It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
bruh
If you absolutely need a Chromium browser (if you’re a privacy advocate, I don’t understand why. Using a Chromium browser means Google can do whatever they want with web standards), use Vivaldi or something.
Use chromium build from source ? It’s the least if you want something chrome based. https://chromium.woolyss.com/
If not, use firefox. It’s still good for everyday task.
I think a lot of pro-Brave people are astroturfers, or heavily influenced by astroturfers. They are definitely not a first choice by any privacy advocate worth their salt.
I use Brave selectively. I don’t know about ads. I don’t get ads. I don’t know about donations. It’s never asked me for donations and doesn’t have the info necessary to charge me without me knowing. A little more info on that one would be nice as I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.
To be honest, I kind of don’t care. If I was super adamant about being 100% politically/morally correct I wouldn’t use any product, ever. I don’t pay for it and I don’t feel like it’s taken advantage of me. So I’m going to keep on using it sporadically like I do now.
For reference, I only use it in private window mode.
I mean I’m open to other mobile browsers if you have suggestions. On my actual PC I use Mullvad and Librewolf.
Also, the Brave defenders in this section… holy moly.
Some folks simply cannot admit they made a questionable choice. They picked it and use it, so everyone else must be wrong.
I’ve met people like this in real life.
It’s because no-one knows any alternatives.
If one wants a Chrome-based browser that isn’t Chrome, Brave is the highest-profile one by orders of magnitude. Next is a bunch of high-SEO scamware before honest projects like Vivaldi or Helium are even a whisper.
…So I don’t really blame folks for using Brave. They aren’t omniscient, and an honest effort to avoid Chrome is still a positive.
You can literally just use ungoogled chromium
I’m still mystified as to how Brave took any market share. I thought there’s two camps: people who care about browser privacy and people who don’t. The latter crowd stay with Chrome or whatever their PC comes with. The former crowd…did I miss a memo on what was wrong with Firefox?
I don’t blame folks for using it.
I do blame folks for not reading up before recommending it.
I recommend(ed) it so people have a mobile browser with functional adblock. I don’t need to research further to know it does that well, which frankly is all most people will care about.
It’s an improvement over most browsers.
It gets your goat? Never heard that before
Yeah, I used Brave for a few years. I made like $10-$40, but the popup ads were super annoying, especially as someone who uses 3 ad blockers. Not to mention the other issues… Not Worth It.
In recent history I’ve used Chrome -> Brave -> Firefox -> LibreWolf -> Floorp -> Midori… So far Midori is good but still testing.
Chrome is honestly fine.
uBlock Origin Lite + Privacy Badger and I’ve been fine for quite a while now.
The minute I see that malware junk, I immediately uninstall it.
Is there anything else with ad blocker for iOS?
Vivaldi has built in ad blocker and tracker blocker.
Use extensions.
Safari supports extensions. Install AdGuard. Edge supports extensions, install ublock origin lite.
You can use ublock origin lite with Safari, it does a pretty good job.
Use it for the time being and never buy an iphone again.
I had no idea about any of this. Have been using brave on android for a few weeks and very happy with it. What would you recommend instead?
A Firefox fork.
Fork? Uhg wtf is wrong with firefox now? This better not be about AI
A bunch of forks just add extra functions, patches or defaults on top of firefox. It’s not a hard fork as in they maintain everything themselves, they’re still based on the latest official firefox releases.
Removing AI is one of those patches yes.
Yea I’m going to go ahead and recommend against opinionated firefox. Oh yea I want some dweeb with misplaced anger and too much time on their hands to dictate how I use the internet. Bitch asses.
You (the end user) decide how you want to use the internet. The forks you’re probably angry about are the ‘hardened forks’, but whether or not you care about their goals and want to use those is a choice only you can make. Most of what they do is basically change some default configs and remove some ‘bad’(according to the maintainers and the users) features.
There’s also forks like zen that under the hood use firefox, but customize the user experience significantly.
Long way to say what is captured in two words: opinionated firefox.
Oh, have I got news for you
Just keep using it, if it works for you. Every company that makes browsers is a bit shit around the edges, there’s no perfect, pure, wholesome browser. Just use what you want. If you like edge for android, use that. If you want to use vim, use that too.
Congratulations on missing the point.
It grinds your gears that people don’t do what you want, doesn’t it?
Have you tried letting people use whatever the fuck browser they want?
Netscape Navigator on Windows Mobile Works for me.
I’m surprised to read the whole thread and nobody mentioned that TorBrowser is the goat for daily anonymous browsing.
You should never use TOR as a daily driver.
Why not? If more people use onion router the network only becomes better.
Tor is ridiculously slow for daily use.
That you’re even suggesting this tells me that you don’t use tor regularly. Many clearnet sites dont want to be accessed through tor and will just block you. If you encounter any recaptchas thats basically a dead end. The time from opening the browser to having a fully loaded site is minutes.
If you don’t plan on doing serious crimes and your not an opposition leader in a totalitarian state, tor is not a good default browser.
I thought people gave up on Tor years ago when it was revealed that it wasnt as anonymous as people expected due to the number of entry and exit nodes controlled by governments and spy agencies.
The NSA wasn’t able to break Tor fundamentally, even with spanning numerous exit nodes to intercept traffic, and high-scale traffic correlation between enter and exit nodes
“We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption
Do we trust a 12 year old article sourced from the government to be honest about current/past capabilities? Genuinely asking.
This question is unironically very deep. As it’s privacy we’re talking, you decide what to trust on your own.
My understanding is that Tor provides anonymity for my threat model (ad-tech corporations).
But trust need to be placed somewhere. Do we trust Mozilla? All their emploees? Do we trust OSS? Does anybody actually review open-source code? What about supply chain attacks?
I am, a nobody, was personally invited to a Contagious Interview (a person, pretending to be a client for consulting was trying to place a rootkit on my machine via GitHub repo).
What about AI-assistet coding that actively tries to eliminate security gates?
who and what is your threat model? as @macros@feddit.org pointed out this article was probably rather accurate.
if you just want to browse anonymously - it is likely, that even the biggest tech corpos can’t de-anonymise you.
if you do small time crime, like buying and selling contraband - likely law enforcement would try to catch you in the real world. you have more vertices and vulnerabilities there, different enforcement agencies are experienced exploiting these.
if you paint a big ass target on your back and get the interest of the CIA or similar - you are probably fucked one way or the other. they may have the ability to de-anonymise you. but if you listen to people that did get caught or do the catching (e.g: darknet diaries), most of the times it is a small mistake. if you only ever play defence, that is enough to loose the game. but what are your options if your adversary is a national agency?
In this case I would. Its from the Snowden leaks and from the government for the government, never intended for our public eyes.
Also if you don’t fully trust tor, just add another layer (e.g. VPN). If the government dissuades you from secure open infrastructure and gets you to use closed ones, they have won because companies can always be forced to comply. Algorithms on the other hand, can’t.
