I’ve seen a lot of people on the community say that brave is bad and has made quite a lot of questionable decisions. But Firefox itself also has made equally bad decisions. Mozilla has faced ongoing criticism regarding their default settings, their approach toward users, the high compensation of their CEO at over $3 million USD annually, and their investments in various companies that may not align directly with their core mission. Additionally, there have been instances where Firefox has implemented a temporary, one-time tracker that transmits certain data to Google during the initial installation on Windows or Mac systems. Brave has also undoubtedly made such decisions as well but the point here is that Both Firefox AND Brave have made questionable decisions and to specifically dunk on brave just because it’s chromium is unfair in my opinion. That’s all, thanks for reading my post :)
No, after Brave installed a service level running VPN without my consent, and continued to reinstall it silently every background update even after removal, it’s a bad browser. That’s what malware does.
Comparing two companies with poor track records doesn’t make them good companies when compared to each other.
Just pasting more info for those that were concerned, like me:
Issue. This was rolled back and only seemed to affect Windows.
(I don’t use Brave as a daily driver, but it’s my Chromium browser of choice when I need assess if a website is really broken, or if it’s just misbehaving on Firefox.)
The issue with this is that it’s a part of an overall picture - that Brave sees nothing wrong with violating users’ boundaries. Brave 100% needs forks that would disable or remove weird non-consensual things added silently in updates, like what Librewolf is to Firefox, except Brave imo pushes the boundaries even more.
There was a fork, from students which got silenced with legal letters because they named the fork Braver-Browser and its a copyright to copy the name.
If you are using Windows, double-check your services.msc to ensure that the VPN was disabled/removed. After I got tired of fighting, I uninstalled Brave and the uninstaller did not remove the VPN service. So I have my doubts the patch would remove it.
What’s the name of the program I’m looking for?
I don’t think I’ve had their VPN installed (I use FF, Librewolf and Mullvad 99.99% of the time), but I do have Brave installed as a 4th option and have only used it a few times, so I’d like to make sure their VPN wasn’t installed at some point.
In Services, I only see three Brave entries. Two are for keeping it up to date, and the other provides elevated privileges.
Thanks
It was a few years back that I dumped Brave and had to perform the surgery to remove the service manually. I can’t remember the name exactly, but this article says “Brave VPN Service” and “Brave VPN Wireguard Service”. You sound like you don’t have it installed.