I use it because it has a built in adblocker, and well it just works.
There is some crypto bullfuck and AI shit you can easily opt out off, and some talk about some CEO making homophobic comments.
@cannedtuna@lemmy.world is the author of everything that follows:
This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t want to however, here is a summary of the key points:
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- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
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- Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.
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- Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
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2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
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- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
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- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
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- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
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- Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.
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2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
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- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
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- Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
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- The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
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- Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.
Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.
Thanks for the mention, but I just summarized the article.
Link to original article by Luca Bramè
Thanks. The original post where I saved your comment has now been deleted, so I only have that comment for reference.
Oh no kidding? Wonder why the post was deleted
You forgot
- 1995 : Brendan Eich creates JavaScript over two weeks at netscape, ruining the internet forever by getting there first with a shoddy piece of shit language instead of something sensical.
Later, that same piece of shit language will be used as an easy and quick way to develop applications running in neutered Chromium instances, that lead to your mouse driver software needing 500+MB of RAM all the time. At least it’s portable, when the developers actually decide to export to Linux, and not just Windows and Mac (looking at you, Logitech!), and at worst have regular OS checks in the code just in case someone decides to take the code out of the Chromium instance.
Been pointing out Brave’s scammy behavior for years
Bookmarking this nice writeup TY
It’s a crypto scam wrapped in a protection racket, built by an incompetent misogynist asshole on a base that supports Google’s hegemony over web standards.
Ahh yes. Brave the bloated browser with very dodgy behaviour. You get a chrome fork with crypto shit, leaky VPN, ridiculously bad search, and a full blown ad engine that hijacks your notifications and tracks you in an ‘anonymized’ way. FUCK.THAT.SHIT.
Not to be antagonistic, but
- chrome fork - much of the browser world is this
- crypto shit - opt in not mandatory
- leaky VPN - opt in not mandatory
- bad search - opt in not mandatory
- ad engine - opt in not mandatory
So, basically, it’s a chrome fork, and some people prefer chrome based browsers, so it’s purely preference?
You know what’s better than that?
The browser world that’s not a chrome fork, and not full of crypto and AI SHIT, and without a bigoted CEO
Waterfox, Librewolf, Ironfox, Fennec, Ladybird, etc
Is ladybird even out? I saw something about it but I thought looking it up got me to something about it being set for some release this next year?
Still in very early alpha
Suggesting “very early alpha” software as a viable alternative is part of the problem.
Good news, all the rest aren’t, they’ve been around for aeons
True!
The point is, that’s a preference, not an innate ‘better,’ I generally use librewolf myself, but when the list of ‘problems’ with the browser is a set of optional things that you specifically have to turn on to experience, it’s kind of like saying pizza is bad because you don’t like pineapple, banana peppers, black olives, and chile flakes.
It’s more akin to saying Hitler Pizza is bad because it was baked by Hitler, tbh
That’s not how pizza quality works. You wouldn’t eat a pizza with literal shit all over it and call it good because it was made by a saint.
Metaphor my dude. Metaphor
Not a good metaphor, though.
The main issues a lot of the FF purists on this site take with Brave is-
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its a chrome fork, which is a hard stop for them, and thats a good enough reason alone to avoid a product given how anti-corporate and anti-google the residents of this site are.
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the systems in the opt-in list are still part of the application. There is an anxiety that the developer may decide at a future time that those features are not opt-in/enabled by default after an update.
So the natural response is to advocate for browsers that simply do not have those features and are open-source so that users can verify rather than trust the dev team to not put features like that in the product. Or rigoursly vet every update installed on your system to prevent that stuff from being installrd in an update, which is not viable for most people… (Run apt update/upgrade and manually approve every package change, we will see you in a few days).
Thank you for at least giving a sensible response rather than irrational anger.
Still seems odd to say software is bad for having features one doesn’t use rather than not having features one does want, but… *shrug*
Also the homophobic antivaxxer CEO, don’t forget that
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For me it boils down to it pretending to be different from Chrome while using the same rendering engine, thus keeping more power at Google.
As someone who lived through the time when IE was dominant and seeing the web stagnate until Mozilla released Firefox and began competing with new features and better speed, I never want to go back to a world with just one main rendering engine, we are sadly there again with Blink, but I am not going to support it.
I don’t think we’re there, thanks to ios.
There is some crypto bullfuck and AI shit you can easily opt out off, and some talk about some CEO making homophobic comments.
I feel like you know the reasons already then.
If having to install an adblocker is the biggest hurdle that means you are willing to put up with the rest of the BS, that’s your choice.
I’d rather take 40 seconds to install a adblocker on a different browser and not support shit CEOs or software that comes loaded with crypto AI shit, but that’s just me.
the ceo is the creator of javascript, some alone would say thats a big enough sin, but the man has also donated money to anti lgbtq bills before, so more than just offhand comments.
Also, in addition to what others said, Brave has been involved in some shady stuff like ad substitution/injection. See:
https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Similarly enough, Brendan Eich’s feed also contains some worrying content, in my opinion. Ranging from, again, retweeting right-wing activists, to weird Republican propaganda. He claims to be independent and not a Republican, but this does not make me any less worried about the type of ideas he follows.
But yeah, if you are a big fan of AI and crypto, and are okay with having advertisements in the user interface out of the box, are okay with past attempts to steal money from websites and collect donations towards people who wouldn’t necessarily even receive it, plus you can put up with occasional privacy mistakes… use Brave!
Besides all the reasons everyone else has already provided in this thread, a browser containing as you so colourfully put it “crypto bullfuck and AI shit” isn’t something I want to use.
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FYI: I know this is not “built in” but on Firefox it is super easy to install an AdBlocker, like its about 6 seconds with a decent internet connection and precise mouse movements. Have to opt out of AI shit as well though.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin
Waterfox is a fork of Firefox that isn’t playing with the AI shit.
Personally, IronFox on phones and LibreWolf on desktops.
In believe both are more hardened FF forks.
It’s chromium, which means Google is probably tracking you though it, like they have been caught doing before.
Why use Brave when you can use Helium or Cromite?
Helium has full (not lite) ublock origin built in, and no junk. That’s the gold standard of Adblock.
Cromite has rather obsessive antifingerprinting, making it extremely difficult to track you compared to Brave.
Basically, people use Brave because it’s got SEO; it’s the first result when people type in “Adblock browser” unfortunately.
I used Cromite for a long time. Then one update the author added a 60 Hz refresh rate cap to help with avoiding fingerprinting with no way to turn it off. It now has an option, but for about a month it didn’t; the author fought it. The janky scrolling was annoying enough to make me stop using Cromite (and I moved to Brave, ironically). I’d switch back but I’m lazy.
Yeah, Cromite is definitely a “second browser” to keep around for shopping and such, not my primary one. Its opinionated development is exactly why is so good in that niche, but it also breaks a few sites and features.
In that spirit… why only use only one browser? You can keep Brave installed.
They used to do affiliate link injections
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Just use Firefox or Floorp with Ublock Origin. No crypto bullshit to be had.
I tried floorp a while ago, but it felt a bit too clumsy and unstable. Has it gotten any better?
I haven’t had any problems with it. If you’re on Linux, there’s a fork of it called Firedragon. It’s a bit more stripped down with additional patches for privacy and security.
It’s chromium based, I’d rater a more open web, so I use FF
