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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
You can audit it. actually there is this video doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNg4Ox2Hvc
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.
What?
Now the 3-year-old strat: Lalalala, I can’t hear you!
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.
I can’t tell if that user is high, drunk, human astroturfer, or a bot. They are all over the thread.
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.
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.
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.
Calm down with this logical and thought-out response.
Appreciate the write up!
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.