What hasn't been said as explicitly yet: It being Chromium-based means there's tons of implementation details that are bad, which will not be listed in any such comparison table.

For example, the Battery Status web standard was being abused, so Mozilla removed their implementation: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/battery-status-api-being-removed-from-firefox-due-to-privacy-concerns/
Chromium-based browsers continue to be standards-compliant in this regard.

And this is still quite a high-level decision. As a software engineer, I can attest that we make tiny design decisions every single day. I'd much rather have those design decisions made under the helm of a non-profit, with privacy as one of their explicit goals, than under an ad corporation.

And Brave shipping that ad corp implementation with just a few superficial patches + privacy-extensions is what us experts call: Lipstick on a pig.

Looking into privacytests.org, the main developer behind it is someone who contributes to Brave source code. He may not be officially affiliated with the company, but it would be hard to ignore any sort of bias towards Brave.

brave owns that domain, I believe. Of course they are going to rate their browser te best

The product isn't all that bad, but the company behind it have proven they're not trustworthy many times over.

I don't run Brave because Brave runs a crypto scam right in the browser.

I don't care that you can disable it, I don't care that it might be the only way they found to make a buck out of free software: anyone who dabbles in crypto is instantly sketchy. And I don't want to run a piece of software as critical as a browser made by someone who's not 100% trustworthy.

That website is run by an employee of Brave, who rates the privacy of browsers based on their default settings (which Brave tends to perform best in). If browsers prompt the user to select their privacy settings on a first run, he scores them based as if the user had selected the worst privacy options.

If he actually spent a few minutes setting up each browser, as is always recommended within the privacy community, that table will look a lot different. But then Brave wouldn't stand out as much...

For further explanation of any point, please hit me up :)

• It is Chromium based
• It has used dubious methods in the past (replacing links with affiliate links, the whole ad/crypto thing, ...)
• Brave's business model relies on ads (I think)
• [This is a weak point, but at least in the privacy community, Brave isn't super popular. It feels more geared towards the "hyped crypto early adopters". ^[1] It might be "fine" for someone switching from Chrome (which is always a good thing) but going all the way would be a modded Firefox.]

TL;DR For most provacy concious Brave users, Brave is a step in their journey towards more privacy, and not the final destination.

[1] The "dumb AF tech youtubers" you mentioned in another post are typically the Brave hype crowd. This is not meant to discredit Brave; it's just that a share of their users are this way.

So much with anything privacy comes down to trust. Any piece of software's technical ability to keep you private is of course important but when it comes to a very large (in terms of code and use) piece of software, being able to trust the motivations and intent of the people behind it is also very important.

It's now reached the point that I personally don't feel I can trust the person leading the company, or the intent behind the software(s) the company makes.

Brendan Eich is a homophobe and an antivaxxer. It's hard to trust in the common sense of a man who thinks in these ways.

Brave has been caught inserting affiliate links and ads that track and just recently of selling other people's data. Any one of these things, taken in isolation is bad enough but this is now a pretty much established pattern of very questionable behaviour.

I also forsee a time when the browser is going to have to make some concessions to it's Chromium base. I know they've said the change from Manifest v2 to 3 won't affect ad blocking as their Shield won't be an extension but built in and that they'll also carry on supporting v2 but the issue goes beyond merely adblocking and they've been unclear on exactly how and for how long they'll support v2. As long as they're Chromium based browser, they are dependent on Chromium and the whims of Google developers. It's hard to see a good future for Brave.

The man who is CEO is a shitter who gave us the blessing/curse that is JavaScript

They're relying on a cryptocurrency for growth

They use Chromium/Blink

Chromium, Crypto, Trash UI

Brave as a browser is fine for now.

But they’re crypto bros with concerning views and it’s just yet another chromium browser.

We really have an issue with the monoculture of web browsers.

That's just browsers with default settings. Firefox doesn't have a built in ad block, so it will always perform worse in that test. I guess FF + ublock origin + hardened settings (such as arkenfox) would perform like brave, if not better. For example, if you check android browsers, you see that Mull (a hardened fork of Firefox) performs great, even without ublock (that you can install as extension anyway).

Judging by a default browser is also really misleading. Firefox is by far the most private with extensions, no competition.

From the JDLR dept… notice how brave is listed first, and passes every test (except a very few)

This report just looks biased. Even if it is totally legitimate, and many users have pointed out how it isn’t , it looks biased.

It looks like every sales pitch for a product where they list everything their product does and how it’s better than the other things.

I vote librewolf

Just install Librewolf

My big grudge is their method of getting revenue. I'm not fond of ads, but replacing services ads for theirs means diverting revenue stream from creators to the company behind brave.

And how did they do this? Why, man-in-the-middling root certificates...

It's not only stupid, but evil.

Have a gander at the people behind Brave Software. They're all cut from the same silicon wafer as everyone else in the Silicon Valley executive biome. And the (lack of) readiness of the information about who is behind Brave is another tell in itself.

The website is run by an employee of Brave, but if you look past the order, even by their criteria Mullvad is ahead.

Librewolf and Mullvad does the same thing Brave does, and doesn't contribute to Google's monopoly on the web by using chromium.

The author of the site works for Brave. The results need to be taken with a grain of salt. Is is more private than Chrome? Absolutely. Is it the best browser for privacy? Ehhh...

it is not even true that "privacytests.org rate it as the best", if you look close enough, librewolf is best rated, which is an amazing browser BTW.

It’s a free country, you can use whatever you like. Respect yourself and your own intuition :)

The current situation (summer July–Sept 2023) is, you better switch to any browser that is not Chromium-based. The reason is “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI), which seems to mean, basically, Google is trying to DRM-lock the whole Internet to make sure you see their ads and they can track everyone. Freedom-loving users obviously don’t like that.

At the same time Firefox is getting more and more annoying, yet it’s better than Google. A safe bet for a general user might be LibreWolf. Another new option is Mullvad Browser.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology

The owner being a homophobe would be reason enough for me even without the crypto/affiliate link scandals

Librewolf with minimal extensions is the only browser one should use, but I must add that too much of restrictions will break websites. Like not allowing JS

Because its a Google product and is inherently unsafe and insecure.

There is a summary linked here also: https://lemmy.ml/post/4077614

I don't trust browsers that feel the need to advertise themselves

Unless someone wants to disagree with me

All the code is opensource and no one has ever raised a privacy alarm in a merged pull request. There's nothing to fear

People don't like the creator of Brave because he's supposedly anti-trans. He donated to some anti-trans political group iirc.

The browser also has some crypto stuff (web advertisment replacement, block chain based decentralized browser sync), and a lot of people hate crypto these days.

Personally I think it's a good browser, the web needs advertising revenue to function and it's solution to replacing web ads with optional browser ads that still pay the websites you visit seems like a decent solution. I respect the push to use a non-chromium browser, but personally I rely too much on browser tab groups to use anything Firefox based.

I don't use Brave simply because it's too buggy. Half the websites I visit don't load properly.

Follow up question.  I’ve been using ff since probably 20 years or so but for some sites (usually work related) that demands chromium based browser I use brave since I don’t know what the “least bad” chromium browser is. Any insights?

I use Brave as recommendation for my friends still using Chrome, since I tell them it’s built on the same code. Most of them are so scared to leave Google’s toxic ecosystem that they think just installing LibreWolf will get them on a gov watchlist, hell they’re probably right. 🫢

One of the issues in its favor imo is it is the best in terms of obfuscating fingerprints. I can't comment on the other aspects like how it supports itself via private measurement but I would argue its the least bad option if not moderately recommendable. I would still use your own VPN to obscure your IP and anything that needs to be anonymous with other options but as a daily driver, you could do a lot worse.

Does anyone here use Cromite on Windows? If so, how did you "install" it?

Looks scam to me. Tooooo much X on chrome, some even hardly possible.

Do people really not realize Brave is just Firefox and can be set up the same way?

It's fine. Use it if you like.

Recently tried moving from Chrome to Firefox, and found that on some websites, Firefox bogged down like I'd never seen it do on Chrome, to the point of making some sites like Mastodon Advanced Web interface, and Tumblr, unusable, no matter what I did. Downloaded Brave after seeing this post, imported all my settings, and both those above mentioned sites are behaving normally again, so until Google does something to break all chromium bases browsers I think I'll be checking out Brave for a while, really wanted Firefox to work, but it just didn't