Why I recommend against Brave.
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i found one called waterfox that is a nice little firefox fork ive been using. super chill.
I've been loving it.
Might give this a crack. Been waiting on Ladybird to come to PC.
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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?
Why I recommend against pushing people from Brave:
Most people are still trapped in an ecosystem owned by either Microsoft, Google or Apple. We're yet to see a perfect web browser for everyone, but in the meantime we choose one, maybe two or three if we feel a bit more picky for each task, and use them to the best of our capacity. Making anyone feel guilty and ashamed for choices like this, when the best options are few, relative, and often come at a cost, is just useless.
I suggest reading the settings guides available at privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ or checking the browser comparison at eylenburg.github.io/browser_comparison.htm to know the details that anyone who actually wants a better browsing experience cares about. Better to lend a hand than push around.
If whoever reads this still can't get over it and needs to play a blame game with someone about why everyone should boycott Mozilla, Brave, Proton and other privacy focused FOSS companies because of what someone said, did or thought, please at least find a decent fork, toss a coin to it's devs, share their work and help others benefit from it.
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If you want to block youtube ads, I think it is really the only option as of now. Adguard can be downloaded on the app store and it does a mediocre job blocking ads, but the placeholder space for them remains and it straight up fails to block some for me. I am stuck with brave for now until something better comes along.
Do you use the paid version of Adguard?
For me on iOS it's almost as good as uBO on Firefox.
No blank spaces where ads go, support for every filterlist I want, especially nice for blocking cookie notices. -
Does anyone have a recommendation for a browser to use on my iPhone other than Brave? I tried Firefox first, but evidently I can’t install extensions for ad blocking due to iPhone restrictions, so I’m using Brave on just this one device.
But you can install Adblock extensions (but only in Safari)!
The best by far is Adguard. -
Do you use the paid version of Adguard?
For me on iOS it's almost as good as uBO on Firefox.
No blank spaces where ads go, support for every filterlist I want, especially nice for blocking cookie notices.Interesting. I have never paid for an adblock before, but it’s good to know there’s a backup. It seems a bit wild to pay for an adblock when free and open sourced solutions exist I guess…
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The CEO of brave is a homophobic bigot if that helps push anyone over the edge for changing their browser. It was the last straw for me.
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Interesting. I have never paid for an adblock before, but it’s good to know there’s a backup. It seems a bit wild to pay for an adblock when free and open sourced solutions exist I guess…
This one is open source.
Adguard is an massive contributor in the adblock scene.
Many of their products are free (Adguard Home, DNS, etc.). Even this one has a free version. They want to make money as a company and on iOS you gotta pay the Apple tax. -
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.
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So it’s ok to buy a Tesla nowadays in your opinion? Genuinely curious.
Yes, if it's the vehicle that fits your needs the best. Elon doesn't need your money, and with Tesla getting roasted in the media, you can probably pick up a good deal.
That said, I wouldn't buy a Tesla for other reasons, such as:
- poor manufacturing quality
- poor reliability (the Model 3 is the "best" and it's just average)
- poor repairability
I do boycott certain products though, first among them is Wal-Mart, but that's because I find Wal-Mart to be anti-competitive (drives smaller stores out of business) and they contribute to poor working conditions either directly (i.e. their own products) or indirectly (i.e. forcing suppliers to cut costs). I've been boycotting them for ~20 years, and honestly haven't bothered checking if they've improved. I also try to avoid buying from Amazon for similar reasons.
Maybe Tesla is similar to those, idk. I personally don't buy Musk's products because I find them lacking, and I haven't needed any more reasons to avoid his products than that.
I literally don't care about the political views of the CEO/owner of a company. I dislike Chik-Fil-A's founder, for example, but I like the food there and the workers seem to be treated well, so I shop there. I especially like that they're closed on Sundays, which guarantees workers get at least one day off. Whether some idiot gets rich from a fraction of the money I spend on a certain product doesn't bother me, I mostly care that the business is run well and the product is good.
I appreciate your perspective, and I agree that we should probably be more concerned with how the company functions than the personal character of the CEO .
Sam Walton was a hardworking, amiable, humble man by all accounts. And even when he was alive Walmart the company was cutting throats.
At the same time, if a CEO deeply ingrains himself in the political process, I can probably take a pass on his products even if they are marginally better. So these days Musk is doing so much damage to the functioning of the US government that even if Teslas were good I wouldn't buy one.
The Chikfila guy on the other hand was just donating to a few discriminatory "Christian" charities last I checked but stopped trying to change policy, so...as fast food shops go it's actually not too bad even if I don't prefer to eat there.
Starbucks...evil CEO, but preemptively boycotting before the organized shops strike doesn't help the workers.
Brave...has had too many fuckups for my taste. On the rare occasion that I need a privacy focused Chromium-based browser I just use Chromium with uBlock Origin for the one website I need to visit.
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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?
It seems to me that nothing in life is free, including browsers. Yeah, free software exists, and that works fine for many kinds of software, but not browsers. Browsers are a living thing, they have to change constantly to adapt to the changing environment. Maintaining a browser takes effort, to an extent that far exceeds that of other programs, word processing, games, image editing, etc. A browser is a primary attack surface for all manner of malware and exploits. It's web facing and it executes code provided by external sources. That last sentence should give you chills.
So all that is to say, that it is very much non trivial to maintain a browser. So it only stands to reason that maintaining it consistently won't actually happen without some amount of compensation.
So how do you pay for a browser? Well everyone seems to agree, with ads. This method is apparently quite viable as a business. But I probably don't have to tell you that there are a bunch of problematic aspects to it. User data collection (and resale) is probably top on the list of problems. It's a pretty serious breach of privacy, I hope I didn't have to convince anyone of that.
To get to my point, Brave is the only browser I know of attempting to use a different model to support their project. They're trying to allow people to just pay for the web themselves, rather than let advertisers pay for the web while users give up all their data. It may not be a perfect implementation, but from where I'm standing I don't see anyone else even trying...
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tldr:
- CEO was forcefully ousted from Firefox for anti-LGBTQ views and donations.
- Replaced existing ads on sites with Brave's own "private" ads.
- Collected crypto on behalf of others without their knowledge or consent
- Injected referral links into crypto websites to steal crypto revenue
- Put ads in the new page tab
- Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS
- Doesn't disclose the ID of their search engine crawler via useragent
- Removed "strict" fingerprinting protection
- CEO is generally a right-wing dick.
i notice they are all past tense save the last 3
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It seems to me that nothing in life is free, including browsers. Yeah, free software exists, and that works fine for many kinds of software, but not browsers. Browsers are a living thing, they have to change constantly to adapt to the changing environment. Maintaining a browser takes effort, to an extent that far exceeds that of other programs, word processing, games, image editing, etc. A browser is a primary attack surface for all manner of malware and exploits. It's web facing and it executes code provided by external sources. That last sentence should give you chills.
So all that is to say, that it is very much non trivial to maintain a browser. So it only stands to reason that maintaining it consistently won't actually happen without some amount of compensation.
So how do you pay for a browser? Well everyone seems to agree, with ads. This method is apparently quite viable as a business. But I probably don't have to tell you that there are a bunch of problematic aspects to it. User data collection (and resale) is probably top on the list of problems. It's a pretty serious breach of privacy, I hope I didn't have to convince anyone of that.
To get to my point, Brave is the only browser I know of attempting to use a different model to support their project. They're trying to allow people to just pay for the web themselves, rather than let advertisers pay for the web while users give up all their data. It may not be a perfect implementation, but from where I'm standing I don't see anyone else even trying...
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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i notice they are all past tense save the last 3
This is like saying "I see he was murderer until he got caught". No shit Sherlock some of those are past tense, because he got caught. If you want to go ahead and get exploited by a dickhead and his future pending scams go ahead.
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and apparently I end up supporting the right wing all the time because I'm a dunce" is apparently how it works these days.
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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.
That's a really concise and thoughtless way to excuse Google, Microsoft and Apple for monetizing spying on every person on earth for profit.
And yes, Linux distros have a business model. I'm happy that distros found a business model through offering official support to corporations, it makes it truly free to the rest of us. It also helps that their competition is very expensive. Will that model work for a browser? What do you think?
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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.
Holy copium batman, imagine excusing malware and checks notes literally aiding in denying rights to LGBTQ+ people.
Let me guess, you pretend to be centrist by day, and you wear
By night?
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I hear Vivaldi is pretty good too
I used Vivaldi for a while. It's still Chromium, so I would recommend against it. There's too many good Firefox options to use anything Chromium.
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This is like saying "I see he was murderer until he got caught". No shit Sherlock some of those are past tense, because he got caught. If you want to go ahead and get exploited by a dickhead and his future pending scams go ahead.
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and apparently I end up supporting the right wing all the time because I'm a dunce" is apparently how it works these days.
well no you're accusing all the contributors of brave of being a murderer
they stopped murdering a long time ago
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tldr:
- CEO was forcefully ousted from Firefox for anti-LGBTQ views and donations.
- Replaced existing ads on sites with Brave's own "private" ads.
- Collected crypto on behalf of others without their knowledge or consent
- Injected referral links into crypto websites to steal crypto revenue
- Put ads in the new page tab
- Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS
- Doesn't disclose the ID of their search engine crawler via useragent
- Removed "strict" fingerprinting protection
- CEO is generally a right-wing dick.
Those are good reasons to ditch a product. Yet, at the same time, inside the Apple ecosystem this is the only browser that allows cross platform watching of yt without any ads, therefore suffocating Google and the fat cat MKBHD influencers from income.
So it’s like an evil to tame another evil to me atm.
Of course the best path forward would be to ditch both Brave and yt and then just get Nebula/patreon or something for serious content browsing.
I’m curious though: if I just use Brace only with a few yt tabs open and never open the new empty tab or visit another site, does Brave get any revenue from me?
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It seems to me that nothing in life is free, including browsers. Yeah, free software exists, and that works fine for many kinds of software, but not browsers. Browsers are a living thing, they have to change constantly to adapt to the changing environment. Maintaining a browser takes effort, to an extent that far exceeds that of other programs, word processing, games, image editing, etc. A browser is a primary attack surface for all manner of malware and exploits. It's web facing and it executes code provided by external sources. That last sentence should give you chills.
So all that is to say, that it is very much non trivial to maintain a browser. So it only stands to reason that maintaining it consistently won't actually happen without some amount of compensation.
So how do you pay for a browser? Well everyone seems to agree, with ads. This method is apparently quite viable as a business. But I probably don't have to tell you that there are a bunch of problematic aspects to it. User data collection (and resale) is probably top on the list of problems. It's a pretty serious breach of privacy, I hope I didn't have to convince anyone of that.
To get to my point, Brave is the only browser I know of attempting to use a different model to support their project. They're trying to allow people to just pay for the web themselves, rather than let advertisers pay for the web while users give up all their data. It may not be a perfect implementation, but from where I'm standing I don't see anyone else even trying...
See guys, I know people didn't believe me when I said there are people who push for and encourage for projects to be corporatized instead of community run but here is one of them. These types of garbage arguments always bring up the idea of cybersecurity but always neglect to mention one of the biggest security and privacy threats to the corporate governed model, the corporation itself. Especially once enshittification really sets in.
And before you vomit some horrible misrepresenting argument reminiscent of Dave Plumber's speech against backdoors in Windows, you know damn well that when I say the company itself is a privacy and security threat to the project that I'm talking about deliberate attempts by the company to make money off the project through tracking, ads, crypto mining, and any other number of shady shit. You know, things that are officially sanctioned.
