Hi. Not sure where to post this, hopefully it fits here. If you haven’t heard of Brave browser by now, it’s made by the ex-CEO of Mozilla, and is prided on being private, and integrates crypto/bitcoin.
I like the idea of crypto, and would like to get more into crypto/blockchain, but I’m not sure I can support brave, or it’s CEO. Do I swallow my pride and just use Brave? Would it be worth it, just for the privacy additions and crypto?
One reason I’m hesitant, is Firefox now has site-to-site cookie protection, whereas Brave does not. Mostly, I’m arguing with myself at this point, on whether to use Brave, and swallow my pride. Sure, as CEO of Mozilla, he made a bad political call. People can grow, right? Someone rebutted to me that Obama didn’t support gay marriage either, and neither did Hillary Clinton.
Sorry to harp on this topic so much. What would y’all do?
Sidenote: A breadtuber I really like uses brave, so Brave can’t be all that bad?
I feel like a broken record, but aside from having a homophobic CEO, Brave also has fascist funding!
One of their original investors was Peter Thiel, the souless monster financing Facebook, Palantir Technologies, and the despotic wing of the Republican Party.
Brave is really a cryptoscam like any other. Lack of monetization is not the problem on the Internet. Monetization in other areas of life is. As long as we try to “fix” the problem of content creators by finding new ways to exploit/track users to come up with advertisement money, we are ignoring “how to survive with all my bills” is a problem we have in all fields, not just for artists.
Brave has shown over the years they won’t hesitate for a second to introduce a very user-hostile change for all users if that brings them money. Trash it in the dumpster.
Also, it’s a worrying trend that most new Web 3.0 browsers as they like to call themselves all have strong JavaScript support. Client-side scripting is an anti-feature of the web and only Tor Browser includes a mechanism (Safest mode) to disable it. If you have JavaScript enabled, privacy/security is impossible by design.
PS: i downvoted because i’m strongly opposed to Brave’s recuperation strategy, not because your post in itself is bad :)
downvoted for the anti-javascript FUD unrelated to the topic at hand :p
This is not “anti-javascript FUD”. Javascript is a very well know security and privacy threat. It implement remote code execution by design. For example, it allows any website to run timing attacks https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+timing+attacks&t=h_&ia=web including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability) against vulnerable devices.
One of the browser’s draws are it’s advertising privacy features. Context being they have a quick-access panel of toggles in the user interface for javascript, third party domains, other useful things?
Brave is trying to spin what is ultimately an advertising model and is not private by design. Targeted ads = targeted surveillance
It’s a fork from Chromium. That’s millions of lines of code written by a tracking company. No fork in the world will unearth all those privacy-unfriendly design decisions. They may patch out the superficial, obvious tracking, but there’s still going to be plenty implementation details that could’ve been easily done in a more privacy-friendly manner.
And in addition to that, Mozilla actually spends quite a bit of time on innovating privacy protections, and accepts/maintains patches from the Tor Browser devs. The Total Cookie Protection (/State Partitioning) that you already mentioned, is just the latest fruit from that collaboration.
So, for privacy I would always recommend a Firefox-based browser. Tor Browser, if you need all the privacy you can get. Or otherwise Firefox, IceCat, LibreWolf, each with the right add-ons to achieve the amount of webpage breakage that you enjoy the most.
And now for the more politically correct section: Fuck homophobes. I am not aware of Brendan Eich having changed his mind, so fuck him as well.
I’ve heard of that Tor push thing. It’s cool that Firefox is first to implement it. Honestly, once Vivaldi gets better with battery life I’ll probably switch to Vivaldi.
Since you asked in the open source community, it’s worth mentioning that Vivaldi by their own admission “is part open-source, part closed-source”.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/
That said, it’s hard to find a pure open source browser since Firefox uses their closed source pocket api by default https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75
brendan eich’s wikipedia page is hilariously funny to me
anyways, about brave, it’s chromium, which has already been mentioned that it feeds into google’s monopoly. they’ve had their share of scandals and personally i see no reason to use it (although the crypto stuff for me is a negative). there’s tons of blog posts/etc that explain more why brave isn’t worth it to use. for daily browsing i just use firefox with ublock origin, and if i need chromium for whatever reason, i’ll use ungoogled-chromium (also with ublock origin)
as a side note, he did more than just not support gay marriage, he actively lobbied against it. (not to mention that obama and hillary clinton are not exactly model citizens)
Brave is Chromium. Using it directly benefits Google, this is enough to stay well clear.
As others have mentioned, they have shady ties. Just stay away, imo. There is no reason to use Brave.
Sidenote: A breadtuber I really like uses brave, so Brave can’t be all that bad?
Many people — including plenty of those who’re good with technology — are very naive about this topic. A breadtuber using it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
This thread made me rethink my usage of Brave and I am trying to use Firefox again.
Don’t and don’t be the “next stupid sucker” for the crypto-currency ponzi scheme scams.
Idk why you are getting downvotes for this pretty good question…
I guess people are downvoting this post just because they do not like Brave.
I called out a fearmongering and hatespeech article on ruqqus and got -6 votes, so it’s not that bad lol.
I don’t use Brave because of the cryptocurrency thing. “Basic Attention Token” sound dystopian. And if handing over your data for free to corporations is a bad idea, it’s also a bad idea even if you get a couple of bucks worth of cryptocurrency in the process.
Brave seems like it very much comes from the right wing “Libertarian” ideology.
Completely agree. Advertisement shouldn’t exist. I think that most of the time we can consider commercial advertisement as disinformation and don’t understand why some people praise something that wastes your time and try to mislead you.
Consensus here is pretty anti-Brave and there are definitely issues (e.g. no one has mentioned the bug that allowed your ISP to view TOR sites you visited in this browser, which is a really glaring problem) but I use it as my second browser for seeing how things look in Blink. As far as I’m aware, only Ungoogled Chromium is an option for FLOSS browsers based on Blink. My first will always be Firefox.
the bug that allowed your ISP to view TOR sites
It’s an honest mistake and is mostly not a problem. Brave browser was never meant for privacy. Tor project always strongly recommended to use Tor Browser NOT ANY OTHER browser for accessing .onion, precisely because of such problems… this is the first thing people are told when they start to use Tor: don’t use any other browser than Tor browser or you’ll have plenty of leaks of all kinds.
Degrees in hell if you ask me. To browse the web safely with proper functionality intact is an oxymoron and frankly a struggle as functionality diminishes for every safety measure taken.
Safe web is no web, welcome to c/gemini.
I’m not in the whole brave thing in. But… For me LibreWolf is for the desktop a better choice, it offers many more privacy settings and is based on Firefox. And on my Android I use “Privacy”. It disables JS at deafault and has some great handy tools. However, Brave doesn’t have such things. Also does Brave looks soo commercial.
It’s not entirely clear what your deciding factor is here on choosing a browser. If its privacy Brave is not it. There is still telemetry used, uses Google dependencies. Personally their privacy policy is dubious, they sell themselves on not serving ads but searches are done on Google by default. A pro of Brave is their anti-fingerprinting that’s pretty innovative.
Out of the box browsers I would recommend are GNU/Icecat, Tor browser paired with a VPN, specifically ungoogled chromium. Customized Firefox is still legit but takes some work. There are a few others out there but unfortunately little support really, small projects, Bromite on Android comes to mind. Check out privacytools DOT io , they have a good list of alternative apps.
https://matt.traudt.xyz/posts/vpn-tor-not-mRikAa4h/
Tor over a VPN is not a good idea at all.
Albeit is not advised to do so, it is not a strict convention that you should not use. I suggest reading this guide that explains the situations that VPN over TOR / TOR over VPN is advised. It’s very well documented. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity
Great read thanks. Not a very dissausive piece, does well going over pros/cons.
Icecat is good. I’ve been using Librewolf intermittently. The one browser, imo, at least, that could potentially rival brave, is the Classic browser. It’s cache-less, uses the hosts file to block all ads, and it has pretty nifty tools for blocking scripts.
The only thing brave is good for is getting BAT from clicking ads, and even that’s a trivial amount. Brave Rewards can be a convenient way to donate to websites and YouTubers who have been Brave verified, but otherwise it’s basically just Chrome with Tor. I remember hearing somewhere that Brave’s built-in Tor browser was not secure but idk the details about that. Brave is not good for privacy. Use LibreWolf or something similar if you need something that respects your privacy.
There were leaks of users that used Tor. Their DNS was leaked along with their searches when using Tor in Brave. It’s since been fixed, though.
you do know you not only don’t have to click the ads to get the BAT, but the devs actively recommend you don’t click them if you’re not interested in the product, right?
I know you can get BAT from sponsored images without clicking. It’s been a long time since I used Brave. I did have to click ads when I used it. I was not aware that they changed that feature.
never changed, it has always been like this
Oh no, I didn’t know there was a culture war aspect to the Firefox vs Brave thing.
