Just gonna leave this here.
Its a bad chromium fork with a crypto snowball scheme attached and some very scummy practices done.
crypto snowball scheme attached
which is opt-in.
Hear that guys?! The pyramid scheme is opt-in! Not scummy whatsoever
The referral links weren’t. That should have been a thought that crossed a developers’ mind and immediately left it. It definitely shouldn’t have made it into a test build, and it super shouldn’t have made it into a public release. That it ever made it that far is enough reason to never use the browser again. The developers have proven that they cannot be trusted with your privacy.
Sure, you have to sign up for it but you can’t remove the hardcoded crypto wallet extension and therefore can’t actually opt-out of having it shoved in your face (at least, it was the time i tried their browser and found it to be inferior in every way to just using Firefox and uBlock Origin).
Damn,
3 days0 days without anti-brave browser propaganda, so lets break down this article:brandon eich
Do you use linux? Go look up all the nasty stuff stallman’s said and firmly believes in. I don’t see people boycotting gnu which is a vital part of linux as a result of this, I myself still use it, because you should never mix politics with software. If the software works as it should, why do the author’s politics make a difference? A lot of praised artwork was made by artists who went mad. Similarly, I’ve heard the creator of lemmy has some questionable views, I don’t see people spreading anti-lemmy propaganda.
The same also applies with microsoft, if you use windows. Or apple, with macos. They’re no saint either.
The Ad Experiments
is Opt in… Come on at least try out something before you write a whole article on it.
Some ranting about the opt in crypto
Mentioned above.
adding affiliate codes to some URLs typed into the address bar
Again shows that they never actually tried the browser, they’re just jumping on the hate bandwagon. It never “rewrote” url’s, or “hijacked” anything, it suggested them, which the user could optionally click on, this is a very significant difference to “hijacked”, or “rewrote” as that’d be malicious, whereas with this approach the user chooses. This was later removed.
use vivaldi
Vivaldi is not comparable brave in terms of all the hardening they’ve done. Firefox is a great alternative, and that’s what I myself use, but I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people, especially if they’re coming from something like chrome.
I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people,Why exactly? The tricks like “optional things to click” are explicitly targeted on less tech savvy people and defeat the point of privacy focused browsers.
I’ve literally installed Firefox and uBlock Origin for elderly people, and walked some other elderly people through installing them. In, like, 2 minutes. This is not difficult.
Why exactly?
Because with firefox, they’d have to install arkenfox’s userjs, change some defaults like the search engine from being google out of the box & add ublock origin, for it to be an alternative. Which for some people is overly complicated, in which case brave comes in handy where you just install it and don’t need to change any settings. It doesn’t use google for search, sync & google safe browsing are implemented in a privacy respecting way, it has an adblock & some resistance to fingerprinting ootb.
Now librewolf does exist as a firefox based browser with good defaults, but on windows unless you’re using a package manager, it won’t auto update.
Just getting somebody on Firefox with ublock origin is enough IMO. I’m not going to also remove their ability to use Google search. Especially if they’re older. I am very privacy oriented but you have to make some compromises for people lol.
Those are choices, not requirements. Using Firefox is better than using Chrome. Doing the extra stuff is even better, but if doing that means someone gives up and goes back to Chrome, that doesn’t help, either.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is why brave exists as a good middle-ground
Actually, the librewolf installer for windows has included an updater for some time now.
I’m no privacy expert, but TechLore has covered Brave a lot and it’s one of his recommended daily drivers.
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Last I checked Stallmann wasn’t “CEO of Linux”. Such a thing does not exist. Eich is CEO of Brave. Apples to oranges.
Go look up all the nasty stuff stallman’s said and firmly believes in. I don’t see people boycotting gnu which is a vital part of linux as a result of this
People are already aware of the shit Stallman does. Hell, you don’t need to read the shit he writes, dude’s a real-life creep.
And besides: GNU project’s tools have continued popularity despite him. Do I need to remind you of XEmacs? EGLIBC? EGCS? A whole lot of projects that reminded GNU equivalents to “oh yeah, maybe we should get gud instead of being an inferiour code base” (XEmacs) or “oh yeah, this fork is clearly superiour, we should merge and call it official” (EGLIBC, EGCS). And now people are like “Hey guys, I just found this compiler called Clang and-” and GNU is like “FFFFF-”
[Ad experiments and crypto] is opt in.
If you download an ad blocker, I’m pretty certain that you don’t want to “opt in” to any advertisements by default.
Hey, you thought that was easy to debunk? How about this: When Brave advertises that content creators are able to accept BAT crypto tokens as donations, should the content creators themselves first opt in? They most certainly didn’t. Brave specifically said that they would accept donations on behalf of all content creators and held the donations on their behalf until they would opt in.
If these content creators never would actually opt in, what then, I wonder? Did they just deceive the fans of those content creators?
This is dangerously close to the whole rhetoric NFT bros had during the peak. “Why, someone made illegitimate NFTs of your creations? Well you SHOULD have minted those NFTs while you had the chance. Oh, you prefer to NOT participate in this whole NFT ecosystem on principle? Have fun staying poor!”
why do the author’s politics make a difference?
In this case it makes a difference because there has been an alarming increase in harmful lies made by the far right. This is a purposeful spread of misinformation that many people hesitate to get involved with in any way, and for good reason.
I do not trust the creator of Brave to be aligned with the far right and to still be guided by ethical conduct that I can trust. If you align yourself with people who lie and put others in danger for profit and control, you’re condoning such behavior and may be capable of it yourself.
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Quite the opposite, brave’s defaults are very good. An alternative to brave on the firefox side would be librewolf, which gives firefox great defaults, but the issue with that is that they disabled auto updates, and there’s still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager (even though many exist).
bullshit integrated into it.
And again, there’s no “bullshit” if you don’t explicitly opt into the crypto.
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They are constantly bugging you to sign up for it
No, the browser asks you once.
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I run it secondary to Firefox when I need to use IPFS, have been for about 6 months now. I also occasionally use it because it also blocks Youtube ads by default, AND when combined with privacy badger, it is the only browser that still works while giving half decent anti-fingerprinting. Firefox, Chrome, nothing else even gets close. They just straight up lie about your screen rez and plugins to keep you from being fingerprinted.
Their account sync is pretty nice. Encrypted P2P syncing of configs and bookmarks. No need to make an account with them to store your settings.
Yeah, if you use their new tab page, there’s an crypto option there which you can remove. Their new tab page sucks and I don’t use it anyway.
There is ONE crypto button to the right of the URL bar, which you can right click and hide. The other stuff is actually the controls for their PWA install , share and privacy/ad block settings. You can just run full block everywhere and flick off the extra blocking for a site if it’s a problem.
I also refuse to use their search, but it does work really well last time I tried it. DDG is good enough and the smaller the company selling my data, the better.
Updates don’t generate any crypto popups for me, perhaps because I don’t use their front page.
It’s open source, so they at the very least aren’t hiding what they’re doing.
The fact that they offer shitty crypto with hideable buttons should be the least of your objections.
They replaced webpage ads with their own when you enable bat. (I don’t crypto so I don’t see those)
They swapped referrer links on unreferred things to make money. (which is sunset now, but is an indicator of how they DGAF)
They used their crypto as a pyramid scheme to sell to investors, even got in trouble over it with the Government.
Once their crypto pyramid scheme fails, They’ll either fold up, or double down on selling data passed through them.
They have an insecure TOR implementation
They are likely to sell your data
They are likely to sell your data to AI projects.
Their CEO is a POS, but that’s hardly unusual these days.
and there’s still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager
I think “lots of people” here can just be simplified to “nearly everyone”. Anyone that is ware of a package manager and why it’s useful and thinks to look for an equivalent for Windows is not going to be bothered by a few extra configuration steps.
because you should never mix politics with technology.
What does this mean?
If these people really want to ban technology based on the views of the author then they might as well live in the stone age. And even then the tools they used was probably invented by some nasty people. The US space program was built by literal Nazi scientist. Most of the research on how humans survive in space was based on experiments done to Jews. The first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research are the HeLa cells taken from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks. She did not consent to have those cells taken nor was she or her family compensated. Are we gonna boycott cancer research because of this injustice? No? Only the things that make them feel uncomfortable?
You mentioned that politics should not be mentioned with software. Consider Hans Reiser, the author of reiserfs. He murdered his wife and was sent to prison. Would you be okay with running code written by a murderer on your computer? How about a vase made by a murderer in your house? Would you enjoy the voice of a murderer in music?
Well that’s a bit of an extreme example… and I don’t know who that person specifically is, but generally: yes, i would be fine with using a vase or software made by him. Why shouldn’t I be? However I’d uncomfortable with music or film’s acted by him.
Be “Brave” use a better browser.
[winks in Firefox]winks in librewolf with uBlock, LocalCDN and altered UserAgent and fixed resolution of 1920×1080
PS: I am paranoid
There’s also the lesser-known Pale Moon browser, of which I actually tried using, to quite a normal success, on our former desktop PC, two years ago.
I would love to use librewolf but somehow it stops being able to resolve web pages where every other browser I have installed is still able to. It’s the only thing stopping me from making the jump full time.
Are they ocsp errors? You can disable ocsp hard fail in settings > librewolf settings
Let’s see if the brave fanboys REEEEEEEE on Lemmy as hard as they do on reddit and try to brigade this post.
Yeah I don’t really get the fanaticism around that browser
To be fair it goes both ways. I don’t understand the hate for it either. Is Brenden Eich an asshat? Maybe, but that doesn’t affect how good the browser is or isn’t. And the crypto/ad stuff is opt-in. You can leave it off and it is just chromium with a built-in ad blocker.
What else are you going to use if you don’t want to use Firefox? Vivaldi is the option suggested the most but that isn’t open source. And extensions and codecs are a pain point with Ungoogled Chromium. As far as I’m aware Brave is the best currently available open source chromium-based browsers.
I don’t even use it, I use librewolf for the record.
For the record, have you also tried the Goanna-based Pale Moon web browser, and compared how well it stands to all those other browsers you’ve actually dug deeper info on?
Anything with crypto seems to get some people all hot and bothered
I never started in the first place.
It always seemed like snake oil to me.
Author of this article, Corbin Davenport, should also stop using Facebook.
Never started. What have they done now?
Nothing new. It’s just an overview of how shady and scammy the browser is. I still see a lot of people recommending it without knowing the backstory.
The article states nothing but misinformation, the first heading is literally about the author’s politics, unrelated to the browser. And the 2nd & 3rd indicate that he’s never installed brave in his life, he’s simply regurgitating other people’s hate.
How is the article inaccurate? Do you suggest that we should support a company regardless of agreement with their politics? Why?
AI summary:
- Brave Browser has marketed itself as a privacy-preserving web browser and has gained attention from cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
- The company behind Brave, founded by Brendan Eich, faced backlash due to Eich’s previous donation in support of California’s Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage.
- Brave initially planned to replace ads with its own ad units and split revenue with publishers, but this idea was met with legal issues and criticism from both inside and outside the company.
- Brave introduced Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) as a way to reward users for viewing ads and content, but the rewards are minimal and the value of BAT is volatile.
- Brave has incorporated various cryptocurrency-related features, including a full crypto wallet, but many of its crypto partners have faced controversies and scandals.
- Brave was involved in a privacy scandal in which affiliate codes were added to URLs typed into the address bar, allowing the company to collect revenue from user signups or purchases.
- The article concludes that Brave is a flawed software project and should not be used, recommending Firefox or Vivaldi as privacy-focused alternatives.
Brave has always seemed shady as hell to me. I don’t understand why so many tech people keep recommending it.
If you are basing the use of a product on the politics of people involved in the project, then you are going to end up with no products to use.
If you are basing it on it being based on Chromium and having a crypto scam built in, then I get that. That being said, the browser isn’t super bad, just not good. Viva La Firefox.
I wouldn’t be using Lemmy at all if I had to agree with the creators political views lol.
especially with opensource stuff, a lot of devs are either extreme right or extreme left. That doesn’t mean they can’t make a great project. Suckless is a good example for extreme right. Lemmy for extreme left.
I challenge anyone to cite an incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.
Well for starters you donated $1,000 in support of prop 8
The article appears to be biased against Brave Browser and its associated company, presenting a negative viewpoint on various aspects of the browser’s development, functionality, partnerships, and the background of its founder. The tone is critical and skeptical at best.
This reads like ai generated text.
It’s perfectly acceptable to have reservations about a browser, but this article seems to be quite exaggerated.
Found chatgpt.
Can’t stop using something I’ve never installed.
TL;DR : The Brave web browser has gained attention as an alternative to mainstream browsers, marketed for privacy and backed by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. However, it’s been criticized for its association with Brendan Eich, who faced backlash for supporting a proposition against same-sex marriage. Brave’s attempts at a privacy-centric approach included plans for a unique advertising model, which faced legal challenges. The browser’s cryptocurrency, BAT, faced volatility and its ad replacement system didn’t provide substantial rewards. Additionally, Brave collaborated with controversial crypto entities. Privacy concerns were raised when the browser added affiliate codes to URLs, and its complexity and associations have led critics to recommend other browsers like Firefox or Vivaldi for privacy-focused users.
Nah i love my built in adblock/open source/privacy features. You can turn off crypto stuff. Author can shove his politics up his ass.
Okay, first and foremost: I do not use brave. I have used it years back (long before the URL-Rewrite-thing) and thought it felt weirdly bloated with stuff I didn’t use (a little like Opera). I would not recommend Brave to anyone at this point, because it’s… weird. I was out when they started to wave at you with their strange pseudo-currency-wallet that had to be set up and all. I would not recommend such a browser to someone who might then just ask me questions about the weird things the browser I told them to install does. No way, Jose!
Now for the but: The article is bad. Like… baaaad.
Let’s have a look, shall we?“Some higher-up of the company did something that is not moral”
You do not become CEO of a company íf your moral compass is a high priority for you. Period. We still need to keep the perspective here: the donation shows views I really dislike, yes. But given how much many of those suited-up nutjobs in upper managements give to really shitty causes… these 1000 dollars were peanuts. Besides: How does a CEO with indefensible political views make the product bad?
The Peter Thiel bonus fact:
Can we stop to attribute any investments by large funds as a morally motivated thing? There was a guy at Peter Thiel’s fund who saw the project and went “Eyyy that’s gonna get us some Dollary-doos”. That’s it. That’s how business works. Those funds constantly shift tuckloads of money into truckloads of projects.
There was a super stupid idea in the initial plans for the browser
Yeah… thing is: They didn’t do it. You’d be surprised how many really “scummy” ideas get pitched in companies every day and how often some management-guy just kinda runs with them. That’s just business as usual really.
BAT
It is kinda weird, yes, but remember: At the time they started this, crypto was everywhere and it made the company money. I don’t see why the mere addition of this stuff is a reason that “Brave Browser is irredeemable”. It doesn’t interfere with the browser’s functionality, it just adds bloat. The article doesn’t distill that though. It just says “It has crypto in it”, goes on with something else and then concludes that “therefore bad” out of nowhere. What about the BAT thing makes the browser bad? Tell me, author!
Brave had FTX-Partnership-stuff and didn’t apologize
The apologize part is what baffles me.
They some (probably paid) partnership with a company that tricked lots and lots of people. Why do they need to apologize for (unknowingly, naively perhaps) working with a firm that turned out to be fraudulent? Does your ISP have to apologize for every scammer who did scams over their landlines?Random listing of crypto stuff
What is bad about this? Tell me, author! They went into the booming crypto sphere and got some users that way. I dislike the crypto-bubble as much as the next guy but why does that make the browser bad? My bank sponsored a local motocross-event. I do not like motocross. Is my bank account now bad, too?
Please tell me why the product is bad if you want me to think that the product is bad.
Affiliate scandal
finally something of substance. Yeah, that one was a shitshow.
But as much as I try to resist, I have to be nerdy here:
This is not an argument now, I just could let this one slide.I’m not aware of another browser ever rewriting what the user types in the address bar.
aren’t you now? So how does “does this browser rewrite stuff in the adress bar?” typed into my adress bar become
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=does+this+browser+rewrite+stuff+in+the+adress+bar%3F&atb=v388-6__&ia=web ? I didn’t type that.Again, not part of the argument, the affiliate-thing was bonkers and justifies scolding, just that one phrase ground me gears, as they say.
Ultimately, Brave Browser is the apparatus of an advertising company
hey, another real reason to dislike the product, to the point. See, author? you can do it! No need to ramble on for pages over pages without any point or conclusion! Just a few words do the trick!
Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.
\ Tell me why!
No really, that’s my main issue with the article: It lists a bunch of stuff and leaves it to the reader to assume that the listed stuff is devaluing the product of this company, basically because the tone of the article is “Brave bad”, but the article never reasons why the things brought forth makes the browser bad. it never concludes any point, just rambles on to the next like a slightly tipsy Thomas the Tank Engine between stops.Is… this your job?
No, my job is teamleader, so I’m used to a) picking people apart and b) firing away emails before ppl start to ask me questions.
