Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser
Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article is written by a dickhead who doesn't know how to write objectively.
The fact that the CEO is a bigot antigay matters to me but it's not the most important thing and someone else might not give a fuck.
TL;DR what you need to know: Brave is an overrated shit full of bloat and cryptoshit and firefox is the least worst.
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 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.
Long time Brave user here. This made me uninstall Brave and move to Firefox. Thank you !
"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.
In my experience, the more a company brands their product presumptuously, the more you should avoid it. At the very least, it will be skewed by consumers so shallow that they only decided to use it because of it, and a significant portion of the demands on it will part from their ignorance.
Things wrong with Brave: #1- It isn't Firefox/a Firefox derivative
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
- "brainwashed" https://www.news18.com/buzz/elon-musk-causes-uproar-with-anti-lgbtq-anti-vax-meme-insults-random-twitter-user-6714733.html
- https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-twitter-makes-millions-off-anti-lgbt-groomer-tweets-report
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitter-pronoun-rule-invites-bullying-lgbtq-groups-say-rcna87336
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-triples-down-on-making-twitter-terrible-for-trans-people/
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
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.
I just deleted it on my phone. All roads lead back to Firefox.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I don't use Brave because they screwed me (banned my Brave Creators without them providing a reason) and I think I would disagree with their CEO on many points - including same sex marriage - but if I did this with every piece of software I use, then I wouldn't be able to use a computer at all. Even if you go all open source, you'll quickly find wild and weird people involved with these projects...
Because it is chromium based, it also does nothing to discourage sites from only supporting chromium based browsers.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
Wtf is spacebar.news. where do you find sites like this?
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.
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..
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.
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!!!
Today I learned that people take it VERY PERSONALLY when you criticize their chosen browser. 😂
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.
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).
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 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.
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
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
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.
Brave is great and i will continue to use it.
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.
I just left the following comment on the article:
So, just to recap, don't use Brave Browser because:
Its CEO & a shareholder hold right-wing political views
It pays users (who opt-in) crypto (whereas other browsers pay users nothing)
It has an ad model (that you neglect to mention also pays users crypto for viewing ads)
It once allowed users with (pre-existing) FTX accounts to link them via a widget
It partners with Gemini (to allow users to offload/exchange the BAT they've earned, not mentioned)
Gemini has an SEC case (part of the SECs crypto witch hunt which includes a failed case vs XRP)
Crypto(dot)com faced layoffs during a bear market
And the first ever Web3 gaming expo had low attendance?
Your arguments are truly weak. I don't even use Brave as my main Browser, but I'll likely be using it more often now literally because this article annoyed me that much. Also FWIW I'm a liberal and member of the LGBTQ+ community, I detest that Eich would donate to prop 8 but I also respect that we live in a country where people will have vast political differences and still be able to see past those things and interact without demonizing and trying to cancel each other.
As for that ad replacement model they abandoned, I can kinda see what the thinking was there: The browser is going to block site's ads regardless, and the browser is going to show its own ads to users who opt into earning BAT for viewing ads regardless. So why not combine those things and replace site's ads with Brave's ads? I can see how they would have been high fiving in the office thinking that was a win/win until the problems were loudly and angrily pointed out to them by others.
In any event Brave serves a niche market segment that no one else is focusing on at the moment, problematic politics of some executives aside, that's a thing that'll have legs so long as no competition (with perhaps better exec political leanings) rises to challenge them.
Just my 2 pesos, don't kill me.
duckduckgo
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.
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.
Permanently Deleted
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.
-
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/
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.
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?
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.)