I think a lot of people don’t know any of the controversy related to brave and just use it because they know it as the most private chromium browser
Marketing has really worked for Brave.
That is the sad state of the world. Mass manipulating sentiment like some commercial psyop is a built in “feature” of the system.
we live in an era where you can make a puke like prime the most desired drink in the world, so yeah.
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While I’m sure you are right I think Brave also likely pays for maintaining opinion on social media and posting positive comments supporting it. Many others learned of doing that (for example musk has bots astroturfing its image pretty much everywhere.) Similarly for example you don’t see controversies section about Brave.
There is so much controversy with every browser and people working on them that I find is better just not to read anything about any browser anymore.
Maybe, if you’ve only heard of like 5 browsers.
I mean, yeah. I’m not a computer person, so
fivesix browsers seems like a lot to just know off hand. I don’t know as many cola brands or Russian Czars without looking them up (I clearly don’t know what a normal comparison would be). People do talk mad shit about Firefox, chrome, opera, brave, safari, and edge though, which have got to make up the vast majority of the browser market.Having to cross out 5 and make it 6 because you actually could name more than 5 off-hand really seems to undercut that point.
But people talk shit about all of them. Plus, does edge really count? Also, wasn’t that really your point? I can think of more than five and people are still shit talking them.
From a non techie perspective, I don’t know why one is better than another.
Maybe. I tried a lot and my personal experience is that Chrome is at least a level above all else in UX for general use. So chrome with some privacy features out of the box seems a good way to go.
Chrome is the worst, there is no privacy with Chrome. The UX is also trash, it’s only good if you haven’t tried anything else.
Also Sergey Brin is in the Epstein files.
Well i respect your personal experience, but it doesn’t at all correspond with mine.
You can prefer the UX of Chrome, especially since so much of the web is designed for it. But it’s not a subjective personal experience that it is not private. Google exists to harvest your data. And the fact that everyone just accepts it is why the internet is so shitty.
We are taking about brave, not chrome. I don’t think you get any more harvested than you do with Firefox.
Privacy features? Google harvests your data regardless of your settings. It also furthers Google’s monopoly on the web. I’m sure anyone can see the problem with an advertising giant hungry for data being able to dictate how you access the internet, and what the internet even looks like. Google has power over all of that, split between their influence in the W3C, their Chrome browser, their Android OS, and Google Search.
Google decides what you see, how you see it, and how the underlying technology functions; that’s literally their business model.
That’s the real problem with Chrome and any Chromium based browser.
Yes, it’s a big concern. Unfortunately I have a lot of those. I will have to leave it to other people to spearhead a better fairer freer alternative. One that will not only attract a select crowd, but a wider audience.
Not sure what that has to do with your claim that “every” browser has “so much controversy”, but okay.
In conversations humans don’t talk like robots or like they are writing a code. People often use lose expressions, colorful language, exaggerations and everything else that I have no idea about.
I didn’t think I’d need to explain that when I said every browser before, I didn’t really think every single browser. Yet here we are. That’s why I didn’t actually think you will call me out on it and just continued with other stuff. 😀
So yeah, not every browser 😁. Only a few. Although with so many new questionable ai ones, the percentage is going up for sure.
So by “every browser has so much controversy”, you meant, “maybe a few browsers have some controversy”.
Apparently it’s robotic to point out gigantic overstatements.
🥱
that’s so sad
Can anyone reccomend good options fo browsers?
These are all the browsers I personally think are good and privacy-respecting. Sorry if I accidentally included too many options.
Desktop
Firefox-Based
Firefox
The standard for browsers where you aren’t the product. For maximum privacy it does require tweaking settings, but it is reasonably privacy-friendly out of the box. It has light customization options including a sidebar and customizable button placement, and can be much more heavily customized with user themes.
Librewolf (Most reccomended for privacy)
A custom version of Firefox with enhanced privacy by default. Comes with Ublock Origin installed. May break some websites.
Waterfox
A Firefox-based browser with some additional privacy features, enhanced speed, and additional features.
Floorp
A browser based on Firefox with much more advanced customization options and many additional features, like workspaces and web panels. Doesn’t add any additional privacy-focused features. They recently also added support for chrome extensions. This is my personal choice of browser (with the Natsumi modification).
Zen Browser
A Firefox-based browser with a sidebar+workspace workflow, and lots of stylistic changes and customizations that help put the focus on the webpage. Very nice and usable for productivity, but doesn’t add any additional privacy-focused features.
Chromium-Based
Ungoogled Chromium
It’s Chromium, but without Google. Pretty self-explanatory, it’s simple, and it works.
Vivaldi
An extremely customizable browser packed with a massive quantity of additional features that can be toggled and tweaked for varying needs and methods of usage. Doesn’t add any significant privacy-focused features. It supports MV2 extensions.
Helium
A chromium-based browser with enhanced privacy and speed. Comes with Ublock Origin pre-installed, and supports MV2 extensions. It’s a pretty new project.
Android
Firefox-Based
Firefox
The de-facto privacy-friendly browser, although for maximum privacy it does require tweaking settings. It (and its forks) are the only privacy-friendly browsers on android that support extensions.
Waterfox
A fork of Firefox with more private defaults, and extra bloat removed.
IronFox
A hardened private Firefox fork. Heavily focused on privacy and security, it sacrifices some usability for privacy.
Chromium-based
Cromite (Most reccomended for privacy)
A chromium fork with enhanced privacy and built-in ad blocking.
Vivaldi
Very customizable chromium-based browser. It does not come with an ad-blocker.
iOS
All browsers on iOS are limited to the WebKit engine which Safari is built on, so just use Safari. The benefits of other browsers on iOS are negligible.
Oh wow ya thank you. This is very helpful
Careful. Trying to sell Brave as a homophobe web browser won’t hurt it like you guys think.
I could care less about the personal beliefs of the creator if the product works as intended, especially if funding the creator is optional
Persistent and unavoidable ads are the reason I don’t use original Firefox, so it’s the reason I don’t use Brave anymore. There were other issues too, and although it’s supposedly open source, the Palantir connection is shadier than their Prop 8 connection, which I don’t even consider that relevant since it was so long ago
Persistent and unavoidable ads are the reason I don’t use original Firefox
Why are you not using uBlock Origin?
No, I mean the ads which are permanently pinned to the startpage. Of course I use uBlock Origin with Firefox forks, as most people do, but that doesn’t prevent the pinned ads from appearing in the startpage, at least not for me.
Why don’t|you set it to open new tabs with a blank page? I have that as my setting and I forgot there were even ads on the start page.
Yeah, I guess I could do that, but aside from that, it is resource-intensive compared to forks.
Firefox does have ads on by default for the startpage, but they can be turned off in the settings in a fairly easy and obvious way. So even as obnoxious and demoralising ads, I don’t think it is fair to say these ones are “persistent and unavoidable”. (It’s not easy to remove the Firefox logo from the new tab page, and that annoys me, but I wouldn’t call it an ad.)
Well, I’m dumb and lazy, I don’t want to have to do a bunch of shit I guess.
Peter Theil is the primary investor in Brave.
For those not in the know, Peter Theil is a MAGA Christian-Nationalist fascist, and owner of Palantir.
Palantir, is the military industrial complex company Trump has entrusted to create a mass surveillance network on US citizens, completely against the 4th Amendment, and dwarfing the NSA spying that was exposed by Snowden.
You can garuntee any activity you do in Brave is being tracked and sent to that network.
People here up upvoting baseless conspiracies based on a braindead notice that technology is like magic.
If everything was tracked and harvested by Brave, it’d destroy them much more than the bullshit “homophobe” allegation. Just use network traffic monitors to see if it does. You think people haven’t tried?
Or do you think software can covertly send data without users being able to determine?
It’s open source for fucks sake. Stop with the Alex Jones tier analysis.
Literally just use Firefox for Android with uBlock. People act like this is difficult.
*uBlock Origin
I’ve seen the following types of people:
- People who ask how to do it, and get amazed.
- People who legitimately are not bothered by ads.
- Who think it to be a “headache”, and to just “let it be”.
- Who are incredibly tech illiterate to the point of frustration.
and then disable your YouTube app and save a link to webpage to your home screen. I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in years with this method.
Or just use ReVanced. Use microG for non rooted phones.
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There’s also PipePipe, which also does SponsorBlock so that you don’t have to see sponsor segments in videos
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Oh, nice. I didn’t know that.
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I’ve been on Firefox since the very, very, very earliest days, back from when it started as Phoenix. I’ve been diehard believer in Firefox from Day 1.
But as usage has declined (and declined), many websites that I actually need to use no longer test for Firefox. A key website I use doesn’t allow me to log in with Firefox. Not as a “we don’t support Firefox” but quite literally it doesn’t work.
I’m all for flying the banner but I can’t live with a browser that no longer works on the websites I need. And yes, I’ve filed a bug, but because it relates to a login Mozilla closed it (they can’t verify logging in to this website).
I happen to be moving my account to a different website so I may be able to dodge it this time but Firefox really is sinking and at what point does one choose to abandon the ship?
Name and shame those sites. Those sites are the problem not firefox.
You’re not wrong. But I’m not on social media so have no channels to shout on. I doubt any newspaper would accept a reader contribution about this.
Name them here
It’s not a difficulty issue It’s that lots of us have tried Firefox and don’t like it.
Personally I don’t use Firefox because it is buggy, is missing critical features, implements some web standards weirdly and has weird user agent styles. The end result is that many websites don’t look right and don’t work correctly and/or fully
Interesting. I use Firefox for everything and haven’t had any issues. Maybe I’m just not that picky?
They’re pretty much just hating to hate or basing themselves on very outdated information, ‘missing critical features’ is a joke, because if it actually were critical it would’ve been implemented already (plus firefox is very extensible, with many plugins existing and forks adding specific features), if they actually had a point they maybe would’ve given a single example.
Weirdly implementing some web standards kinda did apply a bit until a few years ago where all the big browser engine developers got together and pinned down the standard. If something still breaks that probably means the website used some out-of-spec workaround that only works in Chrome. Some things do indeed behave differently between firefox and chrome (an example of my own: file input fields with multiple types, eg allow both video and image are handled differently at least in the mobile apps). Yet again if they had a point maybe an example would’ve been great.
Weird user agent styles?..?? I’m just confused honestly.
Me too
Buggy? Huh.
Not available for IOS. For android firefox is bad at sandboxing and security. Vanadium if it had adblocking would be perfect for me.
I do this as much as possible. However the Firefox in-page translation software seems to do something that actually changes the page (and this can break things like forms) whereas chromium browsers do some kind of translation layer on top, so the page can run normally beneath it.
It’s an infuriating reason but right now it means I have to split my browser use depending on if I need translations or not.
You know you can install the “chromium-like” translation thing on Firefox as well, as an extension? E.g. this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/traduzir-paginas-web/
Is that new in the last couple years or so? I recall chrome breaking form entry left and right when translating before i could read the language.
Same reason they used Chrome. “What else is there?”
Software discoverability is kind of bad these days, and getting worse.
Ive found alternativeto.net pretty useful.
In the past, I’d classify that as SEO spam, but it has become kinda useful now that the rest of the internet has deteriorated so much.
The first place I usually search is GitHub, or open source app repos. Or niche communities that might be into the particular software ecosystem.
Time to break out the article: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
*which is also still chrome
Normal browser icon vs incognito browser icon comes to mind
I only stopped using Firefox when an update broke GPU acceleration on my PC. Would be happy to switch back if it gets fixed, but it seems they’re more interested in adding AI slop, which doesn’t bode well for the last bastion of anti-Google monopoly resistance. 🤷
Wtf hardware do you have? Arc?
They have said they’re adding an off switch for all their AI stuff in Q1 next year. We’ll see how well it works, though.
I use Netscape Navigator like a real keyboard cowboy!
Lynx is all the UI you need.
Or
linksif you’re all fancy like.curl, html2latex and latex are all you need.
I don’t even see the code anymore, all I see is blonde, brunette, redhead
konqueror is all i ever needed
it’s still around, just renamed to seamonkey
I use “nc” and parse like a real man.
Mosaic or gtfo.
Chromium based browsers have no cookie isolation like FF with multi account containers. They recommend Profiles but a separate window eats way more RAM and the experience is just much worse. I use Zen
I love zen Such a great browser
Sadly some of it is that the folks at Brave are very good at burying their bad reputation under marketing
Not just that, it’s that Brave has this cult-like following for being out-of-the-box, Fisher Price My First Privacy BrowserTM easy to use.
Oh…oh, hey, Apple, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.
What does apple have to do with brave? i dont get it
Apple has a reputation as the Fisher Price version of smartphones and laptops/desktops because the user can’t change much themselves. It’s an old meme, but it checks out
I used to use brave when I just started becoming privacy aware. Here are the reasons why:
- it’s chromium based. I loved the way chromium based browsers looked, especially when compared to Firefox. They had a comforting feel to them, whereas Firefox had a very “office-ey” feel to it.
- I wasn’t aware of the issues of chromium dominating the market share that it does and how monopolization in this manner can be harmful.
- I wasn’t aware of the people behind brave.
- I had seen older people use Firefox (with the default UI, which I didn’t like). That’s why, I associated Firefox with “old and outdated”. I hadn’t seen anyone use brave, and it looked quite good at the time for me.
Now, I use Mercury, a Firefox fork (ikik, it hasn’t seen an update in a long time, shush). I’ve loaded it up with my custom CSS, so its appearance is exactly the way I like.
Mercury has had a open high criticality cve for almost a year and a half now, that is being actively exploited.
Either switch to Firefox or a fork that is actually being maintained, or just block your machine from the Internet.
Noted
I agree with all you said, but suggesting to use a specific browser only when not connected to the web is kinda funny.
Too many times people who have been monitoring or are deep in a field overestimate how much knowledge an average person or even newly interested person has in the same field (oh hey, there’s an xkcd about that!).
People scoffing at anyone who thought Elon Musk was just a meme a nerd CEO before the cave thing, people who expect everyone to know who is running every browser, OS, or other company, and lots of other minor things they think should be common knowledge, when at the time it was something only someone invested in the overall field or someone who knew how search much better than the average person.
I personally disagree with homophobia but setting that entirely aside, Brave browser sucks, all the cool kids like Vivaldi now, and they’re right
There is no ethical consumption, so I’ll use whatever works. Brave works. In fact, its search engine works very well. While I don’t currently use its crypto stuff, it was an interesting idea to combat ads while allowing the user to still reward creators.
That said, I also use firefox. 🤷♀️
Time to warm up the popcorn machine.
