I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I'd say the answer is a very clear no.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don't mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
It still uses chromium and it's susceptible to the Google's Web integrity protocols. An website using the new protocols can refuse to load on your browser if you don't accept the ads. Why is it so difficult to comprehend?
Using a fork of Chromium is still using Chromium, and still helping Google's dominance in the browser market. Using forks of Chromium is still supporting Google in the same way using forks of Firefox is still supporting Mozilla.
That's not correct. Chromium is an entirely different browser. It has a logo that looks like the Chrome logo but gray.
and still helping Google's dominance in the browser market
When there becomes a suitable alternative that I can use for daily tasks and still preserves privacy, I'll recommend that one.
Currently I use 1 of 5 different browsers, depending on the task. I can't really recommend other people do the same. So the one is typically recommend is Brave because it's the only out-of-the-box privacy-preserving browser that works with virtually any webpage.
Literally any Firefox fork is a suitable alternative that can be daily driven. As for out-of-the-box function I don't see that as a factor in a community all about privacy, changing settings is pretty much the norm.
Edit: Also I said using a fork of Chromium is still using Chromium, not Chrome.
Literally any Firefox fork is a suitable alternative that can be daily driven
That's simply incorrect. I've used a few and many of them don't load webpages properly. We can argue about who's to blame for that but at the end of the day they don't work the way any Chromium browsers would.
That would run the risk of the user agent displaying as chromium. So you would still need to change the user agent, which I’m not sure why you wouldn’t do that to begin with
I'm not saying they don't exist, just that I have never personally experienced them. The only issues I've ever really experienced are with DRM-ridden websites which you should avoid using anyway.