Brave is literally a grift. Too many people are falling for it.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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Too many people only care about the openweb or shitty companies in the comments. They have no fucking willpower, no patience, and no follow through. Their complaints are utterly meaningless because they utterly refuse to stick to their guns.
There's one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.
Yet, they use Brave.
Brave is not spyware. That website you linked is horrible and full of misinformation. They also claim that Firefox, and even Tor Browser, are spyware. They act as if any and all connections a browser makes are automatically bad and used for spying/tracking.
I won't disagree with the other criticisms of Brave that you made, but just wanted to point that out. That website is just highly unreliable and makes verifiably false claims about the browsers it reviews.
Brave is not spyware
It is officially spyware now: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-services-without-user-consent/
Just commenting to let you know I've clarified a bit in the post. Also, stock Firefox is spyware so.
Stock as in out-of-the-box.
Edit: If you want to downvote this go ahead, but at least know that it's true. Without changing ANY settings, Firefox is spyware.
If nothing else, I would recommend Firefox over Brave for the sole reason of the latter being yet another Chromium browser. It would be nice if we could eat away some of the browser marketshare from Google.
Let's not forget one of the biggest investors is a right-wing billionaire who runs a corporate intelligence agency that contracts with the DoD. And the only proof we have that he doesn't collect data on Brave's users is the questionable word of the devs.
Brave has been off limits for me ever since I saw my QAnon nutjob father using it lol.
I would appreciate if we don't bring politics into the conversation. They are completely subjective and only serve to stray away from the original point.
Edit:
Yes, I'm aware I'm in the wrong here.
Privacy is a political subject.
I absolutely agree, many news about security issues have already been published before.
Even worse for privacy, it uses the Chrome engine.
Never used it, I saw some twitter comments from it's CEO and this guy isn't trustable.
I go with Firefox and sometimes epiphany. Last one tries to accomplish the level of the well known ones but is mostly years behind. That's sad, because I really like it.
Even if they were amazing, it would still be worth using Firefox instead to suppport an alternative to chromium.
Firefox + Startpage is really cool. I like how their searched don't include the search parameters in the url + the built in proxy
Brave behaving like Win XP era browser with gazillion toolbars installed, with a pinch of crypto and crypto promoting ads should be a giant red flag.
FOSS =/= trusted by default. Why are there so many FOSS evangelists, but such a damn tiny part of them are programmers, let alone programmers able to examine a source code behind such a giant codebase as web browser?
I use Vivaldi, at least their business model is clear, and developer is kind of trusted, and not crypto scammer and homophobe.
Brave always marketed itself as hardened privacy browser and the second I saw their shitcoin immediately bells went off.
Either way, I use Librewolf on PC and Mac and lately been giving Arc a try on Mac and I like it.
How about the Opera Browser?
Don't touch opera, avoid it like the plague
I have installed it on all my devices. Firefox is standard from now, becouse of its open source culture etc.
They got sold to a Chinese firm and it appears that much of the core development team abandoned the project and restarted under the name Vivaldi.
Proprietary, controlled by the Chinese Government, spyware, Chromium.
Vivaldi
If you absolutely have to use a Chromium project, then Vivaldi is the one, but at the end of the day it is still unfortunately Chromium.
Might I add brave's BAT wallet is garbage. You had to sign up to some random exchange and upload your ID (I didn't), but even that you couldn't even backup your wallet into a new install, so hope that you would never have to format or reinstall or change devices - it'll be a pain to restore, if it was even possible.
Firefox over brave any day.
I would recommend waterfox. I use it on windows, it doesn't run great on Linux so far so on my Linux machines I use Firefox.
I used to use Brave, then used Bromite but that got abandoned. I think there's another fork of it, but ultimately I just use Firefox which has worked better for me overall.
Browsers are a big attack vector for exploits and security is very important. Firefox releases patches regularly and I don't have to worry about it being abandoned like some others. I disabled whatever telemetry / sponsored stuff they have enabled by default and feel it's a good balance of security & privacy + doesn't have the DRM crap chromium is trying to add.
Their extension support is nice too.
I'll keep using and promoting it. I consider it better than Mozilla/FF anyway. Deal with it and stop telling people what they should and shouldn't do.
Why are there daily posts against Brave but not against other browsers? Is Google more trustworthy than Brave?
Because Brave likes to portray itself as privacy friendly. We already know Chrome, Edge and others aren't.
Newsflash: everything that isn't free and entirely open source is generally spyware these days.
It's amazing how we pilloried RealPlayer and burned its parent company to the fucking ground over two decades ago for far less egregious transgressions than what we now let Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc get away with.
I would be very curious what other browsers people recommend. I use Brave solely because of the profile feature it offers, which for my use case is an order of magnitude better than Firefox’s containers. Is there something more private/better than Brave that still has profiles?
I see this exact thread every week now and it's between the same people:
"Oh ok i stopped using it" to "Naw i'll keep using brave"
At this point can we stop this? Brave is trash but people are either too stubborn or just don't care anymore (which is ironic). Either mods just pin this thread and treat this as a "brave is trash" megathread or I don't know.
Just disable the ads, crypto and telemetry and suddenly none of those things are a problem anymore, just like Firefox.
I will
All you need to know is the Brave guy is a pedophile who is 100% using your ad revenue to buy csam.
Lol isn't eTrash considered a scam anyways? They are the reason i got ad blocker - dumbest ads on youtube 24/7.
Anyways sounds like you gotta be quite brave to use Brave lol
Please just stop flooding this community with Brave-related shit. We already know what a shitty browser it is, we aren't living under the rocks you think we are.
I've seen multiple people recommend it as a browser, so clearly some people need to hear this. There's no reason to not have a post like this, if you don't like it collapse it.
- I use brave on android, because there's not much choice. I really-really-really loved bromite, but noupdatess for like a year Recently I found out there's cromite so I think i will check that one out
- On desktop I use librewolf, only
- For any people using google chrome/yandex/edge/opera I install brave and disable all the crypto/advertising/crap. It would be nice to have a script that does it automatically. Or another browser that just doesn't have that
its open source tho, show me the spyware and i will belive you
I used to use Firefox but have been using Brave cause I was getting tired of having to open Edge every time there would be an addon or tool that was Chrome exclusive. So unless there's other options for privacy focused chromium browsers I'm just gonna stick with brave.
Not reading all that, still sticking to based Brave 😎
If you need a Chromium derivative, then Brave is probably the best choice. It's open-source, and includes ad blocking. Just don't use its crypto token.
I prefer Firefox over Brave, but sometimes I might need a Chromium derivative for a particular site.
Or just use Edge cause Microsoft is already syphoning your data so you might as well go the whole hog and use Edge
Why should I trust Mozilla over Brave? Just because Mozilla is a nonprofit subsidiary doesn't mean that they don't have an incentive to make money for their profit handling corporate division, the Mozilla Corporation. I tried playing around with Firefox and not having the option to directly add a less-used search engine than the ones given without extensions was pretty sketchy to me. All of the complaints people have about Brave like ads and the weird crypto thing are very configurable in the settings, and I have a lot less compatibility issues compared to Firefox. Also, the source linked claiming all of this is a sketchy Neocities site that anyone could have made that doesn't even prove why Brave isn't private. I get that people are loyal to their favorite browsers but this is silly. If you really want to be private, use the Tor network, but all browsers and extensions need to track you in some degree to function.
If people want to use Brave, or Windows, or install screen doors on their submarines who am I to complain?
The fact is for a lot of people, Brave offers a superior out of box experience compared to firefox or almost any other browser. In terms of ad blocking, speed and ease of use, it's pretty much second to none. The fact that you install it and go is really appealing and how easy they make the slider to adjust the aggressiveness of the script blocking is great ui that my dad mother could use.
Yes, the company isn't very good, it's headed by a guy with a questionable history and has a poor track record when it comes to monetization strategy. I stopped using Brave this year, but for ages it was my goto because I could just install it and have an improved web experience.
How about we just let users use what they want? I don't use Brave, but it has some legitimate anti-fingerprinting tech.
There are many, many good reasons to not use Brave. Being spyware is not one of those.
Boycott Brave for real reasons like their CEO and owner being a raging anti-gay reactionary or because of their cryptocurrency bs.