Brave is essentially just Chrome with an adblocker, a bunch of bloatware, and a bunch of controversies.

Brave took BAT donations in YouTuber’s names without their consent, with them keeping the money if the YouTubers didn’t claim it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/

Brave’s search engine crawler hides itself from websites by pretending to be Googlebot, and Meta (Facebook) buys API access from them to train their AI. https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/

The business model of Brave rewards as a whole is to block all other ad networks to replace them with their own, which is unfair as only YouTubers and websites that have joined can make money from most Brave users.

If Brave actually cared, they would create an acceptable ads style feature which was free for everyone and allowed simple contextual banners while blocking ads which track you, take up most of the page, or have NSFW content.

Their approach is monopolistic as they have full control and can strangle YouTubers and websites by dropping pay at any time.

And Brenden Eich has said on Twitter that he plans to release “Brave Origin”, which is a paid version of Brave without the bloatware. That name is ironic as he is admitting that his browser is commercialised and bloated, which is similar to when gorhill gave uBlock way to Chris Aljoudi who commercialised it, which led him to create uBlock Origin.

If you use Brave, ditch it and look at using Librewolf or Helium instead, which both include no ads nor tracking and don’t have Brave News, Rewards, Wallet, Talk etc bloatware.

  • Engywook@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    Nope, Brave is way better than FF has ever been. I will keep using it and promote it if someone asks me. I don’t care about the supposed scandals of Brave or political opinions of Eich, that’s not my business and he’s not my friend nor an acquaintance of mines.

    And no, using Librewolf still gives market share to Gecko, this to Mozilla. No way I’d touch that thing. What’s more, I’d gladly donate to make Mozilla disappear, if I could. Now, feel free to downvote me to hell. I won’t bother to reply to anyone. Better yet, I’ll just block the annoying people that will surely feel obliged to insult me.

  • kratoz29@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    I am pretty set with Firefox in Android and desktop to be honest.

    I cringe a little when users praise Brave as being the best ad-less YouTube solution (especially android users since we have revanced here!), no bro, there is no way using the web version of YT is better than revanced, or any other apps on mobile.

    • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Their shields AdBlock is very good though, it’s done in ram in a memory safe way, arguably doing it through an extension like ublock is not great. I can’t wait until a project facelifts shields and puts it on top of an unbloated security focused chromium (or Firefox grows some balls and builds it in). Vanadium pls 🥺

    • frgl@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      I was looking forward to ladybird until I saw social media posts from the person who runs the project, like:

      In recent years I’ve attended multiple software conference talks that had unrelated extreme political rhetoric in slides, such as “fuck [name]” and “punch [group]”.

      Whenever this happened, some of the audience would clap and cheer, I’d roll my eyes, and the talk would get back on topic.

      Fast-forward to today, and look at how many people in our industry are openly celebrating the murder of someone they decided was a “nazi” and “fascist”. Turns out these people were more serious than I thought.

      As someone who’s repeatedly been called a “nazi” and “fascist” myself for disagreements with far-left ideology, I know how easily those labels get thrown around. And honestly, this is making me seriously reconsider which conferences I attend.

      There’s a hateful rot within our industry. It shouldn’t be socially acceptable to cheer for murder. We need to do more than roll our eyes.

      source: https://nitter.net/awesomekling/status/1967178708852097278

      • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        Can you really discount and avoid a whole project because of that statement?

        It reads like: “Can we keep politics out of software?”

        Which I agree with for the most part.

        I’m not sure I have experienced enough of life to make this statement, but it feels like in recent years a lot of people are becoming radicalized through social media, etc, which is seeing its spread into every conversation and space. Maybe he is done with politics and doesn’t want to keep hearing about it in unrelelated spaces (software conferences). What’s wrong with that?

        I’ve seen the guy on a podcast where he explains ladybird, he seems like a good dude doing it out of love and to see competition in the browser space, I can’t fault him for this (nothing burger).

        Do you think differently?

  • observes_depths@aussie.zone
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    2 months ago

    Honestly what do people have against Firefox that can’t be fixed with plugins? It’s the only decent browser that isn’t chrome based, and I think that deserves support. And with plugins and sync it’s a great experience.

    • zeb420@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      For me it’s a combination of Mozilla making strange business decisions (removing of the “we never sell your data” policy) and the fact that a lot of websites take forever to load on Firefox.

      I’ve tried forks, LibreWolf pisses me off. Too many settings to change just to still have a broken browsing experience in the sake of privacy. If I need that level of privacy, I’ll use I2P/Tor.

      I hate the fact that chromium has won, but it’s getting difficult to avoid the fact that web developers don’t give a rats ass if the website doesn’t work well on Firefox.

      Brave was my primary for a while, but I switched to Vivaldi after reading about some of the BAT bait and switch.

    • mcv@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      Firefox is great. Mozilla, however, is making some weird moves every now and then. A lot of people don’t quite trust Mozilla to have their interests at heart anymore.

      The obvious solution is to use a Firefox fork. I have no idea whether there’s a meaningful difference between the various Firefox forks, and would welcome a summary.

      • pazuzuzu@leminal.space
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        2 months ago

        I switched to LibreWolf, which is a Firefox fork that prioritizes anonymity and privacy. I like it, but there are definite quirks:

        • it will tell every website your time zone is UTC+0, which breaks some stuff. Proton Calendar works if you tell it your actual timezone.

        • no password saving and cookies delete every session, so you have to log in to every website every time you restart. This is intentional but I don’t understand the rationale. You can install a password manager though and self-host it if you want.

        • because your device fingerprint is generic, a lot of websites incorrectly assume you are a not. I have to use FF for GrubHub, for instance, as they won’t play nice with LibreWolf due to restrictions on the HTML5 Canvas element, for instance.

  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 months ago

    Am I the only person who uses mobile tab grouping and sees it as a must-have? Its ridiculous that Firefox is over 5 years behind on this incredible QoL feature. To me it’s almost as bad as if a browser didn’t support bookmarks. It’s just ridiculous at this point.

  • BoycottTwitter@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    I remember Brave was popular among MAGA-type people during Trump’s first term. I suspect it’s likely the same.

    The logo has a striking resemblance to one I remember seeing on a big pro-Trump community. It’s described here https://www.vox.com/2019/8/29/20838289/trump-fascist-lion-head-bull-testicles-video-twitter basically the logo is associated with Mussolini.

    In addition if you check the Wikipedia article you’ll notice this:

    In August 2016, the company had received at least US$7 million in angel investments from venture capital firms, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital and the Digital Currency Group.[13]

    Moreover some right-wing type people expressed their “solidarity” with Brendan Eich for his anti LGBT stance so they used Brave.

  • pineapple@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    But brave still has the best fingerprint resistance of any browser. Except for tor which is too slow for me. If mullvad browser ever gets on android I will use that, for now I will use brave.

    • Credibly_Human@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Do people realize that if Firefox dies (in the many ways that could be interpreted), all of these downstream forks will also die right?

      Like, the work to in essence remove unwanted parts of a code base is admirable but its an utterly miniscule fraction of the work that goes into maintaining a modern browser, keeping up with standards, sending people to be voices at conventions, etc.

      • cheesybuddha@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        The beauty of open source projects is that if they are abandoned, other people can pick them back up. Sure it may be difficult, but if it wasn’t FOSS it wouldn’t even be possible.

        • Credibly_Human@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Thats the beauty to silly idealists who pretend they can’t understand that hundreds of employees getting paid full time wont materialize out of thin air to keep a massive project like a web browser alive in the absence of that structure.

  • w3dd1e@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    Brave is the browser version of Honey. It blocks 3rd party ads and inserts its own, taking the money. Either block the ads or don’t but this is shitty.

  • pigup@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    All brave users I personally know are dumb ass racist maga garbage people.

    Edit : wtf i’m telling the truth. I didn’t say anything about you. Peter Thiel, did you make several accounts on Lemmy and are down-voting me?

  • LiamBox@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Ah yes let me use Helium

    Whoop it uses google’s browser monopoly

    Firefox then

    Whoo it is chained by googles search engine deal

    • Credibly_Human@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Firefox then

      Whoo it is chained by googles search engine deal

      This is some serious self eating idealist talk here.

      In life you must realize there are many situations where you think about the context and consequences of your choices, and you choose the closest to viable option.

      Firefox is that.

      It sucks that there is that google deal, but ultimately the world effects of firefox dying are wide reaching despite its diminishing numbers and so much greater than so many casually Mozilla doomer takes realize.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      It’s been a villain for years. You just hear more from the “stop using Firefox because it isn’t perfect” paid accounts around here.

      • w3dd1e@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        Yeah. I never knew why anyone started using it. Brendan Eich was a well-known shithead when he left Mozilla.

  • Xylight‮@lemdro.id
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    2 months ago

    I already use librewolf on desktop which is a great experience. But Firefox on mobile is just so horribly laggy and has a dated UI, the only offering it has is ublock origin and reader mode. Brave is the only real mobile browser choice I have since it has pretty good tracker blocking and I can disable nearly all of the problems you’ve mentioned here.

  • w3dd1e@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    If you’re a browser with an ad company, you are the problem and can fuck right off.