- cross-posted to:
- slackernews@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- slackernews@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.world
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The browser with fuckloads of baked-in crypto was doing shady shit? No way!
No idea why no one made a fork that just follows the original basically but removes all the “BAT” crypto, web3, all that dogshit, bullshit, annoying-ass crypto bro shit.
Someone tried to do it a few years back and either got threatened with a lawsuit or actually got sued by Brave because of it. The browser was called Braver; you can look it up!
Is Brave not open source?
I mean I get why a normie would back down even from a bullshit suit from a company (laws favor capital and they can drag it forever to fuck you… Nintendo loves doing this too with the Switch modding community (most recently))
Assholes either way. Developing using open source code and then crying foul when someone removes you bullshit.
It is so I don’t understand on what basis they wanted to sue the forking developer. At first it was trademark issues (they renamed the project from 'Braver‘ to 'Bold Browser‘) and then the developer stopped working on it at some point, however, I can‘t find any information about why they did so.
I goggled it after reading your comment and found the same info. It’s pretty common for small projects to get started and abandoned quickly, but in this one specific case I do want to read a comment from that group of developers years later if it was fear, boredom, whatever else that made them abandon it
This is their repository btw: https://github.com/BoldBrowser
It seems they moved to making Ungoogled Chromium after that (you can see that Eloston, the major dev of that Chromium fork, contributed to the repo) and then maybe they just changed the repository and continued working elsewhere? That would at least explain the README.
Ah ok. I’ve seen that project before. Might take another look, although I usually just use Firefox or forks of it. Kind of soured on chromium browsers after Google announced for the 800th time, and for real this time (they said), that they would be blocking ad blockers. I just said fuck it, time to blast the past like it’s 2006 again
They do, it’s called Chromium
Chromium isn’t available on some OS (most notably iOS for now because Apple sucks shit)
Also last I checked, which was recently, Chromium doesn’t come with adblock built-in. In fact doesn’t basic vanilla chromium not allow addons at all?
So a Brave fork would be all the good parts of it (the ad blocking chiefly) but minus the bad parts like the crypto BS. Maybe that’s an entirely different project, I don’t know. I just use Firefox+ubo on desktop. Doesn’t matter that much to me if someone does it or not, but I was always confused why privacy-centric people seemed to love the crypto browser.
I just switch back to good old firefox.
How is this related to privacy? The whole thing is about copyright infringement…
The Brave browser is billed as an ad-blocking, privacy protecting, champion of the everyday internet user.
We know they’re not, but they openly masquerade as one and so when they do something shady it’s somewhat relevant to put them on blast yet again. Just look at all the people in this thread alone that are like “oh wtf Brave isn’t good for privacy?”
I mean I’m sorry you’re not learning anything new from this content but we should probably be happy others are.
Wasn’t Brave always known to be shady in one way or the other? Which is why I never get why people say “remove Chrome get Brave” in 2023.
A crypto company turns out to be shady? Who would have thought!
Yeah I find some of their monetisation stuff makes me a bit uncomfortable, such as their cypto stuff integrated into the browser and enabled by default. There was other articles that when browsing to certain site, the browser would inject their affiliate links (https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology)
In some respects I actually prefer Google’s approach to monetisation over Brave, although I don’t install that either. Having a browser billing itself as privacy focused while manipulating traffic to insert affiliate links leaves a bad taste and distrust of the company.
I use Safari by default and Firefox as a fallback nowadays. Very rarely need to run a chromium browser.
I recommend ungoogled chromium for when you need a chrome browser. There is 0 telemetry and it flies.
Yes exactly. This is just yet another of Brave’s long history of controversial moves.
Typically, these have been followed by the CEO going on a marketing campaign. The new users drown out the controversy.
“I don’t know why, but it just FEELS wrong” is usually the hallmark of a marketing campaign against something. See: Hillary Clinton.
ye first time i heard about brave was in a sponsor segment on a youtube video, my first thoughts were “lol another chromium browser? rewards? bar? ok this seems shady as hell” and sure enough it is indeed shady af. the Tor mode had DNS leaks way back (besides who in their right mind would even use tor in a chromium browser), URL injections, brave not giving out BAT, also them spam mailing Brave pamphlets to customers (physical mail too, it was through i think UPS, which idk if that’s technically considered a privacy violation, but to me, mailing someone a pamphlet out of the blue when you use their browser without your consent is quite literally a privacy violation, no matter where you got the data from or how you mailed it).
been gladly using firefox ever since version 3, best browser of all time.
I don’t think they’ve been that shady, the worst thing they did was say “we’re blocking ads” then said “You can show ads but only through us, and you need a braves token wallet” but else that, I don’t think theres much, and when compared to the history of Microsoft and google, which are the major alternatives, that’s such a small issue, especially when they also offer so many nice extras.
I mostly use LibreWolf now, at least for my main browser, but I do miss the instant access to internet archive and tor, but I think its worth missing out on, to avoid some of the creep I’m feeling from Brave.
Does anyone have a link to a list of controversy’s that Brave has been involved in? I think it’d be good to know, rather than just going of both feeling, and 2 misdeeds.
Edit: My comment below was originally based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation. I’ve removed the mention of the EDDM mailers since they aren’t relevant given this.
I’d take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn’t the most savory:
… Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.
On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance
With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance. He also spreads COVID misinformation.
As others have pointed out, it’s also Chromium based, and so it is just helping Google destroy the web more than they already have.
Their business model sounds 1000000% better than sucking up all your data and selling it to the highest bidder. Which is the alternative. Or people doing it for free/donations, which doesn’t scale.
But they serve ads. Do they say these ads are fully anonymized? The primary reason other vendors suck up all your data is precisely to serve ads. Why is Brave’s serving ads different?
I personally don’t find inserting affiliate referral codes acceptable either, but yes at the end of the day this is the user’s preference whether or not this is all acceptable to them.
I got a bad feeling about that app when i tried it. Something about it didn’t “feel” right. Went crawling right back to firefox after.
I am not an expert and I am sincerely asking, but everyone who is recommending Firefox, how do you feel about DuckDuckGo?
Love it except I can’t use it because I don’t save cookies to keep the “dark setting” enabled and dark reader doesn’t automatically invert it, likely due to them breaking some sort of common html/css standards if I had to guess. Wish they would fix it for accessibility. :(
Here ya go, just bookmark this: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d
You can change tons of settings via url parameters
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params/
Thanks! Came back to actually add an edit or reply to mention that I found an issue on darkreader issues with a resolution for putting in a custom filter to unlock origin! Worked perfectly.
https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/11325
Question in the issues that did come up is… Why are they doing this? Only reason as some others mentioned sounds like it would be for tracking purposes which contradicts what their model is about. Seems like there’s no winning search engine for privacy, just the least of all evils? Lol. Glad to at least be back to using it for now.
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This is important information but it really should be compared to google chrome, safari, edge, and Firefox default settings, which are all bad for privacy, and when combined, make up 99% of browsers.
This article is written like everyone already knows how to install and use librewolf.
The more surprising part of this article is that enough people use Brave to create enough of a dataset to train AI.
I have a feeling that in a future AI society, one trained on Brave data would be considered special needs.
This is data scraped from websites for the brave search engine, not data from browser users
As someone who swapped to chrome > chromium > ungoogled-chromium > brave > firefox > librefox and then back to brave…? Idk, it feels like theres no such thing as a “perfect browser” and that all browsers has a some sort of “anti-consumerism” built-in that we are (still) not aware about.
What is anti-consumer about firefox?
Apparently it has some built-in telemetry and forces political propaganda towards users.
The telemetry is a well known issue and can be disabled quite easily. I have no idea what you’re on about with that second claim - maybe this blog post from 2 years ago? It’s just an open recommendation directed at social media platforms. Nothing to do with the browser itself.
I switched from Brave to Vivaldi.
I was having issues with a web app after a Brave update, so I went to check the changelog to see what might have caused it. It was 100% crypto/nft shit in the change log.
That’s not what I need/want from a web browser.
That’s why I use Opera /s
Probably all browsers spy in some way.
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By that reasoning so is uBlock Origin.
Wait is there something wrong with ublock now?
No, but it does block YouTube better than anything else. Like, if I just ran uMatrix (made by the same developer), I couldn’t get YouTube to work while blocking ads, but with uBlock Origin it works perfectly.
I’m just saying that claiming Brave is affiliated with Google because it blocks their stuff is like claiming uBlock Origin is also affiliated. However, beyond that I wouldn’t say Brave hold a candle to uBlock’s dev.
Ah okay, I misunderstood you. Thanks for the clarification!
