I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can’t recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
lmao still thinking moz corporation is your friend
Firefox. The slowest browser, the least compatible browser, the most annoying when it comes to bugs and issues (Firefox snap anyone?)
I just cannot disagree more. You seriously have to gaslight yourself into liking it.
What a strange take. I switched from Opera to Firefox like 15+ years ago (whenever Firefox added extensions, so I could use Mouse Gestures (why I was on Opera in the first place))
I never have issues with compatibility or speed. I don’t use Google products so I don’t have Chrome to compare it to, but it’s certainly as fast as/faster an IE/Edge.
Firefox has been my browser for eons, but I admit I think Edge is faster. It doesn’t matter to me in the end though.
Edge feels like the same speed to me, but our household has monster computers!
Edge is Chrome.
*Chromium, which is not the same. But I get your point.
Yes, there is a difference, but it’s minor and big stuff, like adblocking not working as well, are true of Chrome and Chromium.
Wow, that is quite a presumption there. Every couple years I try Chrome again and I am done with it in a few hours. The thing is archaic and its interface uncustomizable. And the only reason it could maybe have more compatibility is because of its market share and peoples’ bias towards it. There was once a time over ten years ago when it was good, but it’s not anymore. Not to mention the privacy issues.
Firefox has been my browser for 10 years or longer.
To each their own.
Every couple of years I try firefox, and it doesn’t take me long to be disappointed. Usually just some random incoherent firefox incompatibility with a major feature like logging in on a site or something.
Mozilla are dicks already lol
How so? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything negative against the company, but I’d love to know if I missed something.
deleted by creator
I can’t find the sources right now but it’s being shit I’ve been reading over the years. It goes from employee complaints against the corp, them not using donation money in the browser, etc.
I’ve seen an employee complaining about the impossible deadline they put for Firefox for Android, leading for the browser to come out filled with bugs, while also being very underpaid for a tech worker. In another news, the company direction has been getting huge raises for some years already.
Also, the money you donate isn’t going to the development of the browser. You can notice it as well, since the browser is very subpar when compared to Chromium. Mozilla isn’t making a good job at all and even though I still use Firefox, Mozilla has become a money bank for greedy directors, and I don’t support it at all.
You’re going to need to cite some sources for these fairly wild claims.
You can notice it as well, since the browser is very subpar when compared to Chromium
This is the most egregious lie of the bunch. Firefox is extremely close in terms of features, performance, usability, HTML/JS/CSS support, developer tools, etc. It’s privacy tools are, if anything, significantly better. And once Manifest v2 extensions stop being supported by Chrome (which is coming next year) it’ll have significantly better adblocker support.
Performance? That’s a big lie, performance-wise Firefox is very bad even compared to Safari. Dev tools I can agree with you, and the other CSS it’s on par with Chromium imo.
HUGE lie. Firefox is so freaking slow compared to basically anything else.
I don’t think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.
I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I’m switching to Firefox tomorrow.
Yep, exactly my thought too. I’ve made too many hops but none of these products truly offer privacy.
I moved from Telegram to Signal for security only to learn more and more about the holes in Signal. At least Proton Mail is fine.
Yeah can I get adblock on iPhone with Firefox?
You can use pihole and route your traffic there with a vpn such as tailscale to block ads and more
On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?
I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.
I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.
The problem isn’t the ads, it’s the quantity. And they turn themselves into OS level alerts, that you train yourself to ignore
You can literally choose the quantity that you want to see though. You’re choosing to have them pop up, and how often, based on how much you want to earn. You can choose none, or every option between 1 and 10 per hour. I choose 10 because then I get paid the most and I literally just click “close” on the little popup that comes up in the bottom right of the screen, or I just ignore it.
Have you actually used it?
Not since the last time they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
So if my information is out of date, whoops. But they are still scumbags, particularly with that CEO
deleted by creator
I thought it was supposed to be the best privacy browser but after reading these comments my view has changed completely and have switched all devices to Firefox.
the payouts
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they’d offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.
It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.
My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.
deleted by creator
It’s the hype from Cryptobros pushing it because it has crypto functionally and its own shitcoin.
Personally, I never liked how it wants to monetize your browsing time constantly and pushes a lot of crypto shit in its advertising. Vivaldi is much better as an alternative imo.
deleted by creator
Oh, Vivaldi. I really want to love it, I love the interface and general ideas, but the fact that in 2023 they didn’t manage yet to have an app for iOS and decided to focus first on embedding an email client inside the browser throw me off the boat. Also, there were plenty of bugs often with new releases. Maybe now it’s better but a few years ago it was quite annoying.
I guess you can install whatever browser Apple lets you then.
The reason why Vivaldi is not on iOS or iPadOS is because Vivaldi hasn’t developed it, not because Apple doesn’t let them in. All the other browsers are on iOS.
deleted by creator
I used Brave for a out 6 months, but I’m really turned off by the devs. I switch to FF and am loving it. It’s much improved from when I last used in decades ago.
I use it as my main browser and I honestly can’t go back to Firefox, but I really dislike some parts of it and of it’s community. The browser itself is fast, its default ad-blocker is awesome and there are a couple functionnalities that are nice to see, like Tor integration. But they block ads to show you their ads instead, that you cannot block even if you deactivate the “Brave Rewards”. The whole reward system in BAT is kind of shady; they need to authenticate you before you can withdraw anything and it’s worth peanuts anyway. When I complained about those issues on reddit, I got answers that looked like they were produced by sect members, and it wasn’t even on a related sub.
deleted by creator
I really despise Firefox because (checks notes) I, uhh… love giving Google hegemony over web standards?
Sure, I can, but it would be a hassle and I’m kind of comfortable with what I have now. The first thing that hit me when I tried to get back to firefox (a couple weeks ago) was actually the time to load a page. It felt long compared to what I am use to. Sure it’s anecdotic, but I opened a game called factoryidle that ran capped at 200 fps on Brave, it was only at 70-80 fps on Firefox. The adblocker I had installed was also inferior to Brave’s. I guess it may be due to some extensions or I don’t know, but something was wrong and I didn’t want to do the effort to fix it.
It’s like I want to believe, but as you say, I’m too lazy. I will try Ungoogled Chromium since you recommand it.
deleted by creator
Can I ask where you see Brave ads? I deactivated everything and haven’t seen any of their own ads
If you use Brave News (to display a RSS feed), you get “news” about Brave’s functionnalities. They appear as any other widget in your feed, but are marked as “Advertisement” on the upper right corner. Here is an example from my feed : https://imgur.com/a/RJV2Px2 .
Looks like it’s not the case anymore, but when I opened a new tab, some time ago, I used to get ads from Binance or other cryptocurrencies exchanges displayed as “cards” on the right of the window. Right now, I only get “cards” showing about “Brave Talks” or rewards, but it used to be advertisement about other products, such as Binance or other cryptocurrency company.
I can’t reproduce it right now, but some “new tab” backgrounds are (or were) also advertisement for crypto-related products.
There was also a controversy some time ago where they were injecting their own referral link when you typed a cryptocurrency exchange’s URL on the search bar : https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caught-adding-its-own-referral-codes-to-some-cryptcurrency-trading-sites/ . They stopped after it got viral.
At least they are tagging their ads as such, but it’s weird how you can’t block any of it when they decide it’s there.
I see, thanks for explaining. I used to get ads on every other new tab, but found that I could disable that in the Customize menu. I’ve only been using Brave for a few months, but it’s been a really good experience as it’s been the fastest browser for me, especially for maps. I still use Librewolf as well, which I highly recommend. I am privacy-focused, but honestly this article doesn’t deter me from using the browser and it seems like a lot of the comments here didn’t read the article or don’t understand that Brave Browser is different from Brave Search. I’ve been happy with Duck Duck Go for years, so I don’t use Brave Search.
Brave ads are opt-in.
At some point you opted-in.
If you don’t like it, then next time opt-out now or don’t opt-in next time.
I opted out and I still see ads. That’s the problem.
that’s why I point people at librewolf
It’s a shame that there isn’t a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn’t have much by the way of good ad blockers.
It’s a shame that
there isn’t a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn’t have much by the way of good ad blockersApple infringes on your property rights by refusing to relinquish control of your device to you, the owner, even after they “sold” it to you.FTFY.
A little agressive, but yes, they dont reliquish access to your devce after purchase. “Calling home” being the catch-all term for devices that are fully or parially sending requests to its true owners for commands to run or data to give.
deleted by creator
What are your setting os Firefox? What do you recomend?
install just adblock origin and consentomatic and the quality of your internet experience will increase 10 fold. that’s really all you need and then you can add on some more extensions later.
deleted by creator
The Containers extension is the only thing you really need IMO. Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
deleted by creator
lol no, firefox without adblock origin is like sex with a hooker with no condom.
With First Party Isolation is place, containers now add up very little to your privacy to be honest. They are mostly helpful in convenient compartmentalization of your browsing activities without actually having two different browsers.
Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
Partially incorrect. There is unnecessary telemetry that you would prefer to get rid of, for an example there is a setting for extensions recommendation as you browse. Also, probably because of their deal with Google, Firefox defaults to Google’s location services even though Mozilla has its own. You may want to change that as well for better privacy. I am only citing a handful few examples, there is more for you to dig in. uBO is a must have with right set of filters enabled according to your own privacy threat vectors. There is a reason hardening is a common practice among Firefox users.
Didn’t Firefox install adware on everyone’s instance in an overnight update? Like idk why people swoon over Firefox.
Lol, no
I dont know what you mean exactly, mabe fennec (and other ff forks) is keeping me safe from these changes
Brendan Eich, the guy who co-founded Firefox and developed Javascript, is the CEO of Brave. His politics aside, I think he’s a pretty trustworthy guy.
I hate to burst your bubble but when it comes to 6-7digits of cash at stake what does “trustworthy” even mean? You mean between millions and his word to you he will choose his word? His previously stated values and principles?
The guy who made waterfox seemed pretty nice, friendly, committed to the cause, then sold the project to a data-miner, and so did the honest people who made startpage, the trustworthy privacy minded search engine? Now they see waterfox is independent again and not part of the big multi-natinal data miner.
Mozilla once again made a sudden change that breaks your previous profile or other functionality and if you dare roll back the upgrade your profile has been ruined in transition, so you are forced to start from scratch reconfiguring, setting up you std tabs, bookmarks, history … Same stuff with TB, addons/plugins disabled, new “features” added, whether you trust them or not, added dependencies … you roll back you lose.
The google chrome-engine is so intrusive in the way it runs, degoogled or not, it is hell to have on a system. Maybe inside a vm without anything else other than specific browser session may be ?ok? for fluff work, nothing private I hope.
The naivity of people to accept and sometimes welcom large corporations producing FOSS is what got us to this mess, and I don’t mean users, but devs, distro managers, … if it is legally FOSS it is OK, even if it is a huge trojan horse manufactured by corporations to penetrate an other wise safe and secure system. FOSS - no corporate involvement - may be it, but will it boot? LinFound. gets millions and millions to have board seats to influence kernel, and it seems to be dancing with their wishes.
So if Firefox and Chrome are dogshit, what do we use to browse the web?
lynx elinks links :)
I think FOSS is enough because as long as you can fully read the code, it can be audited and even forked to remove BS. So I’m fine with companies developing FOSS. I don’t even really care about EEE. We can always maintain a fork of the standard at the moment you fucked with it. We can even still get your upstream changes just with the shit cherry picked out! It’s always a win.
Have you audited any of it? Would you like to try gcc or systemd for that matter? By the time you go through 1% of it the code has changed already. How many times in the past years has tremendous security breaches been caused by FOSS and was discovered months after it was in effect, and some of this by coincidence, or corporate teams that review code.
The fact I haven’t doesn’t mean I can’t read auditors who have, who do keep track of these changes. Zero days are usually caused by things no one noticed, not things that were intentionally added by corporate overlords to spy or back door a FOSS app.
Speck was pushed and provided by Google to linux, they added the content to the kernel having your naive belief, it was later found containing a backdoor to ALL systems, and Google raised their hands up and said it was passed to us by NSA. Is this what happened? Or did I dream all this up?
Facebook provided 0 FOSS, not a bit, suddenly they make an algorithm they “bought” including the author, and make it foss, to build it it needs google software, like a bush fire more than half of distributions adopt it and all data provided as comparative to xz are false, based on poor use of xz to make zstd appear better, while still admitting zstd can never attain the level of compression, but it is fast (ONLY when xz is run on a single thread while zstd is multithread by default). They claim xz sums are different when run on 1 cpu or many, still not true.
Just wait for that bomb to explode, the guy who wrote the code for zstd doesn’t seem possible to have enough knowledge to write it, he appears as a front for something.
Things that smell like shit don’t have to be actually tasted to be called shit.
Fair points.
Brendan Eich, the guy who… developed Javascript
You say that as if it’s a point in his favor, LOL.
If not for that asshole, we could’ve had a decent language embedded in the browser, like Scheme or Python!
I mean… if there wasn’t someone inventing a usable open source language for the browser it could have been some weird proprietary Microsoft language and our sites would still look like web 1.0
I didn’t mention Scheme and Python randomly; they were the other options Netscape was considering.
Oh.
What he took credit for he didn’t invent himself, Also he is a total piece of shit.
Brave is just too shady and I hate that it’s considered a “privacy” browser by people who don’t know better.
Brave is just too shady
It’s amazing how so few people seem to understand that Brave’s entire business model is an extortion racket wrapped in a crypto scam.
Of course, both that and the new bullshit described in this article is all just par for the course from the guy who (a) inflicted the abomination that is Javascript upon the world, and (b) got booted from Mozilla for being a bigot.
I found the juxtaposition of your comment to the one below yours to be pretty funny.
I love how you added yellow border for clarity
(I’ve screenshotted lemmy comments before and it looks utterly confusing without border lol)
Well, it doesn’t help that privacyguides.org lists both Brave browser and search as recommendations.
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don’t understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
You might want to look into NewPipe then. Lets you do all those things with YT, plus you can also download the videos or their audio only
I’m on an iPhone, which I why I don’t use all the other things Android people suggest.
Brave has been about the only thing I’ve found that works and is easy for iPhone.
That is unfortunate, newpipe is awesome, dare I say better than YouTube Premium.
Yeah, I mean Brave seems to give me all the features premium does, at least the ones I want. I have a Google account specifically for YouTube watching with which I’ve trained/brute-force-hidden-trash to the point the algorithm 99% of the time gives me what I’m interested in, so it’s pretty simple to pop open the browser and put something on to listen to on a drive.
Newpipe doesn’t use the algorithm (besides the feed for popular but you don’t really contribute to it though) which is actually one of the reasons I like it because it allows me to cut down on my watch time (though I also tend to listen much more than watch nowadays).
It does have downloads too, admittedly I never use this feature but it is neat because you can choose the format and quality which goes above even premium’s choices for quality.
3rd party solutions for these corporate run apps truly are amazing!
I do download on my desktop with an extension (I think it’s just called “YouTube downloader”) or something.
Downloading videos is a regular habit not just to bypass ads but because the videos can disappear for everything from corporate to personal to esoteric reasons.
I use Revanced, personally, but also have NewPipe installed.
You could check out uYouPlus then, it doesn’t require jailbreaking or anything but instead works through “sideloading”. I’ve used it for years and it’s honestlygreat:
I’ll look at it further thanks.
If you’re on apple I’d recommend giving Orion browser a try. It blocks all ads by default, including YouTube. It’s become my default browser on all my devices.
Try 1Blocker and Safari. I’ve had a way better, less buggy experience using that combo as opposed to Brave. I used Brave almost exclusively for ages but found that it was killing my battery life and processor. I have a five year old iPhone 8 and swapping breathed new life into it. It also solved an issue I had where I couldn’t get captions to work while using Brave but there’s no such issue on Safari
On iPhone you are using WebKit no matter what browser you use. Unfortunately it is the same deal with Firefox too. In addition, Apple isn’t forgiving when it comes to their customers privacy and security. They actually “sell” this comfort in their adverts. So it would be crazy if they pulled their windows and Android tricks on Apple.
Iirc the debian of browsers is iceweasle.
IceWeasel EOL’d 6 years ago
I find console text only browsers more effective than iceweasel, when pages break with iw you get no text, at least with links/elinks/lynx you get the text.
I use Brave occasionally, but Firefox has been my #1 for the past 100 years or so. I stopped using Firefox as my only browser after they overhauled the interface. I really miss classic Firefox with my tabs on bottom, old search engine bar, and endless customizations.
I still remember why: Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, the man who would go on to found Brave, for donating to Christian charities in the politically polarised climate of 2016. After Eich went, they also quietly purged any other employees that showed even a hint of conservative sympathies in their internet presence. They then went on to “experiment” with pushing browser ads on users, and while they eventually ended the experiment because of massive user backlash, they still made no apologies and didn’t abandon the idea. Just made a final public response dripping with PR bullshit with a patronising conclusion along the lines of “internet users just aren’t ready for this change yet”.
Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you’re marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
I don’t understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
They replaced links to crypto exhange Binance with their own affiliate links that they profit from without the users concent. It’s bad because they did it behind their user’s backs hoping no one would notice. Makes me question what else they’re not telling me about.
Ok.
Brave had a thing where if you went to website.com, they would add /ref=brave to the URL so they get a kickback as if you clicked on their referral link.
Sneaky? Sure. A huge scandal? I don’t think so. No user data was being collected, no privacy was being violated. If I was the company doing the referral system I’d be mad, but as a user, it does not affect me at all.
Firefox fanatics just need something to point to and say “brave bad firefox good” and that is the worst thing they can find on Brave. It’s all browser wars to them, like iPhone vs Android or Xbox vs Playstation.
The article in this post also does not affect users in anyway, and has been updated after Brave responded, with most of the worst claims of the article now retracted.
Thank you.
Stealing referral URLs is lowest kind of spyware/malware tactics. Topmoxie which was another for of advanced java app coming with Limewire did it.
Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.
The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.
Also, he invented JavaScript. He got on my shitlist permanently for that alone.
deleted by creator
What does his political donations have to do with brave’s misconduct here?
That’s why i use Firefox.
I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products… :(
It’d be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I’d love an open and private search engine that isn’t just a meta search :(
Edit:
Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren’t just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you’re looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites
Yep doesn’t come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)
Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn’t seem have any kind of summary or answers function.
I think I’ll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I’m having a hard time finding something.
I switched to Duck Duck Go and Firefox and have never looked back.
Brave always seemed kinda scummy to me, like they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.
didn’t ddg have it’s own problems a while ago?
I don’t really wanna use a meta search engine that just pulls their results from bing or google though. That doesn’t seem like a sustainable way to build an actual alternative, since eventually google and Microsoft may just choose to change their api terms of service. I’d much prefer to support something independent if I can
Thats no reason for you to switch, just an explanation for why I went with brave. I switched to duckduckgo first and found the results weren’t great for me, so I changed to brave anf have found the results better, and they have their own index rather than taking other people’s search results, but instead they’re taking other people’s web content and selling rights to it 🙃. The company seems a little… Lacking :(
Don’t let the Firefox fanboys cloud your judgement with their constant shilling. Most of the claims in the article have been retracted after Brave responded, and the issue didn’t affect users anyway.
Also, Brave is a completely independent search engine now, which is why they have web crawlers like the guy in the article is complaining about. And speaking of a distributed crawler, Brave Browser has an opt-in feature for that where sites you visit will be indexed by Brave Search.
Brave Search is the only real contender to be an actual competitor for Google Search, but these Firefox fanatics have such a hate boner for Brave they just want to see it fail. All of their arguments against Brave really aren’t serious and don’t affect users at all.
I mean personally for myself, was gonna use Firefox regardless- I’d rather support the open source option and web engine that isn’t chromium based; the question for me was whether to use brave search, and if brave search was providing rights to web content to those who’d like to use it for AI training. I had generally liked brave search okay as my google replacement (though I will say I tired quant looking for a brave alternative because of this article, and qwant is pretty good too! I’ve been impressed!)
Not disclosing sites are being crawled is iffy, but I genuinely do understand the justification given in the email reply that the article updated to add- as long as they’re not selling rights to other people’s content for AI training.
I’m a little out of my depth here from a technical perspective so that probably doesn’t help, but honestly between the comment provided by brave and the original authors interpretation of the email response they received, the whole situation feels pretty muddy. The author and brave seem to be kind of fundamentally at odds about what they’re describing brave as doing, so it’s a little hard to gauge. Even if brave is accurately describing the product they provide (“it’s an api you can make calls to to get ai outputs based on web content”) which doesn’t seem totally consistent with some of the descriptions on their api products page, it still feels somewhat ambiguous because of the fact that websites can’t opt out of their content being provided through an api, whether it’s been filtered through a LLM or not. It all seems very, very mudy; hard to make heads or tails of. I’ll be curious to see any additional updates to the article.
Most of the claims in the article have been retracted after Brave responded
That’s not true, the author pretty explicitly maintained the most important claims…
and the issue didn’t affect users anyway.
So…? You can do unethical things without it affecting the user…? There’s an argument to be had around whether it’s unethical, but it not affecting the user is frankly kinda irrelevant.
Also, Brave is a completely independent search engine now
Indeed! That’s why I was using them. If folks are looking for a brave alternative with their own index though, I’d say qwant has seemed very competitive, and it like their interface even better, though they do lack the helpful ai summary tool- perhaps both for better and worse.
which is why they have web crawlers like the guy in the article is complaining about.
That’s definitely not what he was complaining about. He was complaining about how they’re crawling the web. Tons of people have crawlers, but most do a better job of respecting website consent than brave seems to (even if brave may have understandable reasons, which they might), and that’s especially important given the broader context of the story.
Brave Browser has an opt-in feature for that where sites you visit will be indexed by Brave Search.
Yes, that’s exactly what I was referring to… It’s a cool feature, and I wish Firefox would implement it and maybe use the results to make an open source web index that any alternative search engines could use to supplement their own indexes in order to support competition with bing and google.
Brave Search is the only real contender to be an actual competitor for Google Search
That’s an entirely baseless assertion, I literally listed 3 alternatives to brave, all of which have their own index (and I’m pretty sure there are others, but I may be mistaken), and of those 3 I’d say qwant provides very competitive search results with brave, maybe even better. I plan to keep testing them but its cool for there to be more than one decent private search engine that isn’t a meta search!
All of their arguments against Brave really aren’t serious and don’t affect users at all.
That’s the second time you make this argument and it still doesn’t matter. If were to steal the entirety of other people’s content and copy it 1-1 without attribution that doesn’t affect users either, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean its okay. And I already explained that it genuinely is ambiguous whether what brave is doing is okay- if they’re selling people’s content to train large language models, that’s definitely serious, and for right now it does remain kinda ambiguous whether they’re doing that or not
I get that you’re frustrated and feel like people are biased against something you like, but getting angry, making poor arguments to defend a corporation that doesn’t care about any of us, and calling everyone who says they prefer not to support Brave is more shill-like behavior than the folks you’re frustrated with, it might be worth dialing it back a bit.
Edit: adjusted wording for accuracy, and some of my original wording felt a little more passive aggressive than it need end to be (and some of it kinda still is but I’m tired and don’t wanna edit more 😅 apologies for tone that comes across as somewhat hostile)
just a few counter points:
-
brave is open source too
-
AI copyright precident has not been set by courts, there is no precident for any of this. i don’t see why this is such a big deal you’d stop using their search.
-
As a pirate, I think copyright law is bullshit anyway and holds us back as a species. Most copyright law is outdated and stunts creativity and innovation
-
most people only care if it affects them. which this does not. it is relevant because that is how people operate if they’re not virtue signaling
-
there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. every large organization does some shady shit. Brave in comparison to most hasn’t done anything to warrant such a huge campaign against them. maybe some criticism, sure.
-
I meant brave is the only good alternative to Google. all the others have terrible results. Brave is almost as good as google
-
and I’m not defending a corporation, I am just tired of Firefox fans jumping on any small thing and making a mountain out of a molehill to try and save their dying browser market share
-
also no idea why you think I’m angry about this. I’m just annoyed at the constant Firefox circlejerk/astroturfing campaign
brave browser is open source too
I actually didn’t realize that, thank you for pointing that out to me. I do generally feel better about supporting Mozilla’s web engine since otherwise chromium has a monopoly and google has generally been shitty with the power that has granted them in the market, and Mozilla has generally done a great job of championing a free, open, and inter-compatible internet, but that’s a personal choice on my part; chromium will be better suited to the needs of plenty of users 🤷🏻
AI copyright precident has not been set by courts, there is no precident for any of this. i don’t see why this is such a big deal you’d stop using their search.
I don’t really agree that because something isn’t illegal its therefore okay. Especially when its because laws haven’t has a chance to catch up. But regardless, laws don’t determine whether something is good or right.
As a pirate, I think copyright law is bullshit anyway and holds us back as a species. Most copyright law is outdated and stunts creativity and innovation
I generally agree, I think modern copyright law is broken as all fuck and only exists to further the interests of massive companies at the expense of everyone else. But I do think its important for people who do creative labor to be able to profit off of doing so, which requires some amount of protection since intellectual labor can be copied without doing the labor again. Coming up with a novel idea or writing an article requires creative labor, but copying them does not, as opposed to like manufacturing a physical product, which generally requires the same effort and resources to reproduce (all other factors being equal). But modern interpretation of intellectual property law is complete and utter bullshit, I 100% agree. That being said, if brave is selling people’s content that required intellectual labor to produce, personally I find that pretty unequivocally wrong, the question is whether that’s the actually the case here, and the nature of AI, plus the ambiguity around the specifics of this situation, really muddy the water.
most people only care if it affects them. which this does not. it is relevant because that is how people operate if they’re not virtue signaling
I absolutely disagree that anyone who cares about issues that don’t directly affect them is virtue signalling- to me the term ‘virtue signaling’ intrinsically implies that someone’s care about an issue is disingenuous or insincere. And I also think that only caring about issues that directly affect you is a horrible way to go through life. I’m getting the impression that we may have somewhat fundamentally different worldviews on this subject; to me, caring about things that are harmful or damaging to others even if they don’t affect me directly is a moral imperative unless I wish to loose any shred of respect I may have for myself. I think we could go back and forth on whether most people do or don’t actually care about issues that don’t directly affect them, but I am generally of the mind that people should. If you look at this differently I understand, and am more than happy to chalk this up to a difference in worldviews.
there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. every large organization does some shady shit. Brave in comparison to most hasn’t done anything to warrant such a huge campaign against them. maybe some criticism, sure.
I don’t think that just because nothing can be perfect that one option can’t be less bad than another. That being said, I’m really not super in the loop on any controversies that have happened with Brave though, I honestly have no idea whether they’ve been involved in past wrongdoing or not. I’ve definitely seen bad press they’ve gotten, and I’d never really enjoyed how closely integrated crypto stuff is with their browser (I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with crypto, it’s just been involved in so many scams it makes me warry at this point, especially if it’s showing up somewhere that doesn’t feel like it belongs like a browser) but that was never a big enough deal that I felt it should affect whether I use something of theirs like a search engine. If this turns out to be nothing then I’ll likely just decide between qwant and brave based on preference, I’m curious to continue comparing them and see how they stack up against each other.
I meant brave is the only good alternative to Google. all the others have terrible results. Brave is almost as good as google
That’s fair, that’s what I understood you to mean, I just don’t know that I agree it’s the only meaningful competitor. Though I do certainly agree there aren’t many, and brave is among the best options. Like I said, I’m genuinely really curious to continue comparing brave, qwant, and probably also mojeek though so far it hasn’t impressed me as much. I think there may have been others I considered before going with Brave I could continue comparing, but I’d need to find them again. Techlore on YouTube said he ended up picking brave for search so when I got tired of duckduckgo, I kinda just ended up using Brave.
and I’m not defending a corporation, I am just tired of Firefox fans jumping on any small thing to try and save their dying browser market share
I can understand that frustration. Personally I’m super happy with Firefox and am glad to support it, but I think the open source world in general can kinda just “be like that” sometimes when they feel its better to support one project or another. I often agree with them on what I’d like to support, but I do think there are helpful and unhelpful ways to express one’s opionons on that kinda subject, and people often express them in a way that just kinda sucjs sucks. I think its kinda just an eventuality that discourse ends up that way, given the open source community’s particular cultural mix of genuine care about supporting good projects, varrying levels of “moral superiority” mindset about said projects they support, and the echo chamber aspect of any online community with lots of people sounding off about what they think and why. It really can get frustrating, especially if you’re supporting a project that isn’t what the general majority has chosen to support.
I appreciate your willingness to engage in sincere discussion with me :)
Thanks for the understanding and reasonable reply. I also appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
I don’t even dislike Firefox, I have it installed on my PC and my phone alongside Brave. And I don’t think Brave is completely undeserving of criticism either, just not to the extent that it is portrayed at large.
Of course. Always nice to have real conversation with someone online 😊
And get what you’re saying, I’ll be keeping what you’ve had to say in mind as I see more of that discussion about brave. Its not the right fit for me, but I’m not going to begrudge anyone making the choice that’s right for them.
Hope you have a great day!
-
firefox is so laggy nowadays. the scrolling is also weird.
Firefox is now faster than Chrome as of the latest benchmarks.
Respectfully disagree, I have no complains about the browser itself. just that lazy web devs don’t test on ff, or actually, only on chrome.
Eh… I have absolutely NO PROBLEMS on Windows, Linux and MacOS. You should know that some extensions can cause problems. Try a new profile.
it is not lag as in slow, it has. weird scrolling glitch that make it look like a lag. Definitely not extension, because it happen on clean install too, and it is not only me. Plenty of people have it too if you google it.
On which OS?
Oh shit turn on CNN, a plane just flew onto one of the twin towers!
… What? Wait, we’re not quoting old posts? I dunno man, I know this is a huge “works on my machine”, but I really haven’t seen Firefox be a problem on any machine in at least, hard minimum, half a decade.
come home, your mom died.
Upgrade to a computer built in the 2010s maybe?
Core2duo with Nvidia 9400 does very smooth scrolling once you use Wayland. Yes, Linux of course.
i wish i could use linux on this pc.
Business issue or hardware? If it is hardware there is always help, e.g. high level kernel devs cared about my HP boot issue or NetBSD.
Buy brave token. It price should go up
i still don’t get why there aren’t more firefox based browsers, i’m on librewolf, but there aren’t as many firefox based alternatives, as there are for chromium. why ?
I actually use 5 different browsers:
- Brave for work (need Chromium/Workspace integrations)
- Mullvad for most things not work
- LibreWolf simply because Mullvad can’t be set as default
- Ferdium for convenient containers for sites I am regularly logged into
- Tor for “sensitive” browsing
Ferdium Are you saying Ferdium runs sites in isolated containers so it won’t recognize when I’m logged into another app via cookies?
It just sandboxes your various logins to prevent leaking your browsing habits.
Firefox can do this too so it should work with librewolf too, no?
It just doesn’t work the same way
I use and heavily recommend Waterfox. Less bullshit, more privacy.
Than librewolf? how exactly?
deleted by creator
If someone can explain to me why librewolf refuses to display the specialized font characters that most websites use for necessary navigation symbols, I’ll go back to using it. But all of my research suggests it was a problem only I was having, and it genuinely made some websites unusable.
One of the founders, Brendan Eich, donated his money to take away the equal right for same-sex couples to marry in California (Prop 8). He never acknowledge that it was mistake, so I can only assume that he truly wants to see the marriages of same-sex couples erased, which is quite a hateful thing to desire.
I hope people finally quit that shit of a browser.
I groaned hearing Louis Rossmann recommending Brave during one of his videos about Youtube ads. Firefox uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock would be a better recommendation.
or just librewolf \ Mull that comes with uBO already installed, if he don’t want to let his users (that are probably techie, so idk why) install add-ons by themselves. Otherwise, I can’t find a single reason of using brave lol
Looks neat, but it still depends on Firefox so I don’t mind supporting Firefox which is our last bastion against a Chrome monopoly.
As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
- Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
- Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
- Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
- Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
- Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
- DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
- Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
- Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
As a web developer you should really take a look at Firefox developer eidition. It comes with very nice features for web developers and you are always at the edge of new things FF will support so you see things that will come soon to the rest of the Firefox users.
Normally I would agree with you, but I often need to use the Postman Interceptor extension which is only on Chromium browsers
Workflow differs from person to person. Not sure what that extension does or why it’s needed, but I guess you are use to it.
Check out ungoogled-chromium. It needs some extra work to get extensions (and probably drm stuff) to work, but has good defaults otherwise.
If you want you can just use Vivaldi like any other browser, I would think, what is there that needs to be set up that doesn’t in other browsers?
I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
Any chromium based browser will force manifest v3 on you though, keep that in mind.
I have changed the homepage on brave plenty of times.
Why even make shit for Chromium? Fuck everyone using Chromium.
Arc has been pretty good for me so far. But the challenge will be at what point they stop stuffing it with new ideas, and will that be before it turns into a bloated mess. Edge is a great example of this.
Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information
Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.
It’s quirky, for sure. The easel feature isn’t at all integrated which I find odd.
Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
I used to do QA for a Web portal, and issues with Firefox not scaling .svg files properly was driving me up the wall. There were more obscure issues, but this one was so basic that I couldn’t believe we still had to have a separate code for Firefox browsers.
If Brave redirecting users to use their affiliate links without consent didn’t make people stop using it, I doubt this will.
On Firefox. But I do like Brave Search over something like DDG, their AI summarizer is quite good.
I think Librewolf is a much better option. BUT, I’m glad that at least Brave is taking a stance against Google. (the enemy of my enemy sort of thing). I hope all these firms are sued into following the proper copyright though.
Brave sucks Google dick by using Chromium like everyone else.
Everyone knows the only safe way to browse is to scrape webpages and print the content to your terminal.
Lynx FTW
I like to send the HTML, CSS, and JS to my laser printer personally.
I use curl to pull the text in a bsd jail running on a qemu instance running on a qubes vm and then copy it down on engineering paper and reconstruct it in my brain
Such a noob didn’t even pipe it through grep to block advertising. Get outta here corporate shill.
Use a VPN, and pipe the text-only output to your printer
I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives…
rendering engines. I use multiple browsers depending on context
Agreed, like what do chromium based browsers really have over Firefox? Real question.
It works with Google Cloud’s dashboard lol, I swear they broke it in Firefox on purpose.
But seriously it’s like the IE days, some sites are designed with one target in mind and that target is now Chrome instead of IE, partly because the Chromium engine is now the de facto one to embed and rebrand. So sometimes you just have to use Chrome.
However I use Firefox 99% of the time myself and only use Chrome when needed (mostly when managing my Google compute engine VMs, sigh)
Google integration. That’s all. Anything else is anecdotal, is ill-informed hubris or is a combination of both.
I’ve been using Brave for a few years now on my desktop and after reading the threads lately about it, I’d like to switch. I don’t seem to have the issues other users have, but I don’t want to use it based on the CEO’s views on some things.
I’ve always had Firefox installed with uBlock Origin and I use it occasionally. One of the things Chromium based browsers have is built-in tab grouping. I know there are extensions and I’ve only tried Simple Tab Groups but it didn’t behave how I was expecting it to behave, which is like how Chromium handles it.
So far that’s the only thing I’ve noticed.
I had to use a chrome based browser on Android for a couple of weeks since Firefox had a problem. It was like a nightmare. It is common in IT history that worse quality product wins.
Think about MS-DOS. Microsoft also sold Xenix,a UNIX system that time.
For me it’s because Firefox is (or at least was) noticeably slower. Didn’t support all the extensions I use. And didn’t allow YouTube playback with audio beyond 4x play speed.
All of those items led to me to choose brave over Firefox since I encountered every one of them on a daily basis.
Also I hated the default font (or perhaps it was some other quiirk of the layout) of Firefox. I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
Convenience and performance.
I’m a dual user of Firefox and Brave on different computers. In order to separate work and personal stuff and shopping, I use different profiles. Easy on brave, needs extension with separate app on Firefox, that doesn’t work on librewolf. And too often I have to stop my browsing because this Firefox setup is less stable and crashes once in a while causing annoyance.
Plus Chromecast. I like the ability to search for a video on the laptop and cast it to the TV.
It’s always a balance of convenience and privacy plus ethics, can’t have both.
I use FF but Chrome is objectively better in side by side comparison. It’s faster, more web pages load correctly, its UX is much nicer. For most people, you just install it and go. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to faff on with a browser, much less for something as poorly understood as privacy. It has features Firefox doesn’t, such as tab groups which Mozilla stupidly decided to remove and no addon does the same job as well.
Mozilla just sucks, to be frank. They can’t seem to have any coherent idea about what Firefox should be. The big redesign alienated a lot of the people who used it for its customisation. Adding in unwanted features like Pocket integration made people doubt the credibility of Mozilla’s claims of privacy. And cockups like everyones’ addons stopping working, despite being warned by the community it would happen, leave a bitter taste in peoples’ mouths.
Firefox users: Another Chromium drama? People never learn
wasn’t bunching crypto garbage not shady enough?
Didn’t they do some shady stuff before too? I was pretty confused why some people still recommended it
They got their start redirecting ads to sponsored ads. I’ve never understood the love for that browser.
To me Firefox is the best browser.
I use Chrome because I’m lazy to move, I have my stuff synced in there and I use it also with my phone (Google Pixel). But lately I’m considering Firefox more and more. At least I now have it installed in my phone and specifically use it for some stuff.
I made the move, there are mild inconveniences, but you can export your passwords, bookmarks, et al. from chrome to firefox, you can even set firefox as your primary source for app password suggestions on android. The biggest win is having UBlock Origin on my phone browser.
It takes a little while to get everything moved over and working the way you want to, but for me it’s the superior browser. I get better performance especially on older devices and there are a lot of core things like bookmark handling that are better on Firefox.
