You must log in or register to comment.
I prefer Vivaldi - despite letting you install Adblock extensions (sicnce it’s a Chromium browser), I really like how it has a built-in ad-and-tracker-blocker. Seriously!
Not just that, it’s that Brave has this cult-like following for being out-of-the-box, Fisher Price My First Privacy BrowserTM easy to use.
Oh…oh, hey, Apple, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.
*which is also still chrome
Literally just use Firefox for Android with uBlock. People act like this is difficult.
*uBlock Origin
Sorry why are we mad at Meredith?
Brave is fine. But it is more due to my employer tolerating it instead of insisting on Chrome. I really like how you turn the privacy setting up to 11 and make websurfing borderline impossible.
Sadly some of it is that the folks at Brave are very good at burying their bad reputation under marketing
I switched to Vivaldi recently and it’s alright. I’ll say the Brave ad blocking is solid and the android app works better than Firefox mobile.
Yes! Thank you! I mentioned Vivaldi in a different post on the same topic, and almost got eaten alive by rabid GitHub neckbeards. It’s not fully open source, but who gives a fuck? It’s a great browser.
It’s not fully open source, but who gives a fuck? It’s a great browser.
You forget what corner of the internet you’re commenting on lol
I’m old and jaded. Every corner of the internet is doomed.
Firefox mobile fucking hurts!
That’s easy, it’s a chromium browser with built-in ad-blocking that hasn’t been kneecapped by manifest v3.
You mean Ungoogled Chromium? Vanadium? Chromium?
I’ve never been able to successfully compile ungoogled chromium from the git repo.
I’ve only tried twice. But it’s among my greatest failures in life.
Ungoogled Chromium is a thing of beauty. Google should’ve just endorsed it for shits and giggles.
I said what I said. Thanks for listing alternatives, though!
Alright yall, what browsers you using then?
Orion
Librewolf on desktop, Vanadium on mobile.
I’ve been using firefox but I’m probably gonna switch to librewolf because of Mozilla’s ai bullshit. If you don’t mind me asking, what search engine do you use inside?
I use libre wolf with DuckDuckGo but no doubt there’s a myriad of concerns with them too.
I use StartPage. I like the anonymous mode of viewing sites, it lets me circumvent certain blocks a lot of times.
Vanadium on Mobile, Mullvad browser on desktop
Lagrange
I think a lot of people don’t know any of the controversy related to brave and just use it because they know it as the most private chromium browser
I know of the controversies, I just don’t think they’re all that big when you actually examine them.
Homophobia
I’m part of the LGBT community and I just think there are bigger fish to fry. One of the guys involved made a $1k donation to an anti-prop 8 campaign like 15 years ago. That’s it. That’s the controversy. Like, yea it’s shitty, but there was a lot more hate toward the community back then. People have grown and changed their views a lot in the years since. If we boycott every single company or individual who ever did anything even remotely homophobic, no matter their actions since, we’d essentially have to be living in a commune growing and making literally everything ourselves. Btw, this same guy is the one who developed JavaScript and I don’t see even remotely the same level of hate for that, so it really feels like people are just being selectively upset.
Cryptocurrency
It’s opt-in. It asks you once, and then never again. It was developed at a time when crypto was popular and was a feature people wanted. It was seen as a good thing when it first came out. Public opinion on crypto has soured, but plenty of people who wanted it still use the feature on brave. They have no good reason to scrap it. Especially because, again, it’s opt-in only. Don’t like it? Cool, don’t use it. They aren’t pushing it on you. But people hear the word crypto and immediately break out the pitchforks.
Do you even know what the goal of their cryptocurrency was? I think it’s safe to say its failed at this point, but the goal was to completely rework how ads function on the internet. It would have killed the modern advertisement methods where ads are shoved in your face and you get nothing for it. Instead, it would have directly paid you a tiny amount any time you saw an ad, with you being able to choose how many you saw, or even if you saw any at all. Then you’d either be able to either keep the money for yourself, or donate it to websites/content creators of your choice. Take away the crypto part of it, and that’s actually a pretty admirable goal in my book.
Ad affiliate links
Brave’s biggest, actual, controversy is that they replaced some affiliate links with their own. Specifically links to binance.us, which is a crypto market. When it was found, Brave changed their code extremely quickly and claimed it was a bug. Now, companies have often lied through their teeth and claimed malicious actions were a “mistake” or a “bug”, so maybe that is the same case here. But considering it was one site only, it was fixed almost immediately, and when you look at how it was actually replacing links (suggested auto fill in the address bar, pulled from browsing history) I am leaning toward it actually being unintentional.
Conclusion
I think people just like to hate things, and will find any reason to continue to do so as long as their little corner of the internet tells them they should hate it. People most vocal with their complaints rarely take the time to dig into the facts and see if it’s really as bad as they claim; or they fully know it’s not as bad, but never want to let the truth get in the way of a good ol’ fashion, hate-boner, circle-jerk.
Is Brave the best browser? Hahahaha no. It’s still a chromium fork and has been a little too eager to integrate AI in my opinion. But it’s FAR from the worst and is the probably the best privacy focused browser for those that don’t understand technology and struggle to use third-party ad-ons. It’s just a little ridiculous that while there are legitimate things to complain about, most people’s arguments seem to always stem from the 3 topics above.
Now cue the downvotes because I’m clearly some crypto fascist boot-licker for daring to believe “nuance” isn’t a made up word.
Appreciate the write up!
Wow this is so… sane.
Being childish and reductive I wanted to downvote anything supporting Brave, but I find you’ve challenged my views on this.
That said, I think I’m just going to re-frame my dislike for Brave users by assuming they’re all crypto-weirdos.
That’s really well said.
In the end they are just browsers. It’s great to have people that inform others and lead them to better alternatives and Firefox has many of them who are very passionate. But then many of them are way too passionate.
Calm down with this logical and thought-out response.
Marketing has really worked for Brave.
That is the sad state of the world. Mass manipulating sentiment like some commercial psyop is a built in “feature” of the system.
we live in an era where you can make a puke like prime the most desired drink in the world, so yeah.
Which it isn’t, and also Chromium sucks, so they’re really just mag dumping into their foot
The web sucks, because of Google’s EEE approach with Chromium; there just isn’t a good way to use the web anymore. I use librewolf, it’s okay.
Yup librewolf for all the stuff I can. Google Meet has all kinds of wierd problems on firefox, especially in Linux. Whne you’re hosting you can’t share just one tab with sound and in linux getting the video/mic to authorize is hit or miss and takes a good 20 seconds on my boxes to authorize even when it works.
Google really needs to be kicked out of the W3C and have Chrome taken from them.
While I’m sure you are right I think Brave also likely pays for maintaining opinion on social media and posting positive comments supporting it. Many others learned of doing that (for example musk has bots astroturfing its image pretty much everywhere.) Similarly for example you don’t see controversies section about Brave.
There is so much controversy with every browser and people working on them that I find is better just not to read anything about any browser anymore.
Maybe, if you’ve only heard of like 5 browsers.
I mean, yeah. I’m not a computer person, so
fivesix browsers seems like a lot to just know off hand. I don’t know as many cola brands or Russian Czars without looking them up (I clearly don’t know what a normal comparison would be). People do talk mad shit about Firefox, chrome, opera, brave, safari, and edge though, which have got to make up the vast majority of the browser market.Maybe. I tried a lot and my personal experience is that Chrome is at least a level above all else in UX for general use. So chrome with some privacy features out of the box seems a good way to go.
Privacy features? Google harvests your data regardless of your settings. It also furthers Google’s monopoly on the web. I’m sure anyone can see the problem with an advertising giant hungry for data being able to dictate how you access the internet, and what the internet even looks like. Google has power over all of that, split between their influence in the W3C, their Chrome browser, their Android OS, and Google Search.
Google decides what you see, how you see it, and how the underlying technology functions; that’s literally their business model.
That’s the real problem with Chrome and any Chromium based browser.
Yes, it’s a big concern. Unfortunately I have a lot of those. I will have to leave it to other people to spearhead a better fairer freer alternative. One that will not only attract a select crowd, but a wider audience.
Chrome is the worst, there is no privacy with Chrome. The UX is also trash, it’s only good if you haven’t tried anything else.
Also Sergey Brin is in the Epstein files.
Well i respect your personal experience, but it doesn’t at all correspond with mine.
You can prefer the UX of Chrome, especially since so much of the web is designed for it. But it’s not a subjective personal experience that it is not private. Google exists to harvest your data. And the fact that everyone just accepts it is why the internet is so shitty.
We are taking about brave, not chrome. I don’t think you get any more harvested than you do with Firefox.
Not sure what that has to do with your claim that “every” browser has “so much controversy”, but okay.
In conversations humans don’t talk like robots or like they are writing a code. People often use lose expressions, colorful language, exaggerations and everything else that I have no idea about.
I didn’t think I’d need to explain that when I said every browser before, I didn’t really think every single browser. Yet here we are. That’s why I didn’t actually think you will call me out on it and just continued with other stuff. 😀
So yeah, not every browser 😁. Only a few. Although with so many new questionable ai ones, the percentage is going up for sure.
So by “every browser has so much controversy”, you meant, “maybe a few browsers have some controversy”.
Apparently it’s robotic to point out gigantic overstatements.
🥱
Time to break out the article: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
I use Netscape Navigator like a real keyboard cowboy!
I use “nc” and parse like a real man.
Lynx is all the UI you need.
Or
linksif you’re all fancy like.curl, html2latex and latex are all you need.
I don’t even see the code anymore, all I see is blonde, brunette, redhead
it’s still around, just renamed to seamonkey
Mosaic or gtfo.
Oh shit I didn’t know about this! I remember when Brave came out and I just instinctively knew there was something fishy about it, never used it. It’s like a sixth sense, like how you know when something is an ad.
I remember feeling the exact same when Facebook first rolled out and everyone was raving about it- I just knew it was a big scam, I couldn’t articulate it, but I knew.
It’s a good intuition to have, we should all keep our bullshitometers up to code and well maintained.
When tiktok came out I imagine you just fell ill due to sensory overload.
It absolutely did, and I went on a crusade trying to stop people around me from using it- to no avail.
The first time I saw it used in person was by a friend in a group of us all mid shroom trip. Sensory overload is an understatement.
Tried it when it first came out, noticed that it had an option to allow some ads to “support the developers” or whatever, immediately noped out of there and uninstalled it. The only adblockers that do that are the shady ones who are in bed with the ad companies.
I ditched Adblock Plus for Ublock Origin many years ago over this shit; not about to use an entire browser that secretly collects data on me and sells it to the ad companies.
Brave on Android is a turn-key (no configuration meshugas) adblocking solution for Youtube that let’s me watch my subscribed channels without breaking on updates.
Would newpipe, pipepipe, or Firefox on android with ublock origin extension work?
I use newpipe and it doesn’t have YouTube ads. But I don’t follow any subscribers, so I don’t know if they include that functionality.
Firefox+ublock works for me
They include it and playlists, etc. So does FreeTube.
Newpipe?
