passionate. But then many of them are way too passionate.

      • pr0sp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        14
        ·
        edit-2
        16 hours ago

        Dude you are the most logical and coherent person in this thread, congrats. I should add that most of the bloat Brave has can be disabled via policies, even IA things.

      • tomiant@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        56
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        22 hours ago

        That is the sad state of the world. Mass manipulating sentiment like some commercial psyop is a built in “feature” of the system.

    • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      52
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      23 hours ago

      Which it isn’t, and also Chromium sucks, so they’re really just mag dumping into their foot

      • SteelEmpire@anarchist.nexus
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        38
        ·
        22 hours ago

        The web sucks, because of Google’s EEE approach with Chromium; there just isn’t a good way to use the web anymore. I use librewolf, it’s okay.

        • Leon@pawb.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          18
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          21 hours ago

          Google really needs to be kicked out of the W3C and have Chrome taken from them.

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          18 hours ago

          Yup librewolf for all the stuff I can. Google Meet has all kinds of wierd problems on firefox, especially in Linux. Whne you’re hosting you can’t share just one tab with sound and in linux getting the video/mic to authorize is hit or miss and takes a good 20 seconds on my boxes to authorize even when it works.

        • pr0sp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          7
          ·
          15 hours ago

          Librewolf breaks some site and other FF features, I don’t think if it’s usable enough for day by day.

      • pr0sp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        17
        ·
        16 hours ago

        Chromium sucks? chromium is objectively more secure and performant AND compatible than gecko could be.

          • Xylight‮@lemdro.id
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            11 hours ago

            GrapheneOS cites security issues with Firefox.

            Citation

            Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they’re currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn’t have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox’s sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn’t happening for their Android browser yet.

            In terms of performance, it’s well known that Blink is faster and it can be tested by just trying both. Firefox stutters and lags while Chromium maintains a smooth framerate.

            I disagree with compatibility however. Chromium’s wayland support is iffy and it barely integrates with XDG or VAAPI

            • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              5 minutes ago

              GrapheneOS’s objections are irrelevant because you should be using security extensions if you’re old enough to get online without parental supervision. JavaScript has not run on my web browser since Bush Jr was in office. Considering Graphene is made by weirdos who get hysterical if you start asking questions about the difference between admin permissions on a big device that lives on your desk versus a small device that lives in your pocket, they’re pretty firmly relegated to being unserious.

    • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      22 hours ago

      While I’m sure you are right I think Brave also likely pays for maintaining opinion on social media and posting positive comments supporting it. Many others learned of doing that (for example musk has bots astroturfing its image pretty much everywhere.) Similarly for example you don’t see controversies section about Brave.

      • Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        10 hours ago

        These are all the browsers I personally think are good and privacy-respecting. Sorry if I accidentally included too many options.

        Desktop

        Firefox-Based

        Firefox

        The standard for browsers where you aren’t the product. For maximum privacy it does require tweaking settings, but it is reasonably privacy-friendly out of the box. It has light customization options including a sidebar and customizable button placement, and can be much more heavily customized with user themes.

        Librewolf (Most reccomended for privacy)

        A custom version of Firefox with enhanced privacy by default. Comes with Ublock Origin installed.

        Waterfox

        A Firefox-based browser with some additional privacy features, enhanced speed, and additional features.

        Floorp

        A browser based on Firefox with much more advanced customization options and many additional features, like workspaces and web panels. Doesn’t add any additional privacy-focused features. They recently also added support for chrome extensions. This is my personal choice of browser (with the Natsumi modification).

        Zen Browser

        A Firefox-based browser with a sidebar+workspace workflow, and lots of stylistic changes and customizations that help put the focus on the webpage. Very nice and usable for productivity, but doesn’t add any additional privacy-focused features.

        Chromium-Based

        Ungoogled Chromium

        It’s Chromium, but without Google. Pretty self-explanatory, it’s simple, and it works.

        Vivaldi

        An extremely customizable browser packed with a massive quantity of additional features that can be toggled and tweaked for varying needs and methods of usage. It supports MV2 extensions.

        Helium

        A chromium-based browser with enhanced privacy and speed. Comes with Ublock Origin pre-installed, and supports MV2 extensions. It’s a pretty new project.

        Android

        Firefox-Based

        Firefox

        The de-facto privacy-friendly browser, although for maximum privacy it does require tweaking settings. It (and its forks) are the only privacy-friendly browsers on android that support extensions.

        Waterfox

        A fork of Firefox with more private defaults, and extra bloat removed.

        IronFox

        A hardened private Firefox fork. Heavily focused on privacy and security, it sacrifices some usability for privacy.

        Chromium-based

        Cromite (Most reccomended for privacy)

        A chromium fork with enhanced privacy and built-in ad blocking.

        Vivaldi

        Very customizable chromium-based browser. It does not come with an ad-blocker.

        iOS

        All browsers on iOS are limited to the WebKit engine which Safari is built on, so just use Safari. The benefits of other browsers on iOS are negligible.

    • NoiseColor @lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      26
      ·
      22 hours ago

      There is so much controversy with every browser and people working on them that I find is better just not to read anything about any browser anymore.

        • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          19 hours ago

          I mean, yeah. I’m not a computer person, so five six browsers seems like a lot to just know off hand. I don’t know as many cola brands or Russian Czars without looking them up (I clearly don’t know what a normal comparison would be). People do talk mad shit about Firefox, chrome, opera, brave, safari, and edge though, which have got to make up the vast majority of the browser market.

          • null@piefed.nullspace.lol
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            16 hours ago

            Having to cross out 5 and make it 6 because you actually could name more than 5 off-hand really seems to undercut that point.

            • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              8 hours ago

              But people talk shit about all of them. Plus, does edge really count? Also, wasn’t that really your point? I can think of more than five and people are still shit talking them.

              From a non techie perspective, I don’t know why one is better than another.

        • NoiseColor @lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          14
          ·
          21 hours ago

          Maybe. I tried a lot and my personal experience is that Chrome is at least a level above all else in UX for general use. So chrome with some privacy features out of the box seems a good way to go.

          • 4am@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            10
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            21 hours ago

            Chrome is the worst, there is no privacy with Chrome. The UX is also trash, it’s only good if you haven’t tried anything else.

            Also Sergey Brin is in the Epstein files.

            • NoiseColor @lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              21 hours ago

              Well i respect your personal experience, but it doesn’t at all correspond with mine.

              • dontsayaword@piefed.social
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                6
                ·
                20 hours ago

                You can prefer the UX of Chrome, especially since so much of the web is designed for it. But it’s not a subjective personal experience that it is not private. Google exists to harvest your data. And the fact that everyone just accepts it is why the internet is so shitty.

                • NoiseColor @lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  arrow-down
                  5
                  ·
                  20 hours ago

                  We are taking about brave, not chrome. I don’t think you get any more harvested than you do with Firefox.

                  • dontsayaword@piefed.social
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    6
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    20 hours ago

                    Oh, sorry, for this comment thread yall have been saying Chrome.

                    But no, even with Brave, you aren’t safe from Google tracking. All chromium browsers have been found to feed data back to Google.

          • Leon@pawb.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            21 hours ago

            Privacy features? Google harvests your data regardless of your settings. It also furthers Google’s monopoly on the web. I’m sure anyone can see the problem with an advertising giant hungry for data being able to dictate how you access the internet, and what the internet even looks like. Google has power over all of that, split between their influence in the W3C, their Chrome browser, their Android OS, and Google Search.

            Google decides what you see, how you see it, and how the underlying technology functions; that’s literally their business model.

            That’s the real problem with Chrome and any Chromium based browser.

            • NoiseColor @lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              5
              ·
              20 hours ago

              Yes, it’s a big concern. Unfortunately I have a lot of those. I will have to leave it to other people to spearhead a better fairer freer alternative. One that will not only attract a select crowd, but a wider audience.

          • null@piefed.nullspace.lol
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            20 hours ago

            Not sure what that has to do with your claim that “every” browser has “so much controversy”, but okay.

            • NoiseColor @lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              5
              ·
              20 hours ago

              In conversations humans don’t talk like robots or like they are writing a code. People often use lose expressions, colorful language, exaggerations and everything else that I have no idea about.

              I didn’t think I’d need to explain that when I said every browser before, I didn’t really think every single browser. Yet here we are. That’s why I didn’t actually think you will call me out on it and just continued with other stuff. 😀

              So yeah, not every browser 😁. Only a few. Although with so many new questionable ai ones, the percentage is going up for sure.