Stop using Brave Browser
Stop using Brave Browser
Brave Software, the company behind the browser of the same name, was founded by Brendan Eich. He's best known as the creator of JavaScript from his days at Netscape Communications
Say no more fam.
Truly no atonement can be sufficient for a sin that grave
TL;DR: The article claims that the Brave web browser is bad and should not be used.
The author points out that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, co-founder (and ex-CEO) of Mozilla, and founder of Brave, donated 1,000 USD in support of a proposition to ban same-sex marriage. Along with making the claim that Brave's goal is not to act as an ad-blocker, but instead to build and grow their own advertisement network, and he also believes that the network has several flaws:
- Brave Ads paysout in a form of cryptocurrency, called BAT (š¦).
- As BAT is a cryptocurrency there is high volatility.
- BAT can not be redeemed for fiat ("actual") money directly from within the Brave Wallet.
- The author also believes that "it [the network] has largely failed" but that it "has generated a lot of revenue for Brave," via the ICO (Initial Coin Offering; IPO for crypto).
In addition to these key points the author also:
- Claims that Brave prompted FTX, before the scandal.
- Cites the The Brave Marketer Podcast where ex-CMO of Crypto.com Steven Kalifowitz shares an ambitious goal of being a "'brand like Coke and Netflix.'" The author then mentions that:
- In 2023 there was a report from The Financial Times that Crypto.com traded against their customers.
- In 2022 the company try to hide the severity of its layoffs.
- Mentions Brave's integration with Gemini, and how the crypto exchange is under investigation for lying about FDIC insurance.
- Mentions a partnership with the the 3XP Web3 Gaming Expo where they sponsored the Esports Arena and rewarded contestants with the BAT token.
- Claims that Brave added affiliate/referral codes to URLs, such as "binance.us."
Finally, the author lists Firefox and Vivaldi as alternatives to Brave, and ends the article with "Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances."
I am human, please let me know if I've made a mistake.
Edit: Fixed bat emoji and typo.
These guys tried to get a previous employer of mine to advertise with them. It works great if your entire audience is tech bros. Ours was not.
If he's bad, shouldn't everything he touches be bad? Why web site that uses JavaScript should be just as bad. Any browser based on Mozilla should be bad. Why is it just Brave that's bad for what he did in 2008?
As I understand it, the argument isn't so much "if you use a thing made by a bad person, you are a bad person by association" but rather that using a commercial product made by a bad person, who spends his money on bad causes, is directly helping him spend more money on said bad causes. Since he has never apologized or shown any indication that he has become a better person, not wanting to monetarily support him is a valid reason to not use his product.
It's really hard for the creator of Javascript to make money off of javascript, and it's unlikely he has any financial interest in the Mozilla corporation anymore since they're a nonprofit and thus don't have share holders. However, he directly profits off of Brave.
Because it is cool thing to cancel everything in 2023.
No. Couldn't care less what the founder did or didn't do. We need as many non-Google browsers as possible. The problem with Brave is that it is a chromium browser.
I'd say being chromium makes it a Google browser...
I mean, does that mean Edge is a Google browser, too?
Chromium is open-source. Even if Google adds something malicious to the source code (such as that Web Environment Integrity stuff), it can be removed by someone else creating their own browser based on Chromium. That's the very definition of open-source.
Related side-note: Lemmy itself is open-source, too. If the creator of Lemmy added something to the software that someone running an instance didn't agree with, they could simply fork the original software and remove the unwanted addition. Some people do disagree with that person's views, and yet they're still here. Many of them joined .world and other instances instead of .ml because they disagreed with the creator's views.
While Google, the creator of Chromium, isn't a good company for the consumer, I personally think Chromium itself isn't a bad idea. It's just that Google and some other companies modify it for their own means, and those means aren't always consumer-friendly.
All that to say: while the company that originally created Chromium is bad, the software isn't. And while some of the companies and people using that software are bad (including Brave, IMO), some of them are looking out for their users' interests, and those forks of Chromium are generally ok. (You should still actually do research and not pick a fork because the company developing it said it's okay, though. Take a look at what others are saying and verify it.)
Brave works for what I need it to do. I don't like lending credence to bigots(secret or otherwise) but if someone is gonna say "don't use this browser" they need to list a replacement that has the same functionality. And it can't be "just use duckduckgo" because we all fucking have that on our phones and none of us can use it as our primary browser and we all know exactly why. š
In fact. Mozilla rely more in Google. If i wasn't mistaken 90% of their money came from Google and they rely Google safebrowsing wherein it exposes your IP to Google
no one wants to secure their web render so they'll always use whatever is native to the platform.
on windows that's chromium. on macos that's webkit.
What does this even mean. Chromium or Webkit are not "native" to an OS. OSs don't magically include browser engines, its not a critical component of an OS either.
Most OSs do come with browsers preinstalled, but they are programs just like any other. You can remove Safari from macOS (albeit its pretty hard because root is read only and signed), you can remove Edge from Windows. In my desktop with Windows 10 the only browser I have is Firefox (not even Edge), does that make Gecko the "native" browser engine?
If anything, the native browser engine for Windows would be MSHTML from Internet Explorer.
@whou Don't forget the time they made it possible to 'donate' to creators, but when creators weren't signed up with their program #Brave would just keep the donation. So users would think they have donated for example to Tom Scott, but in reality he never received anything. Overall just a scummy company.
He could receive it, if he signed up though, right?
[Eich] 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.
Even though I do not agree at all with the donation and support - out of the things that influence me into choosing a browser, 15 year-old private donations of appointed CEOs is pretty low on that list.
And the whole BAT thing is opt-in and they're very transparent about it. I don't get why people get so triggered when the C word - crypto - is involved.
I think the only relevant criticism I see is adding affiliate codes to urls (until they were caught).
The author also forgot the polemic of adding twitter and facebook trackers to the whitelist, and impersonating people in their ads. There are some interesting criticisms against brave, I don't understand why their detractors are obsessed with the CEO and crypto.
Exactly. They do a lot of things I don't like, which is why I don't use them. However, I do recommend them over Chrome if someone isn't willing to use Firefox (or Safari on iOS with an ad blocking extension).
That said, the ad replacement thing was an interesting idea, and if it got better click-through rate while preventing sites from stealing PII, they probably could've cut a profit sharing deal and users would've been better off vs the status quo. They could also have a "premium" option where they pay a certain amount for no ads, and that amount gets split with websites who would normally serve ads.
There are some good ideas there, but unfortunately the good ideas don't seem to have really worked out as intended. I still think they're better than Chrome, but things can change.
But the data collection sounds like it's counter to its supposed goals. Multiple campaigns have been discussed that just make it believe they don't actually care about privacy considering all the ways they keep trying to do stuff is counter to that. Why stay? Tor Browser is available. Hell, Firefox itself is already able to take you pretty far and extensions can do the rest.
Why make the sacrifice of your personal data? Like, how many attempts at collecting personal data do you need to have occur before you realize it's always been their goal?
Of appointed CEOs who quit after 11 days to boot. But he was CTO prior.
But looks like he was largely ousted very fast with all the negative PR Mozilla was getting.
I would also imagine there are a lot of people that did not support same sex marriage back in 2008 that do now. I do not know the Eich personally, but it doesn't make sense to hold this stuff against people until we find out if they have or haven't changed their views.
It's not like he's backed down from his position against gay people over the years.
The fact is i don't care about these things. All it matters is that Brave uses Chromium, therefore I'll never touch it.
plus they have Google Advert ID Permission in Android. Tell me who is more creep. Crypto-things can be disabled within a few clicks, While mozilla's trash can be disabled using a bunch of configuration in about:config
Yeah. But if I ever want or need a Chromium browser, it may be the one.
I would go for Vivaldi or ungoogled chromium
Please stop reposting this crap every fucking day. What's up with you and this exact article in particular anyway? Are you getting paid or something?
well, I just came across the article on Mastodon and wanted to share it. I mean jeez, imagine sharing and wanting to discuss interesting topics just for fun?
and I posted the article on [email protected] and then cross-posted it here, because I thought it was also an interesting community to discuss it. I saw a bunch of people cross-posting it elsewhere, so if you're seeing it a bunch of times then it's probably because those communities probably also have something in common with the article. I personally think every community have different people and different discussions to have, so I don't see it as particularly bad.
I don't get it either. It's in the front in 5 different subs
I meanā¦ I've been using Firefox since Google silo'd all log-ins together.
On the other hand, search.brave.com is freaking incredible. It's so much better than Google, Bing or DDG at this point, it's shocking. I switched a couple weeks ago and it's surreal to see so many usable, useful results on the first page again.
Tried it for a couple of weeks and went back to DDG. It's way better for programming and other geekie stuff imo.
Try Startpage And you can use addons to filter out bad results, if that helps. Brave search definitely is potent.
Cool! I didn't think of that, but it would do the trick, you're right.
(I was hoping for it to be in the popup list of search engines, I guess.)
I use Mojeek and Brave.
You shouldn't use Brave simply because it's heavily infected with crypto shit and tries to monitorize your web browsing time by default. Not everything you do has to be a side hustle.
Sure you can "switch it off" but then why not use something else in the first place that's focus isn't trying to make money out of you. If Brave ever gained any decent market share the web would be an even shitter place than what Google is suggesting at the moment.
Fuck chromium and fuck Google
What a shitty fucking article.
As if people really using a browser with a built-in advertising network.
No, this article is pretty much idealistic rant aimed at hating the ceo. The product is fine.
Edit: the ads and crypto are opt in. I'd like to see if anyone ranting here about them has actually used Brave and went so far as to opt in to things they don't want
Never used it to begin with.
Dude, this is a Firefox. Why tell us not use something what...95% of people here are not using in the first place?
EDIT: The crypto stuff is opt-in. You donāt 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 canāt see nothing about his beliefs reflecting in his work. Looks like he kept them separated. Iām not for said beliefs.
EDIT 2: Also Brendan Eich is a co-founder of Mozilla. So if you're not going to use Brave because of him. How can you use Firefox?
Just ignore everything I said here. I misinterpreted stuff. My bad.
I made the switch last month from Brave for years, back to firefox. Brave is easy more effective at blocking tablets and ads, even with ublock/adblock. You can install it and just start using a cleaner web, and it's really easy to customize gow much of an effect the sanitization is. I defended a lot of what Brave did in the early days, because what I was hearing from developers is that they were trying to monetize it in anyway possible that maintained the privacy of the user, and I understand that ethos.
It's the years and years of missteps that finally got to me. I started to feel like I had to keep up on what they were doing to make sure nothing slipped through, and that's not trust.
I still think they have the best ad blocking tech, it beats my pihole, it beats Firefox with extensions. It's fast, and it displays websites reliably.
But, we do need to consider the roads we pave and the tools we use. Brenden Eich has not apologized for his donation, but at the time he did write a blog post about supporting LGBT initiatives at Mozilla and he had support from people that he worked with. He resigned because at the time there was nothing you could do to assuage an internet hate mob but resign. There is information around stating that three board members left because of his appointment, but only one actually said that,
But, we do need to consider the roads we pave and the tools we use
This is the part that every "lol just turn off the crypto crap, no problem!" responses don't understand. There are short-term issues, and there are long-term issues. Disabling undesired stuff fixes the short-term issue. Letting Brave build up their market share, at the expense of user-first options, creates long-term problems.
fwiw, Brave ad blocking for me has been far less effective than using Ublock Origin on literally any other browser
did not know about the founderās past, cheers for this. whenever iām forced to open a chromium browser for something from now on, iāll be using vivaldi.
Is Vivaldi good? I've heard it's like the old Opera, which I used to love (I used Opera from 2003 until around when they switched to Chromium, 2012ish)
I used to use it and I liked it quite a bit, I even replaced my gmail accounts with vivaldi.net accounts, though I may migrate to proton sometime. I use Firefox exclusively but if I needed to use a chromium-based browser, thatās the one Iād use. Iām not a power user by any stretch so my opinion probably has less weight than those of others on here, but thatās my two cents anyway.
i like vivaldi a lot :) mostly because of its UI and extremely easy in-depth customization. in my opinion it is the greatest-looking web browser (if you donāt factor in all the css fiddling you can do in a text editor with firefox, of course. but even then i donāt recall seeing any custom firefox user style that looked better than vivaldi to me).
the reason why i switched away from vivaldi and back to firefox after ~2 years of straight usage was that vivaldi had a weird performance bug for me where if i had too many tabs open for too many days in a row (laptop, no shutdown), it would randomly start freezing and iād have to restart it. but when it was running on a fresh start, it was amazing. also the more ethical choice of using a non-chromium browser was part of the reason
yeah I switched to Vivaldi from Firefox after a few years. was just sick of the incompatibility issues
Well reading this had the opposite effect than intended. Now i just hate the author
Yup, half of it is just "I don't like this person, so no one should use anything they have anything to do with".
The points about the browser itself are clearly just afterthoughts.
Stop using it with honey mustard sauce! Stop using it with tangy sweet and sour sauce! Stop eating the new fiesta Brave salad! Stop enjoying Brave on the patio, in the car, or on the boat... wherever good times are had!
šµ Pop a poppler in your mouth
When you come to Fishy Joe's
What they're made of is a mystery
Where they come from no one knows šµ
These are pretty unconvincing reasons to tell people to stop using brave...
Stop respawning this post again and again. Seriously.
Every so much time someone wakes up and decides to bash Brave, which is fair, but they always have leave out all the nuance
I use Brave as a second browser (mainly to separate different activities) and did not have any issues with it apart from dragging tabs between monitors (it creates an additional empty tab sometimes when doing this). Turned off all unnecessary stuff right when I first launched it and that's it. No bloat, no issues, just works. Didn't know about this CEO controversy but seeing as it was a long time ago, don't think it's a valid reason to not use Brave. And both logo and name are cool.
It's a solid option which we don't really have a lot of in open source spaceI mean, there's simply just Firefox. Which is apparently not the basis for Brave. It does sound like Brave collects data so it still seems shady.
Edit: could have sworn brave was built on Firefox. It's not. It's chromium. Which in my opinion counts against it as I'd rather avoid a monopoly considering how much control Google has over chromium and the inherent biases Google has.
I use it for streaming because the ad block works on spotify and YouTube. I could never get spotify working on Firefox consistently.
Same here.
I used to but it got bloated to hell and back.
Genuine question: I use brave currently. I really heavily on multiple profiles (work, side-business, personal) that are easy to switch between or have active all at the same time in separate windows.
I tried firefox, but in my experience, the method for changing āprofilesā was unintuitive and cumbersome. Was I just doing it wrong, or does Firefox not have that same kind of feature?
I really wanna use Firefox, but thatās a deal-breaker.
Maybe multi account containers for Firefox could work for you? I find it very useful.
Interesting! Iāll give it a whirl.
There are a few ways! I have separate Firefox profiles for everything.
The least effort way is to visit about:profiles, then you get a list of them all and can add/remove them. I have it bookmarked or pinned as a tab in all of my different profiles.
Second, but takes more effort is you can make desktop or start menu shortcuts to the profiles. In short (on windows at least) you copy the Firefox shortcut, edit it, then add -p "Profile Name". There might be more to it? Maybe good to Google this one for a better description. But I literally have a start menu shortcut for all like 7 of mine, then it's just like launching a different application.
Or have a shortcut that has something like this as its target:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" --ProfileManager --allow-downgrade -no-remote
This just opens the profile manager every time. The only caveat is that you have to click "launch" every time as there's no timeout. But I also do have an autohotkey script that does the timeout for me, pressing "enter" after 30s.
Plus Firefox has the same problem that Chrome does. And that problem is the shit ton of ads that pop up every goddamn place.
I only use brave for iOS because it is the best there is
FYI every browser on iOS has to use webkit under the hood as per crapple's diktat, it's just a fork of safari like PC brave is a fork of chromium, eve Firefox on iOS uses webkit AFAIK
Itās the only one that blocks ads everywhere though
qutebrowser ftw
I use Firefox + Brave Search.
You should start using LibreY. It's a fork of LibreX, but it's actually maintained.
I do noticed that instances get ratelimited a lot, leading to empty search results, which sucks
Make me
i'll give you a cookie. not the shitty browser kind either: a full fledged double fudge. the clock is ticking
Honestly, I only use it for when a site will not work in FFX-based browsers
If your going to use a chromium browser brave isn't the worst choice
All I read is cryptocurrency hating.
Do they do anything that's bad for my privacy?
Brave is a better choice than Google Chrome / Opera / Edge by miles.
Still, the only ethical choice is Firefox.
It's chromium with a different hat. If you trust chromium, you can probably trust this as easily.
Common folks you are supposed to use a Computer only to assist at your job.
https://ulaa.com/ - I do trust Zoho.
What a shitty article. Firefox should use mirror.
You should always have three browsers, imho. I use Firefox, Tor, and Brave as my three. Firefox's addon ecosystem is great, and I can use it easily on all the computers I touch. Brave helps me when I need "Chrome" for something to work, but the browser is fairly slick imho, plus exists as a financially independent competitor to Chrome, unlike Firefox. Lastly, Tor is for when using Tor through Brave or using it through transparent proxy isn't enough, and I am worrying about fingerprinting as well.
I have added Mullvad browser to the mix. It's pretty good.
Mullvad has a browser? I'll check that out, thanks
The author of the article has some personal issues it seems, article is more of a rant. I like brave as an alternative browser.
Who cares, it's a browser...use whatever you like.
Who cares, it's a bike lock... Use whatever you like.
Bottom line is it is a good browser and faster than most if not all the others I have tried. Certainly faster than Firefox and Mullvad. If you don't like the add's turn them off. If you dont like the wallet and other stuff, dont use them. It is easy to ignore that stuff. Nothing in that article makes me want to stop using it.
I dunno, automatically modifying user-entered URLs to add an affiliate link sounds pretty awful...
You're about to make a lot of enemies š
Last time someone posted this stupid fucking article up on a different tech lemmy I got into it with some single brain cells morons.
It's open source tech. You could fork the entire thing if you didn't like the CEO. Who cares.
Rehashed article, reposted on Lemmy. How about people stop telling others what browser to use and not to use?
Can't you elaborate?
Can't you read the article?
The article don't need a post here to be read
I disagree with the article. It appears to make two points, both don't convice me.
The first one is about a political donation made by the founder 15 years ago to the tune of 1000 USD. It was against gay marriage. While I somewhat support gay marriage, I find it totally acceptable to be opposed to it. It depends on what marriage means, and people don't agree on that. For some people it just means a strong bond, stronger than a normal relationship. With this definition, gay marriage isn't an issue.
But to other people marriage is an envelope that's supposed to foster reproduction and family building. With this definition gay marriage isn't exactly straightforward. Neither should it be for people with fertility problems and women over 50 in general. Are convervatives also against that? I guess they should. Whatever. I started off thinking I could defend the stance, now i don't think i did. Either way, ditch a browser over this nonsense?
And if Tim Berners Lee spews some BS, will you stop using the Internet? Or if your country elects a stupid president, will you boycott the country and leave temporatily?
The other issue is what Brave does with ads. While I agree it is imperfect, I think in general the approach is among the better ones around.
Wow, this is some real homophobic bullshit.
I'm pro gay marriage, and merely attempted to reconstruct the opposing logic, and apparently failed halfway through.
Now, whats homophobic about this? The fact that in general to people of the same sex won't reproduce? That seems about as outrageous as the thought that obesity is a medical condition.
At the time, same sex couples already had the right to marry in California. He donated money to take that right away from them. Would your stance be the same if he donated money to remove civil rights protections for racial minorities?
For a moment I though I was on Twitter
Mozilla wants to censor and cancel people, harder. And Google is the king of censorship.
I'm going to stick with Brave.
Haters gonna hate. Make FF great again and people will start coming back. Seethe more, and more people will switch to Brave if they haven't yet.
hahahahahhaHAHHAHahahahaha.
more like a good reason to START using Brave. it melts snowflakes.
Why?
from the article...
Ultimately, Brave Browser is the apparatus of an advertising company, a bloated and complicated experience for the average user, and the pet project of the person kicked out of Mozilla for continuing to defend harmful political donations. If you want a privacy-focused web browser, use Firefox or Vivaldi. If you want to support your favorite content creators and publishers, turn on advertisements or support them through the methods they already support (Patreon, Ko-Fi, and so on). Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.
I don't use brave and I am not interested in using it, so YMMV.
The author didnāt talk about hour Brave is the most private and fastest browser. Those are glaring omissions.
Source?
True. Also, folks with cancer tend to lose weight, so cancer needs to be discussed as a practical weight loss solution.
/s, for anyone who can't tell I'm being an asshole.