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.
Could someone explain number 3?
They accepted donations for every creator on every platform. Using the creator’s photos. Implying the creators would get the donations. In fact they only got the pseudo-money if they handed over all their personal details to Brave and agreed to Brave’s terms. Otherwise, those donations quietly vanished, presumably into Brave’s coffers.
See also https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137/https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160882873380870
Sounds like a legitimate business practice s/
I did not know Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla and launched Brave because he was a homophobe who funded anti-LGBT+ campaigns 😬
He also created JavaScript, but I don’t see people getting upset and telling others to not use JavaScript.
Yeah, we shouldn’t totally disregard the browser because he has some bad opinions. That’s a slippery slope.
a bad opinion is like thinking “how i met your mother” had a nice ending
actively donating to anti-LGBT campaigns is not a bad opinion, it is a hostile action
i’m very upset about it and keep telling people not to use it. have for like 15 years.
Didnt know JS can collect data and transmit it to their creator.
Neither does Brave unless you specifically opt in to those services. It’s open source, you can check for yourself.
yeah a few of these where made opt in after the userbase backlashed when they made them opt out by default
they actually have a tendency of making changes this way, i don’t see why i should trust them with anything
Well, JavaScript has a lot of horrible features, but it’s ubiquitous and we’re stuck with it for the time being. Certainly it’s another thing to blame Eich for, rather than something that mitigates his other shitty behavior.
- Don’t care.
- No it doesn’t.
- Don’t care.
- They’re a for-profit privacy centric company same as proton, mullvad, tuta, kagi, duckduckgo, nextcloud, adguard, threema, nextDNS, startmail, bitwarden, OsmAnd, organic maps, odysee, obsidian, onlyoffice, 1984 hosting, njalla, canonical, qubesOS, pfSense, fairphone…
Yeah I don’t get the hate. I don’t use it personally but it seems like a much better choice than chrome
Because of the long history of controversies:
https://blog.alexseifert.com/2025/04/06/why-i-recommend-against-brave/
Even if it was somehow fine now, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. TBH I’d use Edge before Brave, even on Linux.
Anything can have a long list of controversies if you cherry pick
If you reach 20 companies that aren’t ad-centric for-profit companies you can qualify for the false equivalency pro-league.
It’s up there with mental gymnastics in the bad-faith Olympics, a lofty achievement.
well. i’ll give you ad-guard , canonical is also making great strides towards ad-centric so that one too.
Nobody cares what you think. Go back to your cave
I agree. GrapheneOS uses chromium for Vanadium as it has far superior sandboxing to firefox, meaning it has more security. However vanadium doesn’t have adblocking.
So I use brave on mobile, with some settings tweaked recommended by privacyguides.org. Also brave uses chromium which is the only way to install grapheneOS in the first place, on desktop.
Also out of the mainstream browsers brave is far superior to all of them out of the box, even firefox, for those who arne’t into researching the perfect browser. It has in built adblocking and decent default settings. I use librewolf 99% of the time.
- Side note I did some research proton is owned 80% by the proton non for profit something which is pretty cool.
bruh
I don’t think an average person would listen to me if I instructed them to get rid of chrome and get Firefox and install couple extensions for privacy.
So, I just ask them to download brave and tell them it’s just chrome but better, It blocks all the annoying stuff on the internet and atleast they will stop using the hell of a pacifier that chrome is and move on.
Yeah exactly, Brave is for people who are scared of installing extensions but clicking a big install button on a site that runs an executable is perfectly fine
Well I’d argue that with the changes to Manifest, Brave is actually one of your stronger options if chrome is a must have.
If you don’t need chrome, Firefox (or a fork) with ublock is enough for most.
This makes me think that the people who install brave, are the people who, 15-20 years ago, would have a IE install that was half toolbars.
God…remember all the scammy toolbars for IE? and how they could take up half the damn screen on some peoples machines?
Yes, it’s just Chrome but better - it also funds bigots!
Plonk.
It’s just Chrome if Chrome wasn’t made ass backwards basically.
And it funds bigots
just like Google but at way smaller scale
Yes, they both do.
What extensions would you recommend for Firefox?
Ublock origin
Ublock Origin is the only mandatory extension i can think of.
Some other extensions I personally use are:
Gesturefy is useful if you want to control things with mouse gestures (holding right-click and then drawing a shape to activate commands)
NoScript for a little added security, with the cost of having to manually enable javascript on websites that literally can’t function without it.
Any extension that runs userscripts.
Dark Reader for websites that don’t offer a dark mode.
Just Ublock origin is more than enough, it’s pretty customisable too, Brave is for people who just wanna install and do nothing
Except when I install Brave I have to debloat it, holy bloat so is Firefox bloated - I usually get forks (Librewolf, Zen etc)
I just wish librewolf would release a mobile version 🤞🤞
I doubt they’ll ever release a mobile version, they’ll just recommend IronFox
I feel like I’m getting too old for the Internet. I still fondly remember the times where you could create a Geocities page and add it yourself to the Yahoo directory, and other netizens clicked through categories to get to your listing, instead of using a search engine.
But I digress. I’m finding myself browsing the www less over time, and I’m already limited to only a hadful of pages I visit regularly. For me personally, Vivaldi is the best choice for a desktop, and Brave is hands-down the best choice for my smartphone. But I appreciate that others may have different use cases.
Remember when sites had webring links at the bottom? Before Google solved it (then destroyed it completely several years later), discoverability used to be a community effort.
Now you gave me an inspiration. I’m eorking with a few other parents to create a local, walled “Internet” for the kids in our estate, and webrings would be a fun feature to resurrect.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s you used to get an email address and some webspace included in your internet subscription. I remember making a small personal website on the 15 MB of web space I got. The URL was a bit cumbersome http://www.my.isp/www/somesuperlonguserid/index.html but it worked fine.
These times are sadly over.
Why did I click that link lol
The minute I see that malware junk, I immediately uninstall it.
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.
They added referrals to links you clicked. If there is one thing a browser should do its go to the link you click without modification.
As far as I remember, there is some browser with a feature of stripping tracking id from the URL, that is modification, but I find it good (if I can opt in, and if the feature is visible enough to know what to try if it doesn’t work)
And you chose to do that or it was a feature that was advertised to you. Adding referral IDs to links you click so the browser company gets money is not comparable to that at all.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that was crappy, just that not any modification of links is bad
I would argue that if you know your browser is stripping tracking info for links then the link you clicked on doesn’t have tracking information.
I think you are probably assuming most people are as informed about such things, even tech literate people. As someone who tends to stick his head in the sand on anything that isn’t specific tech news I care about organically it would be pretty easy to miss all of the scummy things Brave has done over the years. Let alone the sketchy history of Eich himself.
It’s a bell curve situation.
Those who are uniformed don’t have anything against Brave and would consider it a pretty decent browser.
Those aware of the controversies hate Brave and want it to die.
Those who have taken even a moment to dig into the actual “controversies” and read beyond hyperbolic headlines don’t have anything against Brave and would consider it a pretty decent browser.
im one of those who had taken their time to check every major controversy for every mainstream browser and brave it still trash
(not happy with mozilla either but hey librewolf exists)
They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
a for-profit company partially funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, of Palantir fame. the same Palantir spying on Americans in order to allow nazis to round up immigrants and throw them into concentration camps. the same Peter Thiel that said democracy is not compatible with freedom.
The same one who wants to create the apocalypse and believes the anti-Christ is anyone who isn’t fascistic
I don’t use chromium based browsers for daily use, but I do keep chromium installed just in case
If you had to pick a chromium variant, which is the least horrible?
Ungoogled Chromium is ok. I used it for a while. I found it to be ok. Not great. Not terrible. Just ok.
Helium looks ok too, if they ever release it as a flatpak or snap I’ll give it a go.
I tried Vivaldi. It reminded me of what Netscape Communicator used to be - browser, mail client, newsfroup reader… A few too many bells whistles and gongs for me.
If I was forced to pick a chromium variant, I’d probably turn my PC off for the night and go and have a nice lie down.
I haven’t used it myself but if I had to I’d probably give Helium a try it looks promising.
I use just plane chromium for all my chromium needs
Brave
I enjoy Vivaldi and Ungoogled Chromium when things don’t work in Gecko engine.
I primarily use LibreWolf. Mullvad for scenarios when I need privacy, and Tor + VPN when I need maximum privacy and anonymity.
Personally, if it doesn’t work in Firefox, I just give up.
Vanadium
I trust Vanadium but it’s not the best if you like your web ad-free.
Anything chromium based won’t be best for the web.
People just want the next best easy supposedly privacy friendly solution. People who use Librewolf instead aren’t any different. Just configure Firefox how you want it to and actually get timely updates. All forks suck because updates are massively delayed.
This! I never understand people who recommend Librewolf or other forks over Firefox just because some default settings are better.
Its got electrolytes or crypto or something though.
