There are so many things wrong with brave. The whole business model is unethical, replacing ads from websites with their own. Brave uses a crappy “cryptomoney” which doesn’t mean anything (they could very well use a non-crypto virtual money, they only make it “crypto” to attract attention).
The CEO is homophobic, and now he expresses weird beliefs around COVID.
I’ve also seen brave being promoted by right-wingers. I don’t really know if their userbase is really skewed towards the right.
Personally I’ll stick with Firefox. Even if Mozilla is imperfect, they are actually working to make the Web better, by promoting diversity of browser engine, fighting harmful web standards, and leading the charge on many fronts regarding bettering the Web, not just adding a layer of bullshit that doesn’t help anyone. And when it comes to ads/tracker blocking, Firefox’s advanced tracking protection + uBlock origin is pretty much the best you can get.
yeah the fact that it came from a CEO who was fired from firefox for being homophobic is one of the main reasons I’ll never touch it with a 10 foot pole. It’s different from firefox in all the wrong ways, and some of the cooler things are just gimmicks.
AFAIK he wasn’t fired explicitly, but was forced to resign from is job as CEO due to public outrage.
some of the cooler things are just gimmicks
I totally agree with you on that point. The blockchain is here just to intrigue and make people think it’s cool, while it works just like any virtual money. (blockchain in general does have useful properties, bu when its centralised like it is in BAT).
Same goes with the TOR tabs. In most cases, a VPN is a much better solution than TOR.
Brave also seems to whitelist Facebook and Twitter’s tracking scripts
“There’s a balance between breaking the web and being as strict as possible”
The CEO is homophobic, and now he expresses weird beliefs around COVID.
This line had nothing to do with how shady the Brave browser is though.
My comment wasn’t entirely about the fact thar Brave was shady. It was just a list of reasons why I stay away from it, and why I recommend others to do too.
I don’t even think that “shady” is the right term for Brave. It’s not like they’re really hiding anything, the browser is Open Source, and their business model is clear. I just think it’s unethical, and that Brave doesn’t even try to attack the source of what’s wrong in the Web.
I agree with you on the Brave browser and all the cruft it includes but you’re missing my point. I’m saying it isn’t necessary to mention one’s character defects in relation to their product.
I’m saying it isn’t necessary to mention one’s character defects in relation to their product.
IMO it is. Brendan Eich is the CEO and founder of Brave. Brave is a private company, which he owns. He makes money from the Ads inserted by the browser. Many people don’t want to give this guy any money, and they’re right. It’s a point that will interest many, thus it is useful to bring it up.
If you think that you can support a company while disagreeing with the CEO, fine. But that doesn’t mean that the CEO’s actions should not be discussed.
Okay. By that logic:
“Tim Cook is a homosexual therefore I won’t buy his products because of his sexual orientation.”
Or…
“Marcos Abenante said hateful and racist things. I’m not supporting nor downloading his Brutal Doom project anymore”.
Is that what you’re saying? That’s ridiculous. Stay objective and out of the intersectional rabbit hole.
Marcos Abenante said hateful and racist things. I’m not supporting nor downloading his Brutal Doom project anymore
I don’t know who that guy is or if any of what you’re claiming is true, but if I played brutal doom and learned about something like that it would likely bother me indeed.
Tim Cook is a homosexual therefore I won’t buy his products because of his sexual orientation
This is completely different from what’s above. Tim Cook being Gay doesn’t harm anyone, while donating to hateful lobbies and denying basic science does.
yeah if the CEO of brave donates to hateful charities, and he’s making money from his scummy practices, then that is absolutely a valid criticism of the product.
This is completely different from what’s above. Tim Cook being Gay doesn’t harm anyone, while donating to hateful lobbies and denying basic science does.
Sure it can, depending on whichever ideology or philosophy people follow. I think it’s generally in bad faith to include such things outside the context of the original topic of Brave being sketchy.
Oh, wow. This is way worse than I thought. Fuck 'em and their slimy CEO.
I don’t understand what the CEO being homophobic has to do with it. The product is great, it doesn’t allow targeted advertising, he doesn’t invade our privacy and security, etc.
As for the “crappy cryptomoney”, I wouldn’t call it useless or crappy. I’ve gotten almost $28 from it for nothing, and using the Uphold app connected to your Brave browser you can exchange it for any crypto, or equity in other companies, or even by gold with it. It isn’t just a useless crypto and I think it’s kind of messed up I’ve gotten $28 from literally nothing while advertising companies are taking it all in with normal browsers.
I don’t understand what the CEO being homophobic has to do with it.
The CEO being homophobic means I don’t want to do anything that earns him money.
I don’t understand that though, (not trying to be a dick) I could understand it if he was prejudice, but he just doesn’t like them.
He donated money to anti gay marriage lobbies.
brave is definitely one of those semi libre projects that try to seem libre that stallman always warned us about
Why is the mastodon post saying “Is Brave slowly turning into Firefox”. What’s the problem with Firefox?
I swear most of the brave users I see are brainwashed and think brave is better then firefox when brave does shit like this and firefox doesnt have crypto currency shit built into the browser or an advertising platform
The only reason why Brave was cool to me was because of the speed it had. But after switching from Brave to Firefox, I don’t think speed is a problem anymore.
I wouldn’t say I’m brainwashed at all. I’d rather try a different browser than stick to Firefox, which (sadly) seems to be the token browser for the majority of FOSS enthusiasts. My primary reason for trying Brave was to avoid the invasive advertising and tracking in Firefox. From reading their extensive list of anti-fingerprinting measures, it seemed like well-placed hope.
I also find it hard to recommend a browser that enables Google Analytics, Adjust and Leanplum by default, without any sort of user confirmation. I did raise this on r/firefox, but my post got swamped with Firefox apologists.
Browsers definitely should not be creating new advertising subclasses, then enabling them by default. This is an issue with both Brave and Firefox. If the cryptography functions were not enabled by default, and caused no obstruction to my web browsing, I’d honestly be fine with it.
That being said, I’ve come to realise that my initial reason for using Brave doesn’t seem to have stood the test of time. Thank you for your (mostly reasonable) reply.
UXP is meowning you~
While FF has really bad JSengine and malloc, FF does prompt you to see the telemetry at startup of fresh install
Lots of things. I compared Brave to Firefox because Mozilla have been running an intrusive ad campaign, like the one featured in Brave.
You can turn it off in startup install which FF prompts
that’s interesting about the pushing sponsored links, never see this with ghacks userjs. one thing I did notice from running my dns through a kogger is that when you open a naked profile it goes beserk phoning home. for out of the box privacy, ungoogled chromiun is leagues ahead of firefox but I still use hardened firefox for competition reasons. if they crippled userjs I’d never use it.
Knew Brave was malicious, from it not being available on official repositories on any trusted distro.
Yes, I am using Brave Browser from time to time and I must agree with the issue, sadly. Every now and again, the rewards and Brave-ads re-enable themselves and after so many times it gets really annoying. Not even mentioning how intrusive the reward system is. It might be a nice feature, but why is it opt-out? After all, this was also one of the reasons I stopped using Brave as my daily browser.
Does anyone know of a better Chromium-based alternative?
Foss Chromium and Bromite are good.
You mean Ungoogled-chromium? The default version of chromium is already foss.
The name ‘ungoogled’ is too complicated. How can a Google software be foss?
Well several things from Google are open-source. Now to say it’s “libre” it’s better to use FLOSS. Otherwise people think it’s “free of cost”.
Basically, you have Chromium (open-source but with some Google shit in it) which is the base of Google Chrome (closed-source, with even more Google shit in it).
Some people made a fork from Chromium they called Ungoogled Chromium that removes the Google shit that was in it.
PS: Bromite is based on Ungoogled Chromium
deleted by creator
Chromium is still sponsored by Google, so they still represent the interests of Google I guess.
https://beakerbrowser.com/ Its open source, blocks ads by default, has a p2p system that is quite powerful and actively developed. Also has interesting features like have mulitple tabs open side by side like a wm and other cool things
I’m familiar with Beaker but thought it was just experimental for sharing web pages peer-to-peer. Is it useful for actual everyday browsing?
Yeah it works perfectly fine for everyday browsing
My favorite to use is Vivaldi. Not sure about its foss bona-fides, it’s just a pleasure to use.
Edit: It’s not FOSS, if that concerns you.
It is, thanks.
The goal of brave was supposed to be that you get money for watching the brave ads, which normally gets given to the websites you use the most.
To was supposed to break the parasitic targeted advertising ecosystem and give users control of where their ad money goes.
It would also lets you automatically donate an amount per month to the websites you use most.
Is this not true or does it not work?
Your description is actually right, but not as efficient as they told it would be. Put it all aside and it still a very good browser.
I’ve been using Brave for a while, so if anyone has any questions about it, I’d love to answer them.
This is an accurate description of it, but Brave also allows you to earn money. Brave blocks all normal advertisements by default. It then instead sends you a push notification style advertisement in the bottom right of your screen that you can click away in a second. You get paid for this advertisement whether you click it or not because why the hell shouldn’t you get paid for viewing advertisements, and other companies get it instead? I’m the one viewing it.
That aside, I download Brave on all of my devices and created/connected an Uphold wallet in March and got my first payout in February. I’m sitting at $27.61 CAD today for just clicking away the occasional advertisement - again not even looking at it.
I think this is the main thing with Brave. If I am getting this much money in less than a year from nothing at all, imagine what advertising companies are getting when you don’t get a cut of the profit yourself and they’re milking millions.
I liked the idea at first. But when i downloaded it, it wouldn’t let me donate my own money to websites without giving my real identity.
So I noped out.
Thank you for the information.
Come on guys, you can easily disable Brave Rewards program on your browser, if you dont like it just put it aside. Brave is a fast and private service if you so set it up right.
But at that point, why use Brave at all over the many alternatives?
Because it’s fast (Chromium) and have an efficient and smooth ads blocker. By few clicks you can keep only what matters to you.
They let you choose, it’s pretty honest.
The sad thing is: they have a lot of shit in opt-out instead of opt-in.
You’re kinda right, their message “you’re not the product” and showing you ads after is pretty confusing (maybe more than confusing lol). But i think they hit the reality that they were selling utopia and try to keep the project alive by making profit.
But it’s honest from them to let you choose to see ads or not, i mean it’s all open-source !
For the sponsored background i forgot they did that since i’m using another home tab, but anyway as you showed it, you can still disable it and it’s there at the first place because they need profit to live like any other product.
I think it’s fair enough.
Yes, I have nothing against their BAT cryptocurrency (you can disable it with a few clicks). The backgrounds were weirder, it should be in opt-in. They should just give an option like “to support Brave’s development, please activate ads on the home page” that would be a nice way of contributing.
But they can’t do that. Pretty much nobody opts into stuff. That’s why telemetry, and ad tracking are always opt-out. If brave did that, they would lose most of their source of revenue. The true issue is that they haven’t found a business model that’s not based on ads.
I still haven’t seen anyone actually try WhatsApp’s originally planned business model which was $1 per user per year. With 500 million users for example that’s $500 million, 1 million users > $1 million. It’s affordable and accessible, and IMO sustainable (don’t hire extra marketing and biz dev people if only 1 million are using the service). But it seems people don’t want to try this model because it prevents the ability to sell out to venture capital and make short term profits. Theoretically Brave could sell itself as a privacy focused browser with a built in ad-blocker for $1-2 a year, but it probably wouldn’t support all the extra staff at first. Once it got to a certain size though I believe the growth would expand exponentially from word of mouth and a fair business model.
With 500 million users for example that’s $500 million,
This is what I don’t understand about Mozilla. For 50 million you could have 150 well paid devs benefits, taxes included and people are worried about them scraping by on 500 million while firing good developers and puffing up management. Throw another 50 million in for 150 bus dev and managers. Maybe another 50 for the building and software, hardware. You still have hundreds of millions left over.
It reminds me of how universities have become these bloated administration heavy institutions with a higher ratio of bureaucratic staff to professors than ever before.
There was an economist, I think William Lazonick, that said the natural aim of organizations was not profit, but actually growth. So it didn’t matter if it was a non profit, a government, or a for profit company, management always seems to be focused on growing the organization. If there was only a way we could program it in for that not to happen ik some cases.
You would be surprised. I’ve seen weird things on Reddit. Users that said they lost those sponsored backgrounds and wanted them back and stuff like that.
There’s a wide difference between the what a few people say and what the majority will do.
Sure, but still I think you underestimate the “fanboyism” of Brave users :p Money is actually the all-time issue of free software.
