Brave Software has announced plans to deprecate the 'Strict' fingerprinting protection mode in its privacy-focused Brave Browser because it causes many sites to function incorrectly.
He wasn't fired. He voluntarily left. And thus Mozilla is left with an incompetent CEO whose only aim is to increase her paycheck year after year, despite pathetic market share results for FF. Enjoy that.
That said, nobody cares about your "friendly remainders". We're talking about software here, not politics.
And, to stay on topic, yes, it happened to me that Strict FP broke some website, in particular those displaying a frame with a map or similar stuff. So I've resorted to use "standard" FP myself.
I had a small mountain of BAT they locked me out of due to shoddy linking with their banking affiliates and out of date DRM practices locking me out of my account due to too many devices being logged in (each OS update counted as its own device).
I noticed you didn't have that linked, that's because not every shitty move a company makes gets news coverage. Sorry I don't fit into your narrow view on what constitutes a valid reason.
I've been having a pretty good experience with Mullvad, however I don't hear many people talking about it. I wonder why is that, IIRC it's being developed with Tor Foundation, and is basically a Tor browser for clear web, and that sounds perfect. So far, I didn't run into any issues, so is there a catch, or are they just not well enough known yet? Or, maybe people are turned away by their optional VPN?
Probably because LibreWolf is most of the way there, and the Mullvad branding + proprietary VPN is more than a bit much. I use(d) the VPN alongside it and found the add-on "hints" regarding the correct DNS settings more frustrating than helpful, too.
Yeah, Firefox lacks features like built-in pop-up ads, full screen homepage ads (those ones are enabled by default), and a VPN you probably didn't even purchase.
Truly, the features I wanted to clog up my hard drive whether I use them or not
I use it. I don't get marketing because I use brave, which has a fucking indestructible adblocker. Like while everyone was panicking from the YouTube issues, I've never seen a single message to turn it off on YouTube. And there was a bunch of other things that users has reported, like slow videos, that brave just didn't have problems with.
Brave is simply usable Chromium. On GrapheneOS it is not the most secure as it has its own Chromium engine which is not as hardened poorly.
On Linux it works well with hardened_malloc while Firefox straight up does not run. This is probably because Firefox has memory issues.
It sucks relying on Chromium as Firefoxes UX is top tier. I have no idea why normies are using Chromium Browsers, they all suck for UX, especially Chrome.
But on Android and Linux Chromium is very secure, while Firefox is at least questionable.
Brave sets very weird priorities though, they dont focus on many features people need and instead bloat everything with news or crypto stuff that doesnt even support Monero.
No it literally breaks sites. I was using Firefox with Arkenfox user.js, basically Torbrowser, and nothing broke unless the site told me "your browser is not supported". Braves strong defaults broke Github and more.
Was strict the default? I'd assume the standard would be the default.
I'd imagine if you were using strict you want the sites to break because you absolutely do not want fingerprinting. That kindof restriction usually comes with the breaking being expected.
Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave's users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.
How are they getting this data? If it's with telemetry this data doesn't seem reliable, I doubt that people who change the fingerprint setting don't disable telemetry.
I'd ask why they don't make it optional (I'm not a Brave user) but it seems it was.
Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave's users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.
This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.
Given that, I'm inclined to agree with the decision to remove it. Pick your battles and live to fight another day.
Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave's users
Based exclusively on whether a user had not gone through the Brave's browser settings and disabled the "Send statistics about my behavior to the Brave corporate HQ" flag.
In other words, the number is useless.
This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.
This argument could be used to tell people to avoid using the Brave browser too. After all, only a minority of people do. The best way to blend in would be to use Google Chrome on Windows 11, and improve no privacy settings.
Unless someone wants to argue that using Brave makes you an acceptable degree of unique, but using advanced tracking blocking makes you unacceptably unique.