Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser

Just use Firefox.

Firefox + uBlock Origin + arkenfox user.js gives you privacy, security and anti-tracking. The only way to fly IMO.
- And a Pi Hole for good measure.
- White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It's like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.
- Librewolf
- What does Arkenfox do? I'll definitely add it if it's beneficial.
- What about Privacy Badger? Is uBlock better?
- Is this applicable for Firefox mobile?
- Why not add Snowflake while we're at it?
I bounced between the two for years, i guess i am going back to Firefox full time.
- The only reason I haven't switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn't have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it's not a priority. 🤷
- I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn't handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up
- Same. I had no idea about brave and I started using it full time on all my devices like a month ago. Guess I’m going back to Firefox. Which was fine.
I've switched on Desktop a year ago. Also with Android. But Firefox on Android has an odd bug that I cannot get rid of. Pages are really slow to load on initial render. I've noticed it gets stuck on the SSL cert verification step, sometimes around 5 to 10 seconds before it starts painting the page.

I've tried disabling all add-ons, logging out of Firefox sync, disabling the built in HTTPS everywhere, and literally any custom settings I've added. But I can't get past this issue and seemingly no one else has it.

Chrome doesn't present this issue.
- Yup got the same thing. Annoying as hell. The loading bar always goes to like quarter of the way and stays there for a couple of seconds and the continues. After that it's fine, but it is always the first page you load after closing Firefox.
- I've never encountered this, which makes me realise I've been running Firefox beta for ages (with zero issues). Perhaps try that just in case it helps?
- Same issue here! I thought I was alone. It annoys me to no end and weirder still, issue doesn't present itself with Firefox for Windows running behind the same IP.
  
  Firefox Focus also doesn't seem to present the issue. Just the primary Firefox browser for Android. And honestly, often enough that it's nearly unusable.
  
  If you ever figure it out, please let me know.
- +1 for that issue, you are not alone :)
- You're not alone, I've been using Firefox on Android for two years now, and I've had this problem from the beginning. The first time I launch Firefox and load a page it stops a quarter of the progression bar for ten seconds, and then loads fine. Once pas that everything works perfectly. It's very annoying and I don't know why this happens.
Unrelated, but why is it that so many kbin users seem to keep a dedicated reducing account? Relatively frequently, an account that reduces a post or comment has no recent posts or comments but heavy initial usage a ~month ago as jpgr above. It’s weird.
- I think those existed on Reddit too. It's just that you could never actually confirm they existed.
- I downvoted because it was a lazy comment not providing further elaboration. If anything, the fact that such a comment is highly upvoted shows that this community is not mature yet.
  
  That I'm not engaging in online discussion doesn't automatically mean this is a bot or "dedicated reducing" account. Please restrain yourself from judging strangers on the internet.
I use chrome on my mobile device... Is that bad?
- Might as well take shits with the door unlocked; same level of exposing yourself.
- In a way yes. You're giving Google (via an increased browser market share) the power to decide the direction of the web. Their interests as a corporate organization are not aligned with yours, so they will make decisions to your detriment if they have to.
- Just use Firefox. Mozilla isn’t good but it’s not evil
- I don't know how people browse the web on mobile with ads taking half of the screen.
- It's not really bad per se, it's the default on most Android devices these days. The problem is that almost all modern browsers are Chromium-based which give Google a lot of power to implement changes (see manifest v3 & web DRM). Personally, I'm trying to slowly reduce my usage of Google products. I'm using Firefox on desktop and a mix of DDG+Fennec on my phone.
On mac? Love safari? But also want good adblock? Use Orion! It’s safari, but with support for chrome and Firefox extensions! Fuck yeah!

I always loved safari, and always got weird looks for it as a web developer (but after a month or two they love me for it because I always find non-chrome bugs because those peasants only use chrome), but that browser is so damn good guys… on mac, that is. Not sure if it even exists yet for linux/win.
- Orion
  
  Thanks for the tip! Do you know any similar solution like this for iOS? I'm struggling to find a fully featured browser with decent ad-blocking capacity.
Just moved from Brave to Firefox when that “AI training” story came out. I think it’s faster than brave now
I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
This is the way.
Firefox and mozilla aren't your friend.

They like to play the "user and privacy friendly" company. Meanwhile they are hemoraging users, and laying off staff needed to actually build a great browser.

Mozilla ceo pay increase + layoffs in 2020:

In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
- They don't need to be my friend to be better than the chromium browsers though, so I don't know what this has to do with anything
- What's the alternative though, we have Chrome and Firefox as choices. Chrome is far worse than some issues with Firefox around CEO pay.
Doesn't Firefox do telemetry and other shady shit out of the box? Ofc you can turn it off but I don't get the fanaticism over this browser.
- Every now and then, you'll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.
  
  Some examples:
  
  Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
  
  Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
  
  Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared
  
  And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing "about:telemetry" into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.
  
  Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.
  
  Any 'evil' shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.
  
  You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can't possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.
  
  But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.
- The fact that they have (at least for now) foregone implementing Manifest v3 should be reason enough to use Firefox. Turn their telemetry off and use ublock origin, call it a day well spent.
  
  If you're inclined to, use Librewolf with ublock, NoScript, decentraleyes, and chameleon.
  
  Copy the bypasspaywalls sites into ublock, add a redirect extension to avoid all the idiot megacorps, and use duckduckgo lite and learn to use shebangs for very fast web searching.
- Yeah it's not perfect out of the box but after turning off telemetry and adding some add-ons like ublock origin and such it's one of the best short of going full on tor/mullvad. And still less fanaticism than brave lol
With brave I never see any pc or YouTube ads. With Firefox even with ublock origin I can’t get rid of those damn ads. That’s what keeps me on brave
- Which websites exactly do you still see ads on with ublock and not with Brave? Because I've not seen any ads in years with ublock.
- I don’t know why you’re getting ads… I run Firefox + uBlock just fine.
  
  But I also run NoScript and AdBlockPlus. Maybe try those?
  
  (Yes I know NoScript with uBlock is pretty redundant. Doesn’t really bother me to allow scripts on both to unbreak things. I like the double lock.)
- No ads on YT with Firefox + uBlock, not sure why your setup isn't working.

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.

I see no reason to use any other browser than Firefox and maybe Librewolf.
- So Mull browser, right?
- Firefox on desktop is awesome. Firefox on mobile is painful.
- I am forced to use Chromium on my work laptop because MS Teams doesn't work (all the features) on Firefox.
  
  Edit: I should elaborate this a bit. There are 2 reasons why I use Chromium on my machine.
  
  If I face a problem, company tech team only knows Chrome and they start crying when I open Firefox.
  
  On Linux, the official way to use Teams is through a web-app and Firefox doesn't support PWAs.
  
  All other MS services function fine on Firefox.
- I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.

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.

Personal anecdote:

When I initially decided to drop Chrome, I moved to Brave because - as a chromium-based browser - it supported the same set of extensions I’d grown accustomed to.

That being said, the crypto stuff weirded me out enough that, once I’d weaned myself off the extensions, I switched to Firefox.
- What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?
  
  My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world
Streaming services seem to lower bitrate when I’m using Firefox vs Brave, so Brave is my go to for streaming.

I use Firefox for everything else.
I use it as my hardened Firefox doesn't play well with some government and bank sites
Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seems to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don't buy the argument that it's easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It's not as complicated as people make it out to be. It's not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they'll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine's direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! 😄
- The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.
I was using Chrome as a secondary because unfortunately "designed for Chrome" is a thing now, and got sick of Google's bullshit and thought I was doing better by going to Brave. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Brave has its own large ethical holes.
- When I need a Chromium browser I use Vivaldi. I quite like it!
- Ungoogled Chromium is a great option for a back up. It's lightweight and works well
I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
I've tried Firefox several times but always end up back on chromium due to compatibility; a lot of sites don't play well with anything but chrome anymore and this is very much something intentionally caused by Google, who have basically taken a page out of Microsoft's playbook but with a much more mature product that is going to be substantially harder to replace then IE was
Brave is the only browser I know that can play youtube videos in the background on mobile. Please tell me another browser that can do that. The UX is just really good.
- Why not use NewPipe?
- Vivaldi can do that, there is an option in settings. Firefox mobile does that with an addon.
Firefox and gecko are just not as smooth. I don't know how you don't notice this, especially on Android.

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.

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.

someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side

LOL, he inflicted Javascript upon the world. He never knew better and was always on the dark side.
Louis Rossmann also recommended Brave in one of his videos. Quite sad.
- I like a fair amount of his videos but he has a big ole bag of bad takes
Brave is more secure than Firefox out of the box.

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.

Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave

It starts to feel astroturfed at a certain point. The last week or so has been crazy.
- I would bet my left nut they astroturf
At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see.

To be clear, that means Brave is ① invading their users' privacy, and ② stealing money from web publishers.

The point of referral codes is to reward web publishers for referring users to a product; leading to the user buying a product that they otherwise wouldn't.

Your browser isn't introducing you to a product. For it to insert referral codes for the browser vendor's benefit is stealing money.
Its almost like UX is one of the most important things for a user of any given program. 🥴
If you really dig into the whole ordeal it was a software error, not some malicious idea to steal links from creators.
- How exactly does one accidentally insert affiliate data on links? At some point someone wrote that code, which is malicious in itself, even if the activation was accidental.
What’s so bad about that?
- It's without your consent.
- Why the fuck should your browser get a share from your amazon shopping? It’s doubly galling since they pretend to care about user privacy.

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.

The fact that its main 2 gimmicks are a shitty ad blocker and integrated cryptocurrency should be enough of a red flag, honestly. Just use Firefox, people!

Firefox is king 👑

So the CEO is a raging alt-righter. Glad I never used his product then.

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:

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

Use Firefox or Safari, the more people use Chromium-based browsers the faster we get to the situation where Google completely owns the Internet (and they almost do now).

Vivaldi? Trusting a closed sourced application for privacy? What?

Not even defending brave here, just weird that the author say that.

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

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

I can't think of a reason why anyone would use a browser other than Firefox and its forks.

I just use Firefox and DuckDuckGo

This article is useless trash. There is no real technical argument here except "founder bad".

I do have reasons for not using Brave, but it's to do with the annoying defaults and the crypto integration. They default whitelist Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook garbage that I have to go and toggle off.

Given the level of effort and extensions like Facebook container on Firefox, I just prefer the better experience for me. This bullshit about getting on identity politics agendas I find abhorrent and repulsive. This author's a stupid fuckhead.

Thanks. Whenever I raised the issue of homophobia or his general support of right-wing causes that threaten people's privacy (see the aftermath of Roe v. Wade for example), I got downvoted, be it on the PrivacyGuides sub where they adore the browser, or right here just weeks ago.

Oh boy, this comment section is gonna be spicy. I can already smell the smoke from the Brave enthusiasts heads exploding.

I ditched Brave ages ago when the ad and crypto bullshit really ramped up, and finding out Peter Thiel was involved and Brendan Eich was a bigot, were more than enough to keep me away from Brave.

I currently use Arc on desktop because it makes my life as a busy dev much easier to organize, and Safari on iOS because every browser on there is just Safari anyway. iOS Safari + custom DNS to block ads. Works for me.

I’d use Firefox but Arc’s organization features have become insanely useful.

Things wrong with Brave: #1- It isn't Firefox/a Firefox derivative

I've read the article via Firefox, with NoScript enabled. Am I doing this right?

I get people wanting an alternative Chromium based browser. Vivaldi, IMO, is a much better than Brave, and doesn't have all the annoying crypto weirdness.

I don't use either, though, I use Firefox

I started using Brave about a year ago... I didn't know any of this.

The Prop 8 stuff is enough of a reason for me. Firefox it is, I guess.

"If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong."

I stopped reading here. If you would like to present objective technical arguments, please try not to sound like a 5 year old "I'm right, you're wrong, blah blah".

Use Brave or use Firefox. They both work great for privacy, but I find Brave is easier to configure to be private.

I used Brave on mobile for a full week about a year or so ago at the suggestion of a coworker before realizing it gave me nothing over Firefox and added the bizarre crypto angle to everything.

This was during my (thankfully brief) crypto interest phase and I tried to see if I could accumulate any of the BAT coins the browser would give you for viewing ads...that never worked somehow so I accumulated zero, which was certainly one thing that led to me getting fed up with it and going back to Firefox.

Beyond that, the interface was weird, it was prone to crashes, and it was generally a hassle. 100% flash-in-the-pan cash-grab effort.

The writer is proposing Vivaldi, a closed-source browser, as an alternative to Brave, which is free and open-source. I think a better alternative would be Ungoogled Chromium.

I use Brave as a backup browser. My main one is Firefox.

You can turn off the crypto stuff. You don't have to use Brave Shields (in browser ad blocker). It can be turned off. Now you can use uBlock Origin or another ad blocker.

About the CEO, I can't see nothing about his beliefs reflecting in his work. Looks like he kept them separated. I'm not for said beliefs.

Just because something is open source doesn't mean the people behind it have the best intentions in mind.

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 stopped using Brave over the whole BAT thing, it just felt shady and weird. This article just validated my decision even more. Happy to be back with Firefox, even though Mozilla has its own issues.

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.

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.

Firefox works well enough for me. Never given me any problems or grief. I don't really understand the fascination with chromium forks or the insistence on using them instead of Mozilla's engine.

I've been trying out the DuckDuckGo browser lately on mobile. It uses the Chromium backend, so some sites work better in it than in my normal Firefox.

The neatest feature of the browser is the ability to generate random email addresses in signup forms, and those emails all get forwarded to your real email address. As it forwards the emails, it removes trackers from them. You can click a link in one of the forwarded emails to disable that address from being forwarded any more if it gets spammy.

Well, fork, I hadn't looked at this team behind Brave. I use both Firefox and Brave. Bye bye Brave...

Im gay, I use librewolf

I just deleted it on my phone. All roads lead back to Firefox.

I think that the number 1 reason to not use brave is that is based on the chromium engine. The number 2 is that they use limited anti fingerprinting tools and support his self built tracking and ads. The others about ideology of the CEO i think are not so important.

I just read an article about a browser... That somehow included a court case about hulk hogan being gay or not... I had to stop right there lol.

Wtf is spacebar.news. where do you find sites like this?

Honestly I don't care who or what he personally donated to. But the ad model is the problem for me.

I tried Brave for maybe 2 days before going back to literally anything else. The heavy push for Crypto made me wary, and it really didn't seem to be doing anything specific to increase my privacy online.

I hadn't read the details of their intended ad network. I just recall it sounded shady. Now that I read about it, it sounds very similar conceptually to Google's Privacy Sandbox. I'm not sure if this is a better or worse approach than the status quo but I surely don't trust Brave Inc, a startup with a questionable business model and investors, with gathering and processing this data.

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.

Out of the box Firefox is definitely not very privacy conscious, better than Chrome no doubt, but worse than Brave. It can be configured to be better than both or one can use Librewolf/Mullvad browser

Such a brave article. So brave that they turned off the comments when people started bringing up valid criticisms against it. Such a cop out.

I dont use brave, but is this how most people choose what browser to use? Weather or not the dev supports gays?

Okay, so the creator of Brave might be a bigot and some of the stuff it does with crypto currency is a little sketchy? And the ads it replaces with the blocked ads are somewhat invasive?

So disable the crypto stuff and use ad-blocking software along with its own adblocking functions.

If a mechanic fixes my car and does a really good job, but he might have some shitty opinions of gay people, as long as he fixes my car I don't care about what he might think of gay people.

Everyone needs to be aware that there's propaganda everywhere. microsoft and google REALLY want you to use their browsers and people are tired of the data MS Edge and chrome collect.

I for one, hate that chrome constantly connects other shit to your google account with just one accidental click sometimes. Edge does the same shit, but brave is the only chromium based browser that doesn't deceptively do shit like that.

I still like firefox better and I only have brave for those rare instances where firefox won't work on a website. And I don't actually believe that the creator of brave is actually a bigot. Pro-liberty, Pro-privacy and anti-surveillance types are always getting smeared as bigots when they aren't.

Anyone here ragging on brave that is on a Windows platform has got a real funky view of privacy. By percentage, that is probably most.

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?

That seems like an extremely niche issue.
- The sentiment feels on point however, that this users experience with Firefox has been poor and issues flagged have not resolved in an eternity. I've definitely felt similar exhaustion with other systems.
- So it's ok to not fix it? I agee with original commenter. Firefox is full of bugs, particularly in dev tools, which renders it unusable for me
- it's not that niche - svg is a common format and it was difficult to work around. my point was more that the issue was known and just unlikely to ever be fixed, which makes me concerned about other issues I'm not experiencing today but might tomorrow.
  
  I honestly would prefer to be using Firefox.
I have used it as a daily driver on PC and phone for years. It works great for me. There are compatibility issues that force me on Edge sometimes, but I try to keep those as short as possible.
- It works great for me. There are compatibility issues that force me on Edge sometime
  
  Sounds like it doesn't work great
I use Firefox on PC and I'm happy with it there. But on my phone Firefox isn't great. Scrolling and zooming is pretty choppy, not excessively but it shouldn't be choppy at all.

Edit: after posting this I tried using Firefox again for a while. I take back the "excessively" part. It is distractingly slow, there's no reason for it to be that bad
- yeah I really notice the difference. I wish I didn't, I'd rather use Firefox, but it feels slower and I want my settings syncing between devices
Just curious, does that only affect macOS?
I tried on Linux and saw no hanging nor any cores at 100% usage, bit slow on performance though, yes
- I'm on windows but I think the Mac testing bed had the issue too
  
  it was a couple of years ago and I've tried ff since and it's good, there's just always a reason to switch back.

Maybe it's me but some of the things in this articles make me question their reporting.

What makes sense to me is that they have been involved with some shady crypto companies and they have been opaque about their goals, with some of the developers disagreeing with the CEO every now and again.

What rubs me the wrong way is the focus on his own political viewpoint (this is holy irrelevant to the software), his involvement with FTX (almost no one saw the collapse coming. It was one of only a few crypto companies that people didn't expect to be that shady) and getting a cease and desist from a newspaper corporation (this is much expected and frankly idk if the cease and desist even holds up. This is not as shady as the article makes it out to be and legally this is not cotton dry at all iirc. IANAL tho ofc)

I agree it's not the best idea to mindlessly go on using Brave, but honestly this article is really not that good.

Agreed, to actually convince anyone who uses it to switch over to another one I would have liked to see an objective comparison of how solid the privacy features are on both browsers, that's the only relevant argument that matters to anyone regardless of their ethical beliefs, here the only thing that tarnished Brave's reputation for privacy was the injected affiliate URL parameters, that's pretty bad, but it has also been fixed since, doesn't mean we can blindly trust Brave now, but it's not as bad as it is made out to be. To make a counterpoint, I think it's good that there is a privacy focused Chromium browser, because they can take a stance against proposed Chromium changes, like the handicapped ad blockers under manifest v3 or the most recent WEI, Chrome still goes ahead and implements those, but Brave remains and keeps their Chromium saner.
Personally I barely use it, but for what I have seen it has its ups and downs, if we also bring who's behind the product into the picture then even Mozilla hasn't always done good and good alone

If you put aside the crypto crap, Brave is an okay browser. Sometimes I use it for web development. But I don't like the direction the company is heading towards.

Most of the time I use Firefox with Extensions and Librewolf for everything. Firefox has been my go-to for years and I sure hope it stays that way.

Don't use Brave because of the ads and crypto currency stuff

I don't see why how one person even the CEO and founder's political beliefs from 15 years ago should stop anyone from using a product today. Unless we want to expose all 7 million+ people who voted for and passed prop 8 in 2008 and cancel them all into oblivion.

I used brave in the past sometimes still do. I don't care for the leadership. The browser is opensource and solid. I use librewolf as my main browser now though.

They just started showing ads again on YouTube when watching on Brave. Which is a very good way to get me to permanently switch elsewhere! Thanks Brave!

Use Firefox on desktop

Use Firefox (or Mull or Fennec- both are forks) on Android. I have Bromite too for times Firefox is being fucky.

On iOS unfortunately due to Apple’s (soon to be lifted) browser restrictions, the default Safari browser is basically as good as any other since Apple forces other browsers to basically just be reskins of Safari (forces webkit usage). I do recommend Firefox Focus if you want stronger, Brave-like adblocking without using Brave obviously. Focus seems to block close to the same level as ublock origin + Firefox on a desktop. It’s barebones by design though, so not ideal for everyone. I know Google/Mozilla are working on non-webkit Apple App Store approved browsers for next year when that law goes into effect (might not be available officially for NA users, not sure how that is gonna play out yet. Hopefully EU sues Apple for $100B for doing that if they do.) Hopefully that means official actual gecko based Firefox is coming fucking finally. Firefox with ublock is all I ever asked for. I’d even take Safari with actual ublock but unfortunately Apple is Apple, the annoying little fuckers.

I couldn't find fennec or mull on the android app store, what are they?
- Privacy-focused Firefox forks. You'll have to get them from F-Droid.
- Fennec:
  https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
  
  F-Droid:
  F-Droid is a robot with a passion for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on the Android platform. On this site you’ll find a repository of FOSS apps, along with an Android client to perform installations and updates, news, reviews, and other features covering all things Android and software-freedom related.
  https://f-droid.org/en/about/

If you are on Android, you can try Cromite (a beta app by dev of Bromite). The app has less bloat compared to Brave.

Though the app needs some ironing as it has some missing/broken stuff.

GitHub: https://github.com/uazo/cromite

Just gonna leave this here... https://privacytests.org/

Edit: After reading the article I'm sceptical about a bias as the writer clearly misrepresented the lawsuit against Gawker by Hulk Hogan, which in turn puts the whole article into question.

Not saying that the allegations against Brave aren't true, I'm just saying I wouldn't trust a journalist who misrepresents the truth to tell me the truth.

The guy who runs the site literally works for Brave. It says so in the about page.
- Agreed, he could very well be biased even when trying not to be, according to FAQ, but the project is open source and he made it easy to clone the git for anyone to verify it that doubt his work.
Mullvad and LibreWolf are better than Brave, jokes on you.

I use links btw.
- Ah yes, links, the gentleman's browser.
  
  Jokes aside, I actually do use links to browse news specifically.
- I had never heard of Links before, thank you for giving me another rabbit hole to dive into!
the setting used for vivaldi on this test are worse than the default one, pretty bad source as the author tries to make brave look as good as possible

Why has no one forked brave yet?

That 1k donation, from years ago, is very usefull to someone. I dont know who cares so much to destroy this Brave founder, but that story for a 1k donation keep being repeated over and over.

Some people gave millions to have trans right banned.. we never hear about thoses people. But 1k, big deal!

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.

A lot of people on Lemmy don't like bigots, they don't like crypto, they don't like scammy tracking and they don't like dishonesty. So I'm gonna fling that poo and point it out for as many people as possible, in case they don't know.
- A lot of people on lemmy don't care about bigots, crypto, or anything else until something they dislike because it's not en vogue is doing it.
  
  Some dude at Firefox donates $1000 against prop 8? I sleep
  Some dude at Brave donates $1000 against prop 8? REAL SHIT
  
  I'm not trying to get into the "everyone is equally bad" thing here, but with projects as large as these if you dig into the history of everyone involved you WILL find some distasteful shit, it's just statistics.
  
  There's a lot of "Brave bad" going around the Fediverse, and people trying to find reasons to support that emotional belief, and stuff like that annoys me.

I think we have far bigger problems than Brendan Eich in the tech industry. Far more people have suffered or died in recent years from tax cuts and austerity lobbied by by some of the biggest billionaires (i.e. Zuckerberg, Gates, Ballmer, Musk, Bezos) than from the causes Eich has funded.

Can we truly call ourselves humanitarians when we continue to lap up everything that big tech gives to us?

At best, we're hypocrites for cancelling Eich whilst simultaneously sweeping issues like worker exploitation, political/medical disinformation, erosion of privacy, etc from the rest of big tech under the rug.

I just read it all and I don't entirely agree with all the reasons that the writer stated to not use brave (the CEO donating to ban same-sex marriage and the idea of BAT in itself I find interesting and I like but I ended up disabling it because I got nothing from it and I read somewhere how they were taking the donations that people made to the creators that do not have BAT or know about it without telling the users) but let's say he got me to question whether I would recommend Brave anymore, either way with what Google is doing right now I'm recommending Firefox to everyone I know whenever I can for the cause

what's everyone's thoughts on Vivaldi?

Who cares? As liberal I'm sick of the mellow-dramatic outrage culture. People aren't perfect. Who knew? If you don't use brave what's the alternative? Google, who is much worse? Maybe "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" and stop using the lefts social capital to alien people over small personal gripes.

I notice people who write these types of articles never open themselves to the same sort of scrutiny.

Because it is chromium based, it also does nothing to discourage sites from only supporting chromium based browsers.

Yandex is working so nicely for me lately--even better than Firefox. I think any possible spying by Russian capitalists or government will have little to no effect on my life.

How about duckduckgo? That's my to go. Also I have all my password from Ransome websites stored in brave browser, any idea how to migrate them to another browser? I really like that I can connect my account and my password migrate with me.

What do you use if you need a Chromium browser for something specific?

Stop doing that specific thing. You'll live.

(Or just use Ungoogled Chromium for the time being, until you learn to stop doing what you're doing.)
- There is nothing wrong with chromium or using modified versions of it. The Google Monopoly over it is whats wrong.
- The Via program to customize keyboards only works in Chrome. It will be hard to find up that one thing 😄
  
  https://www.caniusevia.com/
Chromium.

Soooo... bad PR = bad browser... advertising bad, crypto bad, source of funds bad, anti gay marriage guy bad.... meh I get the reasoning here but.. it's a bit of a reach

I use Firefox on desktop but on Android i use Brave for one single reason: it lets me open links in the full browser rather than a webview. Or whatever that tech is called. I hate that stuff. It drives me absolutely bonkers. Like, you might think that's irrational and/or that i have some kind of anger management problem but i promise you it is way beyond that. I'm fucking actually feral about this. This one thing determines which browser i use. If i couldn't find one with it i would have to start uninstalling apps that don't let me force full external browsers.

Firefox used to allow you to force this setting but at some point stopped. I don't know why. Give it back, please. (Along with full desktop extensions...)

Anyway if anyone knows how to change this i would be happy.

Press the 3 dots when you're in a web view and go to "Open in Firefox." I don't know how to make it automatic, though.
- Even that is too much for me :(
  
  Maybe i need to fork Firefox. I don't understand why they wouldn't have this.
What are you referring to regarding the webview? Are you talking about custom tabs?
- Yeah sounds like custom tabs is the thing i hate.
You're probably confusing webview and custom tabs. Custom tabs run in the default browser itself, while webview is an entirely separate browser.
- Alright that's very possible. It sounds like custom tabs is the name of the damn thing. Anyway i don't know how to turn it off :(
Imagine throwing your whole privacy away because of a single niche issue.

EDIT: this whole thread is havy astroturfed by brave shills. This post was at +8 and went down to -1 in 10 Minutes
- throwing your whole privacy away
  
  Listen to yourself, you could prevent some lies
- I'm not throwing all my privacy away.
  
  Just some of it.
  
  But it's pretty easy to get me back on Firefox.

I use brave to keep a secret set of tabs so my wife won't see my jerk off material on chrome.

Pretty useful for that actually

Why not use Firefox?
- Someone might assume Firefox is my main browser ;) And then they'd think I'm a massive pervert who does nothing else with his computer.
Lol, still, you can have separate profiles no?

And the weird thing is they are tied to their own crypto currency called BAT for viewing supported ad network. Still a fork of chromium

I use both Firefox and Brave. Just disable all the crypto stuff. Also, Brave is the only open-source browser on iOS that has ad blocking.

I use brave as it really blocks the things from foking meta, and goo gel, even if i think javascript is a warcrime against human kind, and against IT, and its created by eich

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.

I use a derivative of this browser for what I call "junk surfing" and I find it personally satisfying to feed it garbage searches, just for the fun of collecting an obscure crypto I know will never accrue any true value.

But if they are willing to give it to me, I'll take it.

The important searches go through FF or the DuckDuckGo browser.

Hows opera?

Weren't they bought by a Chinese company some years ago?
- Yes.
  
  I personally think Opera GX is even more dangerous but that's just me.
Chinese spyware IIRC

lmao what kind of propaganda is this. Take your fucking meds lad

If I want to keep a chrome-based browser, what is a decent (in terms of privacy intrusion and adblocking) one to use? Is Vivaldi a reasonable choice as a replacement of Brave?

If you're fine with missing some QoL features, ungoogled-chromium is the only Chromium browser that I recommend for privacy. It's very barebones as the name suggests.

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Which ever one you chose don't forget you need to do a good job at vetting all the top people involved just to ensure their personal morals and social opinions align with the current trends of social media.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2069436850145993

50 States, 50 Protests, 1day

Feb 5 @ your downtown.

Agreed!

These browser wars are funny. It's not like you have a real choice anyways. You get either some sort of Chrome, with it's various problems. Or you get some sort of Firefox... which has it's own host of issues. The rest of the competition is so far behind that it'd take a miracle for them to enter the mainstream.

Shilling for any particular browser is pathetic.

If software works I'll use it.

I prefer firefox but I'm not going to tell someone not to use a piece of software because the creator is a retard.

Learn to be angry at the right things and grow up. Jesus fucking christ people are so god damn stupid now days.

"Waahh I don't like this guys political position so I'm going to try to defame all his work and the work of hundreds of others because of one guys personal opinion"

If this had said something like 'v3 manifest will be rolled out and they're going to be anti-anonymity' then I'd be salty because that would mean the software is becoming less useful.

Anyone who thinks like this should stop using the internet because, spoiler, the entire backbone of the internet has been contributed to by everyone of every faith, creed and philosophy which means thousands of people you 'hate' have contributed to your literal bitching about those very people online.

Get over yourselves. Actual fucking children.

This author is a moron.

Use firefox (or librefox).

I thought this would bring up serious issues with the browser but it's just...the creator doesn't support gay marriage, the browser isn't an adblock hardliner, and it has built-in crypto support?

lollllllll

I thought it was nice that maybe a private browser would be mainstream but then on second thought.... Something icky must be going on if it's mainstream, i mean the whole crypto part was an instant warning for me. Proud Librewolf user over here!!!

run links2

The problem with the author is the idea of lumping together some good reasons to avoid Brave and some really bad reasons. The idea that the company behind brave depends on ads for revenue is good reasoning, the fact that they have a volatile cryptocurrency to use as payment is another. But when you mention that the founder is a bigot, or that he was associated with Peter Theil, or that they CONSIDERED a shady ad practice are not really reasons to avoid the product.

In the end, you want to have some competition in the browser market (that means not using the same base browser with a skin and some features). I would recommend Firefox over Brave for that reason alone.

This is old news.

But what browser should I use? Do I have to check the politics of every employee or volunteer?

Ugh. I was trying Firefox, but there are too many extensions I use that use Chromium that I need. I'm too torn on what to do.

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..

One word, eight letters:

Chromium

tldr?

I use Firefox and Brave. It works for me great. I can have one set of tabs open in Firefox and a different set open in Brave. It lets me distinguish between work and private at a glance. Politics of either do not affect my user experience and unwanted features in Brave can be turned off. While I have been using Firefox much longer than Brave, some sites don't work in it as well as they do on chromium based browser.

Yesterday I have installed Ubuntu and KDE Plasma. It's a bit of a steep learning curve so far, but I'm open to good Linux based browsers you might suggest.

duckduckgo

This article author has to have a few screws loose to make those connections

Just to play devils advocate, while I do agree that there are some shady stuff happening, if the browser remains open source that wouldn't be a problem right? These "features" while present can be disabled by the end user, either within the settings menu or by adjusting in the configs page.

This is bulshit, i dont decide will i use a browser depending on who works on it, but depending on the browser itself.

So insted of looking at browser itself this dude sugests we should look at people that work on it and asume the browser is bad if someone working on it is bad which is blindfolded deciding and its nonsense.

So if you have malicios intent and dont have to say anything bad about the browser itself concretly and tehnical because if you lie there, many people that know how it is will say no it doesnt work that way here how it is than you just trash people that are working on it whic is wery hard to veryfi is it trye or not. And probably it isnt..

So when we discus open source software there is no need to talk about writers of the code much because we can discus the code itself and tell concretly if something is bad. Exactly which line and why its bad.

Anything else is just made up and malicios.

So why exactly should people stop using brave browser? This article is just smearing campaign, I can easily write much more compelling reasons as to "why you should stop using Firefox browser", coming from a Firefox user myself

The crypto is crypto. that’s how crypto.

The asshole at the top, well that’s a new discovery for me.

It just works the best. Ad-blocking is unrivalled. I've tried Firefox+extensions, Duduck Go browser etc, but none match Brave's ad-blocking capabilities on mobile and desktop.

And I'm all on board with the dream of users receiving a return on their attention. Yes the quantity is small now, but that's because it's just starting out.

What's up with all these Firefox elitists in the comment section?

The points in this article have nothing to do with the actual browser. For the record I use Firefox, librewolf, and brave

Some sites are broken with a Firefox base.

the founder is controversial. so what? Does the product render pages with pretty good fingerprint blocking? Yes
crypto exchanges are under scrutiny and brave uses crypto. so what? does the product render pages with decent cross tracking isolation? Yes
their crypto has little value and was a failed experiment so what? Does the browser remove ads? Yes

If you're going to write about how something sucks, talk about it with substance, point out code that does XYZ to confirm negative statements.

Random* ;(

Following his reasoning, the author should also avoid JavaScript at all cost then. Good luck with that!

"The Brave web browser has carved out a niche over the past few years as an alternative to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and other mainstream web browsers." Excellent article my only criticism is that firefox is not a mainstream browser lol. Im saying this as a proud firefox user.

I really enjoy brave on desktop and mobile. Other mobile browsers turn every internet interaction into chaos with all the popups and ads (even let’s you use YouTube in the background with its playlist feature on mobile). I read the article and I didn’t understand why the product itself was bad? CEO did some stuff that the writer (and me) doesn’t agree with, doesn’t make it a crappy product though?

I've been using Brave for years especially on Android. It's secure, open-source and supports all chrome extensions and easiest to recommend anyone. I guess majority people care only about that much. Firefox needs improvement on Android, besides that their leadership are not saints either.

Brave is great and i will continue to use it.

This is really just a rip on the CEO because of his political beliefs. I imagine if he donated money to some sort of left wing thing there would be no story. Just another tech person doing what they do. It's so amazing how divided everyone is nowadays, always looking for some reason to hate someone. That goes for left, right and center!

What's the deal with the founder ? If my browser is good I couldn't care less if it's made by Hitler himself.

This doesn't give a balanced overview of the positives of Brave, for example they have Tor integration which is interesting: https://brave.com/tor-bridges/

Right we shouldn't use brave because CEO donated $1000 to some law author doesn't like. Maybe we should leave lemmy too because creators believe in things most other people don't like. These kind of morality plays are stupid, who knows what every devs and ceo of company actually think and do with their money and honestly if it's legal who cares.

You should not use it because i don't like it. Got it.

Yeah, while I agree with most of the reasons for not using brave in the article, I think the best reason is because it's chromium based and Google/chrome id doing the dumb WEI thing and hoped it would be more centered on that.
- They tried before and it didn't stop people from using brave, so they are switching to whatever this is

Ignoring all other concerns, Brave is simply the buggiest browser I've ever used, both on desktop and mobile. It's the only one where I have to regularly switch to a different browser due to sites not loading properly.

Have been using it for 4 years with no issues

This article has attracted the obvious responses it wants to attract.

I bet many who've responded in agreement with the sentiment of this article use windows which is tied to a company that has done far worse than brave software.

Edit: I am not sitting here for hour or more trying to figure out who is employed at a company of a piece of software I chose to use just to ensure their personal opinions, views and opinions align with current trends on what is sociably acceptable.

If we all were to apply this to all the software we use you will fast find out that you'll be looking for quite a few alternatives to what you assumed was neutral or aligned to your view point.

None of that is a reason not to make these things known. No one can escape from using brands that support something they disagree with. That doesn't lead to a conclusion that folks shouldn't make an informed decision on each of the products they do use. Part of that is going to be how hard it would be to give it up balanced against how strongly they feel about it.

Personally I dumped Windows in 2007 and each successive year has made me happier and happier with that decision. For other folks that's not a choice they can or are interested in making, nothing wrong with that.

In this particular case, Firefox is already my main browser, I have brave installed as a secondary only. It will cause me less heartburn to dump it than it did to type up this comment.
- I just want the software I've chosen to work and do what I want it to well.
  
  I'm not choosing software based on anything else as it's not part of my decision framework when making software choices. If it was where do you draw the line? Do we only vet the C tier if not why not vet the Dev team as they are the people that actually create the product , Then the Q&A and R&D teams because without them the software would be more buggy and not have cutting edge features.
  
  It's just a rabbit hole that's best avoided and for the most part I'd argue that 90% of people don't think or even care about the points raised because it's the last thing they think about when choosing a browser.
  
  Good for you if you do, That's your choice.

Just want to chip in on the mobile browsers. A big issue is that webview is chromium based. So even if you use Firefox on android , you are using chromium/chrome plus Firefox.

Options on mobile would be vanadium (only on graphene I believe) or bromite (on F-droid). Bromite has its own webview separate as well , crashed my phone many years ago , no idea about it now.

On PC (Linux) I use Firefox with chromium as backup. Also fuck brave ,why support shady bigots if you can avoid it?

As a Brave user who doesn't dabble with its crypto BS and only uses Private Browsing on it, I find this virtue signaling an overreach. Fuck your downvotes.

How I love seeing people talk the big talk about 'democracy' and 'freedom' but also do their best to remind everyone that "your'e free as long as you agree with them", else they attack with pitchforks and torches. Lovely. (Yes I'm talking to you).

So we shouldn't use a piece of software because the guy behind it isn't woke enough? That's crazy

Left is good right is bad. What do you expect?

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.

I want to try a thought experiment. Imagine that you observe this comment in reaction to the above:

I just don’t get why the author is so pissed about their political contributions. Guess what, people who are involved in big business are usually right-wing and support right-wing organizations. Shocking. Who could have known. I don’t even want to imagine how the author comes to the conclusion that this is some big conspiracy but I think we all know what political spectrum that guy belongs to.

What I just wrote is a mirror-image version of the top rated comment on that article from a few days ago about the Mozilla foundation funding left-wing organizations. Do you agree with one of those statements and not the other? If so, why?

It is one-sided to say that someone involved in Brave should only be "allowed" to do so if he doesn't support anything conservative. Just as would be one-sided and wrong to say that Mozilla shouldn't be "allowed" to support left-wing organizations. Flipping it around, and looking at the reaction when it's the other way around, is an easy way to analyze your own internal reactions on it.

(Generally, I'm in agreement with the idea that you shouldn't use Brave because of all these other shady things; just this one part jumped out at me as one thing that's not like the others.)

Bro, if you can't tell why people are happy about progressive policies that support the right to love each other, and upset about regressive conservative antics that attempt to shame them and wrong them just for being themselves by telling them that they are "other" and not allowed to participate in society by getting married just because you personally think it's "icky" or against YOUR religion, then I honestly don't know what to tell ya. And I blame you for that run-on sentence mess, thanks a lot.
- Thank you. I’m tired of these people who think there are sides of equal good or equal bad. There a group of religious fascists that want to control all our lives and then there are the rest of us that sometimes begrudgingly are lumped together because we aren’t wacko nut jobs. Fact is there are very few liberal leaning organizations that I would care if a developer or ceo was apart of because they don’t threaten me for disagreeing.
Supporting politicians you like and supporting basic human rights being taken away on the basis of completely arbitrary factors outside one's control are two very different things.
- You're not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. "But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it's different") is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn't go to prison and it's okay when they cheat in elections.
  
  I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn't mean someone who's on the other side suddenly shouldn't be an executive of anything.
Your argument has no merit because one side of the political aisle is actively endorsing a piece of shit draft-dodging criminal and encouraging states to strip the rights of a minority population as well as the bodily autonomy of women, and the other side wants to charge you more money on taxes to support social programs and help people. (I own many guns and live in a red state btw, I have a bias.) Guess which side is being disingenuous?
- You're not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. "But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it's different") is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn't go to prison and it's okay when they cheat in elections.
  
  I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn't mean someone who's on the other side suddenly shouldn't be an executive of anything.
The two sides are not morally equal. Prop 8 was an awful, bigoted stain on California's history and he was unrepentant. I am glad he no longer is at Firefox. And Brave is a sketchy company that makes clear it was a good decision to give him the boot. I can support companies with moral stances I agree with and not support companies that do bad things.
Right wing is the one that actively and openly hurts people, so yeah I do see a difference tbh
- You're not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. "But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it's different") is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn't go to prison and it's okay when they cheat in elections.
  
  I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn't mean someone who's on the other side suddenly shouldn't be an executive of anything.
Very good observation. The issue being, the way I see it, he supported a generally accepted hateful conservative rhetoric. Most left wing organizations do not promote hateful rhetorics.
Its one sided to call fire hot
The fact that you would consider your counterfactual a mirror image is itself problematic.

In the case of the Foundation, it supports exactly what it purports to support. They’re like the EFF and other civil rights organizations. If you consider the EFF left wing, I think that says a bit more about where you stand.

The original article was outrage-bate blog spam, with random Capitalized Words and the prolific use of “scare quotes.” It doesn’t even say anything. No charges of misinformation. No citation of law. Just “They have a Billion Dollars!!” kinds of sentences.

On the other hand, the CEO of a company - particularly a small company - lends his personality to the company. It often makes sense to co-identify them, given that the CEO has an incredible amount of influence.

So if you are saying that libertarian software project : libertarian institutions :: conservative ideas : homophobic legislation, I guess you’re just really endorsing the position of judging the company by the politicians and politics it supports. If you see prop 8 as being as fundamental to the conservative position as internet freedom is to an organization specifically dedicated to preserving internet freedom, all I can say is that I hope more people start to see it that way.
- The fact that you would consider your counterfactual a mirror image is itself problematic.
  
  It's definitely an imperfect mirror image, yes. One is a private person spending $1,000 of his own money contributing personally to a political campaign (for something fairly abhorrent, I agree.) The other is a public foundation spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of the money it's been entrusted with on various things which don't seem to line up with what I think most people's idea of their mission would be (i.e. software). I glossed over the asymmetry in the analogy to make a point but they're actually wildly different situations.
  
  If you consider the EFF left wing, I think that says a bit more about where you stand.
  
  What on earth are you talking about? I genuinely can't even make sense of you got yourself to this leap of logic.
  
  Mozilla I think is generally understood as a software organization. The EFF didn't get their start by making a web browser called "EFF" which now has been rebranded as "EFF Firefox" and collects ad revenue for them through partnerships. I do realize that the Mozilla Foundation's mission statement now says they support general internet activism -- which, again, is fine -- but how you got from there to thinking anything about what I think about the EFF is genuinely very weird.
  
  Also, I've contributed to the EFF. Have you?
  
  The original article was outrage-bate blog spam, with random Capitalized Words and the prolific use of “scare quotes.” It doesn’t even say anything. No charges of misinformation. No citation of law. Just “They have a Billion Dollars!!” kinds of sentences.
  
  Did you dig into its sources? I did. I'm sort of in agreement with you that it smells of some kind of right-wing hit job (like "HOW DARE THEY give money to this woman when she's on THE LEFT"), and I think I pointed out up above that obviously Mozilla has the right to support left-wing causes with their money if they want to, even if it makes some right wing person VERY upset. I would just think that Eich has the same right. Even if it makes you very upset. Doesn't he?
  
  Be that as it may, specific things that I went back to its original sources and verified were:
  
  They're spending less money on software development
  
  They gave almost half a million dollars to a one-woman consulting outfit without much explanation of what got produced (for them or for the world at large) in return
  
  It said some other specific things that I didn't dig into enough (that it paid one executive around $5 million dollars personally, which seems like a lot) (that they're claiming to people that they rely on people's donations to keep operating when they don't) (etc). But, I poked around enough to determine that at the very least the article passed the obvious-bullshit test.
  
  On the other hand, the CEO of a company - particularly a small company - lends his personality to the company. It often makes sense to co-identify them, given that the CEO has an incredible amount of influence.
  
  You know that this is the same type of logic that the right uses to claim that some company whose executives once gave $1,000 to Hillary Clinton now needs to be boycotted, right?
  
  I know, I know, the left is correct, and the right isn't, so it's different. Look... I'm pretty sure I'm on your side, politically. I just think it's weird to advocate avoiding a web browser because one executive affiliated with them once gave $1,000 to a political cause I strongly disagree with. I think flipping it around to the other way is a pretty clear way of explaining why it's weird. That's all.
Yeah, it's one-sided. Prop 8 was stupid and CA rightfully rejected that shit later.

It's good to be one-sided against stupid shit that is a crime against humanity. Gay marriage is now legal federally. Same as interracial marriage. Nazis got beat the fuck up in WW2. Slavery is over. Deal with it.
- To your last point, Slavery isn’t really over. I recommend watching the documentary the 13th on Netflix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
- California actually never has rejected it and it's still in our constitution. We may get the chance to do so in 2024. The only reason it's not law right now is the US Supreme Court ruling it unconstitutional. A new Supreme Court decision that reverses that ruling would make it law again.

I'll keep using it, thank you for your concerns. At least I'm not giving market share to FF/Gecko/Mozilla.

First time I’ve ever seen someone say something negative about FF/Mozilla. Care to expand?
- There are always negative things to find about companies:
  
  https://kagi.com/search?q=Mozilla+controversy+&r=se&sh=iCWUr53W2UDFd8vi5oR4zg (link you can use even if you don't have Kagi)
  
  But I think it's the best of the bunch still. Google is absolutely evil, Brave is using Chromium as a base, so Firefox is the only browser with it's own engine.
  
  It means they are not affected by the shit Google pulls, at least not stuff they put in their engine. Of course Web Environment Integrity is hostile to the entire planet, but that's Google in a nutshell.
- Let's say I just dislike them as an org/com and I don't like the shit they have made FF into. After being a FF since the beginning (it still was Phoenix, back then). Nowadays FF sole selling point is the existence of uBlock Origin (which isn't even a Mozilla product) and the Chromium-dominance fear-mongering. Every other browsers just works better, faster, has a better U (I refuse to waste my time untucking it using Class) and is more suited to my workflow. Moreover, I sincerely think that Mozilla is at best useless, at worst just a cash grab and a shady org. The fact that the CEO paycheck almost matches all the donations they receive (from clueless people thinking that they're funding FF development) and that it keeps growing despite FF the decreasing market share should be more than enough for everyone to reconsider Mozilla's ethics:
  
  https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla
  
  https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/yy986k/can_someone_explain_why_mozillas_ceo_salary/
  
  https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
  
  Plus, frankly speaking, I'm fed up of being schooled by YouTube-addictes with a Gmail account and that buy crap on Amazon that my browser choice is "wrong" because potato.
  
  That said, I'll put my grain of sand to make Mozilla and their shitty circle jerk community (even more) irrelevant, whenever I can. I profoundly regret having been part of that community for almost 20 years.
  
  This is going be my last comment in this useless thread. I'm not interested in debating a d I'll ignore further replies. I have just answered your question.