I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Let’s be real here for just a minute. The only actual reason people here hate Brave is because the founder personally believes in traditional marriage.
You’re the only one who believes your bullshit. You aren’t fooling anyone, or being sneaky. Everyone is very well aware of what you’re actually saying.
Nah, I hate brave too, for multiple reasons behind those listed here.
Didn’t even know the founder had any beliefs about anything, and don’t really care.
I hate Brave because of the reasons I listed in the post (among other things). Sure the CEO is an ass but the software also sucks.
@eya Oh wow, I’m using it as a daily basis. I think using mullvad browser is an option now.
There are many, many good reasons to not use Brave. Being spyware is not one of those.
Boycott Brave for real reasons like their CEO and owner being a raging anti-gay reactionary or because of their cryptocurrency bs.
Those are good reasons and it’s sad to see so many downvotes on a community that should know better :/
The spyware portion of the post was one sentence.
Edit: Half a sentence
I will
How about the Opera Browser?
Don’t touch opera, avoid it like the plague
I have installed it on all my devices. Firefox is standard from now, becouse of its open source culture etc.
Proprietary, controlled by the Chinese Government, spyware, Chromium.
They got sold to a Chinese firm and it appears that much of the core development team abandoned the project and restarted under the name Vivaldi.
So the recommendation seams to be Vivaldi. Will check it out during this week.
Vivaldi
Chromium, proprietary.
If you absolutely have to use a Chromium project, then Vivaldi is the one, but at the end of the day it is still unfortunately Chromium.
I only use it as my piracy browser that’s routed through a VPN. All other browsing I do is via FF/LibreWolf
Does this all matter though? Afaik the browser if fully open source, even the crypto stuff so all the shady stuff would be detected (and has as in your examples). Like all of the issues you linked at this point are years in the past. I don’t use Brave personally but it being completely FOSS is a huge plus even if the company itself might be weird. On the other hand you have something like Vivaldi that looks like “the good guys” but you’ll always have to trust them as well because they’re not fully open source.
I use FF but you just cannot deny that using a Chromium based browser has many security advantages over Gecko, especially on mobile. I takes Mozilla seemingly years and years to implement security features like Chromium. They don’t put the necessary priority behind this.
Using Chromium at all is supporting Google’s dominance over the market. If you want to support a company that has taken advantage of its users, and committed actual crimes while doing so, be my guest. This post is a recommendation, not a rule.
Of course it does but that is a moot point and a different discussion altogether. It doesn’t change the fact that Brave is fully open source, even their shitty stuff and that it’s better for privacy than using a proprietary browser like people here suggest. It also doesn’t change that Chromium has a better security model than Gecko.
I personally right now prefer FF (Librewolf and Mull) for different reasons still. The Chromium dominance is…well it is what it is. Definitely not the reason why I use FF. It’s a losing battle. FF has been losing users forever now. The few % market share it still has will not change that Google is going to “win”. When the EU forces Apple to open up iOS for Chromium the last “wall” that is in the way of total Chromium dominance will fall. FF will not do anything about that except just exist until either too many websites break or someone does something about Google controlling Chromium. Until then I’ll just choose whichever browser fits my needs in terms of FOSS, privacy but also features. Right now FF is good enough despite them lacking behind in security (severely even on mobile) and I’m happy to use it.
OMG shut up. Go use Firefox and leave people alone. Firefox users are like Linux users. Can’t get in a conversation without mentioning it.
That is absolutely a false equivalence
Spyware is a bit of a stretch. However, let’s talk about Firefox. Mozilla Corporation is a Billion Dollar Corporation that is tied at the hip to Google and uses 115+ servers to track every single thing you do.
Chromium explicitly uses shared memory and is technically able to write and execute not only shared data from private/incognito to regular windows or tabs but adjacent processes. You can search for
mmapin the Chromium repo or try to use Chromium with FreeBSD or GhostBSD sysctl.conf set withkern.elf64.allow_wx = 0- it won’t run.The Precise Geolcation Timeout for Firefox is 68 years.
What is better in Brave then Mull(firefox fork) or firefox ?
I switched from Bromite and Vandium to Mull and it is so much better with the addons you can install (ublock etc.)
The second comment really explains it. Chromium based browsers are more secure on android than any ff as for right now.
Also I would like to add that at the time when I was hopping browsers ff was way slower, and i’m pretty sure it will be slow these days if I install all the extentiions
Also, another thing, in my experience, password managers work a little better with chromes, and also just websites look prettier, and the PWAs
And a word about brave and ff, tbh they both suck
Mull is fine, brave has some nice features useful for me To be honest, today I tried that chromite I mentioned yesterday, and oh man, oh man, oh man, this is a whole new level
The security aspect really. FF on Android has terrible security compare to Chromium and Mozilla is making really slow progress it seems. Fission is still not enabled on mobile despite being on desktop for years. And even then it seems the sandboxing on FF desktop is just not considered quite as robust as Chromiums. Doesn’t matter much though because on mobile FF has none of that.
I still personally also use Mull but that is something to keep in mind. Brave has all of that because it has the Chromium base of course.
Any reasons why you do not consider Mull, or even simply Firefox on android ? Mull works really well for me and can really be seen as the Librewolf equivalent for Android.
Or just use Edge cause Microsoft is already syphoning your data so you might as well go the whole hog and use Edge
If nothing else, I would recommend Firefox over Brave for the sole reason of the latter being yet another Chromium browser. It would be nice if we could eat away some of the browser marketshare from Google.
I have used Firefox for years, and I can’t believe it’s actually losing market share. Oh well.
Not reading all that, still sticking to based Brave 😎
I used to use Firefox but have been using Brave cause I was getting tired of having to open Edge every time there would be an addon or tool that was Chrome exclusive. So unless there’s other options for privacy focused chromium browsers I’m just gonna stick with brave.
Vivaldi is chromium and way way better than brave
What addons are you using that are Chromium exclusive? Also, Ungoogled Chromium exists.
Ungoogled Chromium doesn’t have a lot of the security features that Brave, Mullvad, Tor, Librewolf, or even Safari have.
Fair.
Vivaldi!! - the company is also actively supporting the fediverse by hosting and aggressively promoting their large Mastodon server ,switch to Vivaldi!
Proprietary
but better than Brave
And it uses Chromium.
The commenter I replied to was specifically asking for chrome based.
What addon or tool that’s chromium exclusive do you mean? I never need to open any other browser than Firefox. And use Opera with privacy addons instead? Better than supporting brave at least.
Why would you ever use Opera vs Brave if you care about privacy? Brave at the end of the day is fully open source. Yes that is a huge plus even if you yourself cannot review the code.
Firefox dropped support for PWA a while ago (a really sad decision, because PWA are an amazing idea… ) so just any webpage that needs to function more like an app is often more functional under Chrome. Microsoft Teams is one example.
It’s really not that amazing. PWA is a glorified bookmark, and most people don’t use them. I’ve built support for them for the businesses I worked on, and we’d get <1% usage on it
Seems they have PWAs, here’s a guide by Mozilla for installing them on Firefox
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Installing
Firefox killed SSB, not PWA, no? As far as I’m aware it was a buggy mess, and I don’t think PWA has been standardized yet.
How about we just let users use what they want? I don’t use Brave, but it has some legitimate anti-fingerprinting tech.
This comment is just confusing. Sure, go ahead and use whatever you want, but at least be informed about what you’re using. As for the anti-fingerprinting tech, Firefox has had that for a very long time.
Brave behaving like Win XP era browser with gazillion toolbars installed, with a pinch of crypto and crypto promoting ads should be a giant red flag.
FOSS =/= trusted by default. Why are there so many FOSS evangelists, but such a damn tiny part of them are programmers, let alone programmers able to examine a source code behind such a giant codebase as web browser?
I use Vivaldi, at least their business model is clear, and developer is kind of trusted, and not crypto scammer and homophobe.
Vivaldi is closed source and another chromium fork
So it’s trash by default
vivaldi probably does have spyware it lol. why would you choose an application that hides their code instead of making it open for everybody to see / improove? you dont need to be a programmer to know that any FOSS app with a following would get caught out instantly for pulling anything lame. Eg chromium prototyping web integrity api. you dont need to audit the code, just the fact that it is open makes it 99% more trustworthy as people are looking at the code all the time.
Chromium has tons of eyes on it, because it’s codebase for many other projects, such as Electron and any chromium based browser.
Web integrity wasn’t discovered through chromium source code, but it was openly proposed by Google on separate Github repo, dedicated solely for that proposal.
There are many shortcuts in your thinking that just the code being open makes it trustworthy. Every PowerShell malware technically has its code open, because it’s a script. But you wouldn’t open a random script from the internet, without checking what it does, yet you don’t apply the same logic to Brave. If you don’t check the source code yourself, you either need to trust an author, or third parties that “checked” the code.
In addition to that, you’re probably using compiled binary, which means at this point you can throw that source code out from window, because at this point you can’t be sure compiled binary == source code.
Due to the enormous amount of code, it’s really easy to obfuscate malicious behavior. At the scale of the browser it’s more efficient tracking outbound packets that program sends than examine source code.
i really dont think the large amount of code thing is a good argument because of the way github works. any changes made are highlighted and you can look back at the history of changes. even if this theoretical spyware was implimented from the beginning people would know.
yeah I downloaded it from github and doubt its got spyware in it so i trust i dont need to compile it myself.
ppl are just hating coz they dont like some guy that has somthing to do with brave & all this brave is spyware stuff is based off of nothing.
vivaldi has closed source code that is completely trust me bro not spyware 🤣
Vivaldi is Source Available :
https://vivaldi.com/source/
from vivialdi website: Roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open source coming from Chromium, 3% is open source coming from us, leaves only 5% for our UI closed-source
still way more sus than brave
source: https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/
If people want to use Brave, or Windows, or install screen doors on their submarines who am I to complain?
The fact is for a lot of people, Brave offers a superior out of box experience compared to firefox or almost any other browser. In terms of ad blocking, speed and ease of use, it’s pretty much second to none. The fact that you install it and go is really appealing and how easy they make the slider to adjust the aggressiveness of the script blocking is great ui that my dad mother could use.
Yes, the company isn’t very good, it’s headed by a guy with a questionable history and has a poor track record when it comes to monetization strategy. I stopped using Brave this year, but for ages it was my goto because I could just install it and have an improved web experience.
What do you use nowadays?
I made this post because people in this community are recommending Brave to other people in this community. People in this community generally are fine with messing around with settings to increase their privacy which is why I don’t talk about out-of-the-box-experience.
Basically, look at what community this was posted in. This is less a warning to the average joe and more to the people that actively care about their privacy.