You must log in or register to comment.
I used brave for a while, I got 10$ I also got 10$ from Honey, apparently only scams give me anything
Same reason they used Chrome. “What else is there?”
Software discoverability is kind of bad these days, and getting worse.
Any alternative on iOS and android? Can’t find any good one… And I’m a GOS user very privacy aware but honestly brave is the only browser I know that blocks ads
Kagi Orion, DDG, Safari with Ublock?
A Lemmy user made a nice “low data” browser called Narrow32.
I’m trying out waterfox on GOS with UBO and it’s working pretty good, though I still mostly use vanadium out of habit (wish it had better ad blocking though). Gotta use aurora store for it though since it isn’t on F-droid which is annoying.
iOS: Orion browser - built on WebKit but works with chrome/FF extensions, so you can just snag uBlock Origin and be good
GOS: Firefox (or one of its forks). Supports FF extensions, so you can just snag uBlock Origin and be good
Vivaldi
Safari on iOS with the Ublock Origin extension?
Fennec with Ublock Origin/ AdNauseam extension
Fennec on iOS? Searching for this in the AppStore only reveals crypto scam apps.
Vivaldi
Mullvad isn’t available on Android or iOS sadly
Brave is just malware
if you’re already using GOS, just use vanadium then, and block ads on the dns-level (eg by setting nextdns or adguard as “private dns” on your phone). works fine for me!
Iron Fox.
Vanadium.
AdGuard and DuckDuckGo Browser seems like a good combo, interested to hear anyone’s thoughts against this though!
DuckDuckGo browser is so handy for so many reasons.
I think the only real solution to protect ourselves is to stop using any browsers.
Chromium based browsers have no cookie isolation like FF with multi account containers. They recommend Profiles but a separate window eats way more RAM and the experience is just much worse. I use Zen
I love zen Such a great browser
That said, other browsers should improve their ad blocking. Can’t let Brave win.
I’ve not had issues with ublock
Personally as long as I’m not contributing to their wealth in some way I don’t think it really matters what the CEO of the company that makes a product does. I’m mostly just going to use the best product for me. Now there is an argument that simply by using it I’m contributing to their usage numbers which helps them, and that’s definitely true for social media platforms because of the network effect (which is why I stay off of the corporate ones), but it’s less true of other products. In fact if i use an ad-supported product but block the ads I’m likely costing them more than I am a benefit.
It’s also a spectrum rather than black and white: every medium or larger tech company, especially if american due to the deregulated and in many cases openly corrupt capitalism, is going to do evil things for profit and be both run and owned by evil people/corporations. But their level of danger to global society varies. Musk is extremely dangerous because of his active campaign to bring fascism and nationalism to power in Europe, which is why x.com is blocked in my house at a DNS level. Other billionaires are dangerous too but they’re not all equal.
There are more problems with Brave than just the CEO. The Brave browser itself has quite a history of deceptive and ethically questionable practices, such as replacing ads with its own, conning people into donating to crypto wallets by making them think they’re donating to creators, and sneaking in affiliate codes. A browser with that kind of record should never be trusted, especially by people who care about privacy.
I used to use brave when I just started becoming privacy aware. Here are the reasons why:
- it’s chromium based. I loved the way chromium based browsers looked, especially when compared to Firefox. They had a comforting feel to them, whereas Firefox had a very “office-ey” feel to it.
- I wasn’t aware of the issues of chromium dominating the market share that it does and how monopolization in this manner can be harmful.
- I wasn’t aware of the people behind brave.
- I had seen older people use Firefox (with the default UI, which I didn’t like). That’s why, I associated Firefox with “old and outdated”. I hadn’t seen anyone use brave, and it looked quite good at the time for me.
Now, I use Mercury, a Firefox fork (ikik, it hasn’t seen an update in a long time, shush). I’ve loaded it up with my custom CSS, so its appearance is exactly the way I like.
I personally disagree with homophobia but setting that entirely aside, Brave browser sucks, all the cool kids like Vivaldi now, and they’re right
Mercury has had a open high criticality cve for almost a year and a half now, that is being actively exploited.
Either switch to Firefox or a fork that is actually being maintained, or just block your machine from the Internet.
I agree with all you said, but suggesting to use a specific browser only when not connected to the web is kinda funny.
Too many times people who have been monitoring or are deep in a field overestimate how much knowledge an average person or even newly interested person has in the same field (oh hey, there’s an xkcd about that!).
People scoffing at anyone who thought Elon Musk was just a meme a nerd CEO before the cave thing, people who expect everyone to know who is running every browser, OS, or other company, and lots of other minor things they think should be common knowledge, when at the time it was something only someone invested in the overall field or someone who knew how search much better than the average person.
Gorgeous.
Peter Theil is the primary investor in Brave.
For those not in the know, Peter Theil is a MAGA Christian-Nationalist fascist, and owner of Palantir.
Palantir, is the military industrial complex company Trump has entrusted to create a mass surveillance network on US citizens, completely against the 4th Amendment, and dwarfing the NSA spying that was exposed by Snowden.
You can garuntee any activity you do in Brave is being tracked and sent to that network.
You can garuntee any activity you do in Brave is being tracked and sent to that network.
Source:??? BTW, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNg4Ox2Hvc
As much as palantir and brave are both pieces of shit, I agree a claim like that needs a source and proof. This is all highly measurable, so proof should be something easy to obtain and reproduce.
A two year old video, when one of those years is 2025, is not a counterpoint either.
Now both of us will of course be downvoted to oblivion by the “I don’t need proof to hate palantir” crowd, but hating palantir is not proof. We have proof of their other crimes.
you only have three downvotes. maybe the kids are alright? XD
I’ll stop using Brave when other browsers improve.
No one forcing you to do shit. Use all the inferior malware you want.
Literally just use Firefox for Android with uBlock. People act like this is difficult.
I’ve seen the following types of people:
- People who ask how to do it, and get amazed.
- People who legitimately are not bothered by ads.
- Who think it to be a “headache”, and to just “let it be”.
- Who are incredibly tech illiterate to the point of frustration.
*uBlock Origin
and then disable your YouTube app and save a link to webpage to your home screen. I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in years with this method.
Or just use ReVanced. Use microG for non rooted phones.
Freetube
There’s also PipePipe, which also does SponsorBlock so that you don’t have to see sponsor segments in videos
I’ve been on Firefox since the very, very, very earliest days, back from when it started as Phoenix. I’ve been diehard believer in Firefox from Day 1.
But as usage has declined (and declined), many websites that I actually need to use no longer test for Firefox. A key website I use doesn’t allow me to log in with Firefox. Not as a “we don’t support Firefox” but quite literally it doesn’t work.
I’m all for flying the banner but I can’t live with a browser that no longer works on the websites I need. And yes, I’ve filed a bug, but because it relates to a login Mozilla closed it (they can’t verify logging in to this website).
I happen to be moving my account to a different website so I may be able to dodge it this time but Firefox really is sinking and at what point does one choose to abandon the ship?
Name and shame those sites. Those sites are the problem not firefox.
You’re not wrong. But I’m not on social media so have no channels to shout on. I doubt any newspaper would accept a reader contribution about this.
Name them here
It’s not a difficulty issue It’s that lots of us have tried Firefox and don’t like it.
Personally I don’t use Firefox because it is buggy, is missing critical features, implements some web standards weirdly and has weird user agent styles. The end result is that many websites don’t look right and don’t work correctly and/or fully
Buggy? Huh.
Interesting. I use Firefox for everything and haven’t had any issues. Maybe I’m just not that picky?
They’re pretty much just hating to hate or basing themselves on very outdated information, ‘missing critical features’ is a joke, because if it actually were critical it would’ve been implemented already (plus firefox is very extensible, with many plugins existing and forks adding specific features), if they actually had a point they maybe would’ve given a single example.
Weirdly implementing some web standards kinda did apply a bit until a few years ago where all the big browser engine developers got together and pinned down the standard. If something still breaks that probably means the website used some out-of-spec workaround that only works in Chrome. Some things do indeed behave differently between firefox and chrome (an example of my own: file input fields with multiple types, eg allow both video and image are handled differently at least in the mobile apps). Yet again if they had a point maybe an example would’ve been great.
Weird user agent styles?..?? I’m just confused honestly.
Me too
I do this as much as possible. However the Firefox in-page translation software seems to do something that actually changes the page (and this can break things like forms) whereas chromium browsers do some kind of translation layer on top, so the page can run normally beneath it.
It’s an infuriating reason but right now it means I have to split my browser use depending on if I need translations or not.
You know you can install the “chromium-like” translation thing on Firefox as well, as an extension? E.g. this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/traduzir-paginas-web/
Is that new in the last couple years or so? I recall chrome breaking form entry left and right when translating before i could read the language.
Not available for IOS. For android firefox is bad at sandboxing and security. Vanadium if it had adblocking would be perfect for me.
Objectively more insecure and underperformant than ANY other chromium based browser.
Lmao, never have I ever seen a lemmy comment ratio’d this bad
Got a source for that incredible claim?
If you’re going to make wild claims that most people would disagree with, you better be able to back it up with objective facts
I just searched for
chrome vs firefoxand just about every article from the past year or so say firefox is more secure. Not that it matters a lot either way. Two party system is crap.How so? at least on Android and Linux there is a lack of sandboxing and site isolation. This could be fixed up to a certain point but anyways it would be more insecure than chromium.
Firefox uses literally the Chromium sandbox on Linux, they have for years.
Do you have a more recent article describing that? 2022 is old but I’ve not seen anything backing up your claim either
To the dumbass downvoters: why does lemmy hate the concept of backing up claims so much? There are two conflicting claims, one that says Linux sandbox is bad, another saying its fine. I’ll believe the first person who can actually back their shit up. Nobody should believe either claim until then. This isn’t complicated.
that’s why ironfox is so valuable
The problem with iron fox is that it’s so hardened about privacy that it breaks functionality l, for example you can’t even use add-ons if you don’t enable it first, it is disabled by default…
Bullshit (except maybe on Linux, I have no idea if they’ve fixed their shit there)
*which is also still chrome
Normal browser icon vs incognito browser icon comes to mind
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
They were pushed heavily by the type of “privacy enthusiasts” who think being homophobic is fine.
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.)
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.
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.
What?
Now the 3-year-old strat: Lalalala, I can’t hear you!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Marketing has really worked for Brave.
That is the sad state of the world. Mass manipulating sentiment like some commercial psyop is a built in “feature” of the system.
we live in an era where you can make a puke like prime the most desired drink in the world, so yeah.
Which it isn’t, and also Chromium sucks, so they’re really just mag dumping into their foot
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.
Google really needs to be kicked out of the W3C and have Chrome taken from them.
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.
Librewolf breaks some site and other FF features, I don’t think if it’s usable enough for day by day.
Chromium sucks? chromium is objectively more secure and performant AND compatible than gecko could be.
Based on what?
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
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.
Can anyone reccomend good options fo browsers?
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.
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.
Maybe, if you’ve only heard of like 5 browsers.
I mean, yeah. I’m not a computer person, so
fivesix 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.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.
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.
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.
that’s so sad
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.
Well i respect your personal experience, but it doesn’t at all correspond with mine.
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.
We are taking about brave, not chrome. I don’t think you get any more harvested than you do with Firefox.
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.
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.
Not sure what that has to do with your claim that “every” browser has “so much controversy”, but okay.
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.
So by “every browser has so much controversy”, you meant, “maybe a few browsers have some controversy”.
Apparently it’s robotic to point out gigantic overstatements.
🥱
Not just that, it’s that Brave has this cult-like following for being out-of-the-box, Fisher Price My First Privacy BrowserTM easy to use.
Oh…oh, hey, Apple, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.
What does apple have to do with brave? i dont get it
Apple has a reputation as the Fisher Price version of smartphones and laptops/desktops because the user can’t change much themselves. It’s an old meme, but it checks out
Imagine criticizing an app just because it is usable and useful for the normal user, instead of thinking that is such a big goal. Fucking elitism and snobism devours leftism.
Brave has this cult-like following
Criticism is of the cult-like following. Not that I expect you know anything about that ;)
Imagine being so ideologically primed that a comment about a browser requires inventing a leftist to argue with.
Criticizing my critic about your ideology and not the argument.
Touch grass
