As far as I know, you are correct. My main browser is Librewolf and search engine is DDG. But I still use Brave when I rarely need a chromium browser or alternate search engine and he gains nothing from that.
Tl;dr Brave’s ceo (founder?) has donated to legislation to abolish gay marriage in California.
Aight, found this. Apparently the twat donated 1000 dollars to some proposal in California that would ban gay marriage.
Brave adds referral links to cryptocurrency urls.
You know? Honestly, I don't care about that. They're free and open source. They have to make SOME money somehow. Referrals cost the seller rather than the customer. While this does count as an advertisement, it is still very low profile. So uk....I don't really mind that.
And I agree with you, if they were simply adding their referral link when you did not include one, nbd as long as that is going to support the free browser development. But if they were actually replacing your referral link with their own, that is some Mr. Burns shit for sure.
As a piece of software, nothing. It’s an open source browser, and has an added bonus of having many privacy settings on by default. Not even firefox can say the same, it comes with telemetry, pocket and whatnot out of the box.
But there are some fair criticisms about the company and its administration. For example, there was an incident years ago when you signed on a crypto exchange, it would swap the sign on link for their own referral link. They claimed this was an error and quickly patched it, but I don’t buy it.
You’ll quickly notice that a lot of people on lemmy passionately hate brave. So expect a strong bias and, as a result, truths but overblown, half truths and misinformation. Don’t ignore what they say but double check them.
DDG is so bad in results though it makes not using a search engine seem like a solid alternative. I remember that research from a few months ago where they compared Google, Bing and DDG to do statistical analysis of if and how much Google's search results have been getting worse in recent years.
Result:
Google did get worse.
However, Bing and DDG got worser, faster.
The real conclusion was that SEO spam has found ways to optimize that is no longer easy to exclude for search providers. Hence all search is getting shit pretty quickly.
A lot of people are complaining about Kagi using Brave as a backend but the alternatives aren't much better. Both Google and Microsoft are BDS for example.