Why I recommend against Brave.
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ultimately they're still chromium and they still contribute to chrome's dominance.
Eh, I think that's a stretch. Right now, Lemmy is going nuclear on Firefox. Should I also stop using Librewolf, too, because ultimately, it contributes to Firefox? Chromium is solid and I think it's better to show what type of chromium we want instead of outright boycotting the entire open source project.
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ultimately they're still chromium and they still contribute to chrome's dominance.
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CEO was forcefully ousted from Firefox for anti-LGBTQ views and donations.
I think this is making mountains out of molehills. My understanding is that he had a very good working relationship w/ LGBTQ people in the org, and he had been working for many years at Mozilla before this point. The issue was his private donations to an anti-same sex marriage initiative. He didn't push for any company policy change, didn't advertise the donation, and didn't use company funds (used personal funds), so it really shouldn't be anyone's business.
I personally disagree with his political views, but I think he was a fantastic candidate for CEO of Mozilla. How he votes or spends his personal money shouldn't be relevant at all.
Replaced existing ads on sites with Brave’s own “private” ads.
I like this idea in principle, but not in implementation. Brave should have worked with major websites to share revenue, but what Brave actually did was remove website ads and insert its own, forcing websites to go claim BAT to get any of that revenue back.
My preference here is to not use a cryptocurrency and instead have users pay in their local currency into a bucket to not see ads (and that's shared w/ the website), and that should be in collaboration w/ website owners.
Collected crypto on behalf of others without their knowledge or consent
This is a big nothing-burger.
Basically, Brave had a way to donate to a creator that wasn't affiliated with the creator. The way it works is you could donate (using BAT), and once it got to $100 worth, Brave would reach out to the creator to give them the money. They adjusted the wording to make it clear they weren't affiliated with the creator in any way.
Injected referral links into crypto websites to steal crypto revenue
Yeah, this is totally wrong, and they reversed course immediately.
Put ads in the new page tab
Not a fan, but at least you can opt-out.
Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS
Mistakes happen. If you truly need the anonymity, you would have multiple layers of defense (i.e. change your default DNS server) and probably not use something like Brave anyway (Tor Browser is the gold standard here).
Doesn’t disclose the ID of their search engine crawler via useragent
Also a bad move, though I am sympathetic to their reasoning here: they just don't have the resources to get permission from everyone. Search has a huge barrier to entry, and I'm in favor of more competition to Google and Microsoft here.
Removed “strict” fingerprinting protection
This was for better UX, since it broke sites. Not a fan of removing this, they should have instead had a big warning when enabling this (e.g. many sites will break if you enable this).
CEO is generally a right-wing dick.
Fair, but that should be a separate consideration from whether to use a given product. Using Brave doesn't make you a right-wing dick.
You probably wouldn't like the CEO of any company whose products you like, so basing a decision of what product to use based on that is... dumb.
I personally use Brave as a backup browser, for two reasons:
- it's a chrome-based browser
- it has ad-blocking
My primary browser is something based on Firefox because I value rendering-engine competition. But if I need a chromium-based browser, Brave is my go-to. I disable the crypto nonsense and keep ad-blocking on, and it's generally pretty usable.
It’s tempting to see his donations to prop 8 as just his personal business, but like so many others you’re missing the fact that when your political beliefs are that other humans are actually subhuman and not equals, that goes beyond “personal politics.” Like outright naziism, there should be no safe place for a single ounce of this thinking. If you think it’s akin to liking shrimp more than chicken, you should deeply rethink your own “personal politics.”
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How is LibreWolf niche ?
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Orion all the way
I second this. I simply use the FF compatible extensions and ignore the Chrome side of compatibility. It's been awesome!
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Remember that, by virtue of us being here on Lemmy and talking about all of this, we are also a niche group of people. We don't represent the average person, even if we might be the ones who influence them with our knowledge.
absolutely. people gotta realize when they put themselves in a bubble and not project that experience outwards to everyone else
there's a word for this.. lemme see if i can find it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
The curse of knowledge, also called the curse of expertise[1] or expert's curse, is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person who has specialized knowledge assumes that others share in that knowledge.[2]
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CEO was forcefully ousted from Firefox for anti-LGBTQ views and donations.
I think this is making mountains out of molehills. My understanding is that he had a very good working relationship w/ LGBTQ people in the org, and he had been working for many years at Mozilla before this point. The issue was his private donations to an anti-same sex marriage initiative. He didn't push for any company policy change, didn't advertise the donation, and didn't use company funds (used personal funds), so it really shouldn't be anyone's business.
I personally disagree with his political views, but I think he was a fantastic candidate for CEO of Mozilla. How he votes or spends his personal money shouldn't be relevant at all.
Replaced existing ads on sites with Brave’s own “private” ads.
I like this idea in principle, but not in implementation. Brave should have worked with major websites to share revenue, but what Brave actually did was remove website ads and insert its own, forcing websites to go claim BAT to get any of that revenue back.
My preference here is to not use a cryptocurrency and instead have users pay in their local currency into a bucket to not see ads (and that's shared w/ the website), and that should be in collaboration w/ website owners.
Collected crypto on behalf of others without their knowledge or consent
This is a big nothing-burger.
Basically, Brave had a way to donate to a creator that wasn't affiliated with the creator. The way it works is you could donate (using BAT), and once it got to $100 worth, Brave would reach out to the creator to give them the money. They adjusted the wording to make it clear they weren't affiliated with the creator in any way.
Injected referral links into crypto websites to steal crypto revenue
Yeah, this is totally wrong, and they reversed course immediately.
Put ads in the new page tab
Not a fan, but at least you can opt-out.
Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS
Mistakes happen. If you truly need the anonymity, you would have multiple layers of defense (i.e. change your default DNS server) and probably not use something like Brave anyway (Tor Browser is the gold standard here).
Doesn’t disclose the ID of their search engine crawler via useragent
Also a bad move, though I am sympathetic to their reasoning here: they just don't have the resources to get permission from everyone. Search has a huge barrier to entry, and I'm in favor of more competition to Google and Microsoft here.
Removed “strict” fingerprinting protection
This was for better UX, since it broke sites. Not a fan of removing this, they should have instead had a big warning when enabling this (e.g. many sites will break if you enable this).
CEO is generally a right-wing dick.
Fair, but that should be a separate consideration from whether to use a given product. Using Brave doesn't make you a right-wing dick.
You probably wouldn't like the CEO of any company whose products you like, so basing a decision of what product to use based on that is... dumb.
I personally use Brave as a backup browser, for two reasons:
- it's a chrome-based browser
- it has ad-blocking
My primary browser is something based on Firefox because I value rendering-engine competition. But if I need a chromium-based browser, Brave is my go-to. I disable the crypto nonsense and keep ad-blocking on, and it's generally pretty usable.
My understanding is that he had a very good working relationship w/ LGBTQ people in the org
Then why betray them? He has nothing to gain from funding such a campaign. There is no logical explanation and sure as hell no justification for it.
[...] so it really shouldn’t be anyone’s business.
How he votes or spends his personal money shouldn’t be relevant at all.Oh, shut up. When this asshole funds a campaign that's actively fighting against the rights of millions of people, it absolutely is our damn fucking business.
Yeah, this is totally wrong, and they reversed course immediately.
It's bad enough that they even got the idea, let alone implement and actually ship it. Negative reactions shouldn't be the first deciding factor for reversing such decisions.
Brave should have worked with major websites to share revenue
Not just share, completely give up that revenue. Blocking ads is one thing, but to then also monetise other people's content should not allow Brave to earn even a single cent.
Your proposed solution sounds fine, though.CEO is generally a right-wing dick.
Fair, but that should be a separate consideration from whether to use a given product.
Again, no. Maybe if there weren't any alternatives, but there are plenty.
You probably wouldn’t like the CEO of any company whose products you like,
That's probably true, however, Eich is a different story. Despite not gaining anything from it, neither for his companies nor for himself, he was willing to go out of his way to support a campaign in favour of discriminating millions of people, proactively. This doesn't just make me not like him, it makes me despise him.
Other CEO's typically at least keep quiet about politics, and make me dislike them mainly because of self-interest and their resulting business decisions, which can at least still be somewhat understandable.And let me be clear that I'm not going to jump on people who use Brave for whatever reason. But under no circumstances will I defend those who downplay or justify Brave's, and especially Eich's, actions.
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It is still a privacy reason. You are still contributing to googles plans to dominate and control the internet by using a chromium product.
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Eh, I think that's a stretch. Right now, Lemmy is going nuclear on Firefox. Should I also stop using Librewolf, too, because ultimately, it contributes to Firefox? Chromium is solid and I think it's better to show what type of chromium we want instead of outright boycotting the entire open source project.
Wait, what's wrong with Firefox?
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i notice they are all past tense save the last 3
Theres also a long list of messed up shit over the course of a long time so they're just consistently inventing new shit. Who knows what they're fucking up today that no one has discovered yet?
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It is still a privacy reason. You are still contributing to googles plans to dominate and control the internet by using a chromium product.
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the crypto and the asshole ceo aside, nobody should trust a browser that claims to respect privacy that's based on chromium.
Chromium is much more secure than Firefox, so your privacy depends on your threat model here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html
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Please tell me you have the whole set. I have waited for someone to post this since literally 2018
I do not but now wish I did
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If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?
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Eh, I think that's a stretch. Right now, Lemmy is going nuclear on Firefox. Should I also stop using Librewolf, too, because ultimately, it contributes to Firefox? Chromium is solid and I think it's better to show what type of chromium we want instead of outright boycotting the entire open source project.
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Wait, what's wrong with Firefox?
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That's a long winded way to try to excuse secretly mining crypto, far right misinformation pushing, transgender phobia, and more that Brave does / has done.
I also want to point out an operating system is a huge project to create and maintain, and yet Linux has accomplished this without all the shit Brave has pulled.
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You got me, I guess? But don't tell my POC SO that I've been happily married to for >10 years.
Seriously though, this is the kind of extreme take I'm pushing back on. I strongly disagree with the Lemmy devs' politics, yet here I am on their platform. I've even contributed bug fixes. I strongly disagree with Eich's politics, yet I use Brave as my backup browser. Why? It meets my technical requirements. Firefox is my main browser though.
I'm not a centrist either, whatever that means, but I guess of you average out my extreme takes it could look that way. Conservatives call me socialist, Progressives call me far right, so I guess the middle of that is centrist?
I made the mistake of responding to Lumiluz on a different comment thread. They haven't responded yet, but based on this communication here I will just ignore any reply. It's strange we live in a world where you can be accused of being a KKK member due to unrelated tools one uses to browse the Internet.
