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?
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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.
Oh my, what will I do then, nowadays everything needs javascript. are we doomed?
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
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.
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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
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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.
Don’t and don’t be the “next stupid sucker” for the crypto-currency ponzi scheme scams.
This thread made me rethink my usage of Brave and I am trying to use Firefox again.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Oh no, I didn’t know there was a culture war aspect to the Firefox vs Brave thing.
Someone rebutted to me that Obama didn’t support gay marriage either, and neither did Hillary Clinton.
uh oh
Re: privacy additions - I use it on iOS only for the shield toggle interface (ie I disabled the reward and vpn fluff.) Have disabled cookies. Brave user protections are as user friendly to operate as the DDG browser is obfuscated (as in DDG has one toggle called GPC, that does literally nothing.)
On desktop, Firefox built-in protection (third party cookies disabled, everything else as strict as possible) plus a few choice extensions is pretty nice.
So my two cents is that Brave is only worthwhile on iOS where you can’t install browser extensions into Firefox…
Re: blockchain / human decency - I’m glad they’re pushing on a complex surface that Google Contributor veered away from in horror as that builds awareness of a variety of issues, ie: I’m not sold on how they implemented / their website refuses to render anything without javascript running so that’s a massive knock against them in my careless opinion. I wish librepay was as ubiquitous as patreon (stopped loading on my browser eventually due to some newly added and unknown required third party asset that I have no interest in troubleshooting…ask me what I think about google recaptcha.) The blood that lubricates the grindstone here is https://stripe.com/pricing#pricing-details which incidentally works perfectly without javascript
I read on brave’s website they are using ex-Cliqz developers to develop their own brave search engine. Cause Cliqz was privacy-oriented…Their privacy practices weren’t good from what I recall.
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