Technology

Just use Firefox.

The fact that their founder wants to ban gay marriage is enough reason for me to avoid it like the plague.

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.

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 I think they want to use that tracking data for AI training as well, meaning other people can potentially access it.

And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. Which they seemingly unironically called it "Basic Attent Tokens"..

TL;DR: The company is basically a sham company trying to usher in a dystopia. Where you'll get paid for staring at ads, while having all your data stolen and sold back to you.

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.

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.

Edit:

I am going to add more perspective to this, because holy shit people are so into eating nothing burgers.

Reddit/Twitter was a database and API that everyone was centralized onto, there was no choice. Brave you can literally fork because its open source. Aside from that this was literally the CEO's personal donation of $1000...in like 2014. Almost 10 yrs ago.

Elon, as CEO and on the X/Twitter brand:

• "brainwashed" https://www.news18.com/buzz/elon-musk-causes-uproar-with-anti-lgbtq-anti-vax-meme-insults-random-twitter-user-6714733.html
• https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-twitter-makes-millions-off-anti-lgbt-groomer-tweets-report
• https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitter-pronoun-rule-invites-bullying-lgbtq-groups-say-rcna87336
• https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-triples-down-on-making-twitter-terrible-for-trans-people/

Meanwhile Brendan:

• Literally stepped down as CEO https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-resigns-as-mozilla-corporation-ceo/
• https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/
• made personal blog post about inclusivity shortly after https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
• invented and worked on/for javascript, brave, firefox

Gnubyte

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.

This is bulshit, didnt have to say aything in tehnical aspect of the browser so he continyed to tras some people that work on that project, probably false..

Today I learned that people take it VERY PERSONALLY when you criticize their chosen browser. 😂

Damn didnt know it was that bad.

They also lack any documentation about how to use their policies on Linux (where you can disable all the bloat). But it should be doable, I will give it another try.

Is the browser even FOSS? Can you compile a working version yourself?

I do that with Firefox and it is really cool.

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 have absolutely no idea how Brave got the reputation it has. It's business model is disgusting and extortionate, it's like paying for warez. Been clear as day since day one.

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.

Long time Brave user here. This made me uninstall Brave and move to Firefox. Thank you !

This article did not present a compelling case for abandoning brave. Who cares what the founder thinks about various political issues. If the software is good, then that’s all that matters.

Don’t get me wrong, I support same sex marriage, but people have a right to oppose the concept as marriage is a government idea that is tied up in politics.

At one 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.

urghhhhh but firefox just doesn't perform as well. i tried, i really did. i found a 15 year old (!!) bug affecting svg drawing performance that was fucking up a page i was working on, i'm not imagining it.

I'm not sure if it's the same one but i just found a similar bug with a five year old comment saying i guess we're not fixing it anytime soon... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483868

I do have it installed and check in occasionally but it feels like a downgrade when i try to use it as a daily driver.

is there any way to get a functional de-googled chromium build with settings sync across devices?

Unfortunately, there are the ame stuff about Firefox too. Mozilla Foundation is such a corrupt organization with extreme shady finances.

Foundation's main income is royalties by google: 567M per year.

Donations: 7M (which almost goes to the CEO's bonuses)

the CEO gets 700K salary and 4.6M bonuses. Lmao.

I'd suggest, using Firefox but not donating to them.