It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
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If you absolutely need a Chromium browser (if you’re a privacy advocate, I don’t understand why. Using a Chromium browser means Google can do whatever they want with web standards), use Vivaldi or something.
I think a lot of pro-Brave people are astroturfers, or heavily influenced by astroturfers. They are definitely not a first choice by any privacy advocate worth their salt.
Also, the Brave defenders in this section… holy moly.
Some folks simply cannot admit they made a questionable choice. They picked it and use it, so everyone else must be wrong.
I’ve met people like this in real life.
It’s because no-one knows any alternatives.
If one wants a Chrome-based browser that isn’t Chrome, Brave is the highest-profile one by orders of magnitude. Next is a bunch of high-SEO scamware before honest projects like Vivaldi or Helium are even a whisper.
…So I don’t really blame folks for using Brave. They aren’t omniscient, and an honest effort to avoid Chrome is still a positive.
bruh
I use Firefox. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s not that bad.
And if I didn’t, I’d use Vivaldi. Only reason I don’t is I do prefer open source whenever possible and, well, Firefox isn’t Chromium.
Firefox is the only browser that has mobile extensions, making it the only choice
But it kills the battery on mobile, even scrolling it choppy.
I switched to the Samsung browser a few years ago, I don’t know what black magic they do but it’s super smooth and light on the battery. It has some plugin support but I don’t use it so can’t comment much about it. It’s chromium based.
This is one from 2 days ago…
PS: it’s not some accounting trickery, if I load a few reddit comment threads to read on a plane the battery really lasts forever.
Yeah, that’s my point. 40m on screen 8.4% if battery.
I didn’t use it that much yesterday, but we can extrapolate…
What phone were you using?
I I’ve never had any issue with firefox, with regards to battery or scrolling, but i use 8 year old flagship (Got it used, I’m not Mr.Moneybags)… which is probably still better than a budget phone of today, though.
Relatively new Samsung S24 Ultra, similar as you: “old” flagship bought used. The scrolling on the Samsung browser is like an iPhone, with Firefox like a windows 95 :(
Happened with a previous Samsung as well. On my old oneplus everything was kinda choppy.
On my Z Fold 6, I do notice that Samsung Internet, Chrome, etc are smoother, that is absolutely true. It’s not really enough to matter to me, though, doesn’t really warrant being described as “choppy” in my experience. My default is IronFox with uBlock Origin.
Well, Samsung is enshitified with its newer phones, that I have no doubt that an S24 would run non-samsung shit poorly to force you to use samsung shit.
Samsung was enshittified with their older phones too.
Pixels are shit too.
I had a One Plus 9 Pro and it was honestly my first phone that I traded in and felt like I got a huge downgrade. It just worked.
I doubt it’s on purpose, many other non-Samsung apps run fine, even when a samsung alternative exists, it’s specifically the browser that is weird. Which is a pity, since I do use Firefox on my desktop and laptop, but the mobile experience is just frustrating.
I have an s24 and had the same experience. Fennec F-droid worked better for me.
That’s also a good point.
LibreWilf is a good choice if you don’t want the Mozilla crap. Just make sure to turn off the cookie clearing and resistFingerprinting then enable WebGL in the browser’s settings.
Use chromium build from source ? It’s the least if you want something chrome based. https://chromium.woolyss.com/
If not, use firefox. It’s still good for everyday task.
It’s a for profit ad company making a “privacy first browser”.
Thinking for literaly a second about that sentence should tell you all you need to know.
it’s the best browser out there right now. did you know it has the TOR net and ad blocking built in? great huh?
where does firefox make its money
IS IT FROM GOOGLE SEARCHES?
so what have the owners done to the lgbtq+ community in the last 5 years?
You should probably add /s to that, hah.
Customized firefox, zen browser, helium, and mullvad all with some kind of assortment of privacy extentions.
On Android, we got ironfox and cromite. most of the same privacy extentions are applicable.
If you want to use the tor network, go use the tor browser.
Frankly, I do not care that much that Mozilla makes most of its money from Google. I can change the search engine as the first thing I do and this fact simply stops affecting my experience negatively, especially on Firefox derivates.
you can do privacy friendly ads, it’s not because the entire industry has evolved to an horrible point that the good way of doing it can’t exist
This is true. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics used to run and maintain a good sort of ad service called Project Wonderful, that catered to webcomics and blogs and didn’t track users. Sadly he shut it down in 2018.
Currently I know of Comicad Network that’s trying a similar kind of thing.
Did it gettoo hard to run or what?
Yeah it kinda mystifies me that anyone is still recommending that shitty bigotware.
In the emulation scene, RetroArch is in a similar boat if I’m understanding things correctly. Awful maintainers, but people keep recommending it and supporting it. Sucks too, because there are even fewer alternatives there.
Whats going on with RetroArch? I havent really paid attention/kept up since I set up my last Raspberry Pi.
This website details various issues. I’d suggest looking at the Byuu page - as I understand it the RetroArch devs played a large role in the harrassments that were being done to the developer of Higan/bsnes, which eventually led to them killing themself.
Did I miss what you’re talking about? It just mentions Xbox SDKs being proprietary, which I couldn’t care less about. Apologies if I missed what you mentioned
This is the page I’m referring to, where one of the main RA devs is shown saying a lot of really toxic things about byuu. It’s kind of hard to find any reliable info about the dramas, but there are various threads online where people bring up a number of dramas, like this thread.
Thanks for the context.
I used retro arch a decade ago, and when setting up a emulation pi last year the consensus seemed to be batocera. No idea if its better, but it’s as easy to use as I remembered and my kids are still enjoying it, so not too unstable.
Batocera is a relatively minimalist Linux distro for emulation specifically. It’s one example that kind of highlights the problem I’m referring to. All of these retro software stacks still use RetroArch to varying degrees, and depend on it. Even alternative frontends like Emulation Station are just built on top of the same libraries. Or as another example, for most game systems, RetroAchievements only currently work on RetroArch.
Interesting, TIL.
My only issue with batocera is that GameCube was broken out of the box and I haven’t had the time to figure out how to fix it
I had no idea about any of this. Have been using brave on android for a few weeks and very happy with it. What would you recommend instead?
A Firefox fork.
Fork? Uhg wtf is wrong with firefox now? This better not be about AI
Oh, have I got news for you
A bunch of forks just add extra functions, patches or defaults on top of firefox. It’s not a hard fork as in they maintain everything themselves, they’re still based on the latest official firefox releases.
Removing AI is one of those patches yes.
Yea I’m going to go ahead and recommend against opinionated firefox. Oh yea I want some dweeb with misplaced anger and too much time on their hands to dictate how I use the internet. Bitch asses.
You (the end user) decide how you want to use the internet. The forks you’re probably angry about are the ‘hardened forks’, but whether or not you care about their goals and want to use those is a choice only you can make. Most of what they do is basically change some default configs and remove some ‘bad’(according to the maintainers and the users) features.
There’s also forks like zen that under the hood use firefox, but customize the user experience significantly.
Long way to say what is captured in two words: opinionated firefox.
Just keep using it, if it works for you. Every company that makes browsers is a bit shit around the edges, there’s no perfect, pure, wholesome browser. Just use what you want. If you like edge for android, use that. If you want to use vim, use that too.
Congratulations on missing the point.
It grinds your gears that people don’t do what you want, doesn’t it?
Have you tried letting people use whatever the fuck browser they want?
Netscape Navigator on Windows Mobile Works for me.
I really like vivaldi
Firefox Focus, Ironfox, or others recommended here. I will note that Waterfox was always quite slow on an android device of mine.
I’ve been using Iceraven with uBlock and it’s been pretty great so far. I use Obtainium to keep it updated directly from the repo.
I use Brave selectively. I don’t know about ads. I don’t get ads. I don’t know about donations. It’s never asked me for donations and doesn’t have the info necessary to charge me without me knowing. A little more info on that one would be nice as I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.
To be honest, I kind of don’t care. If I was super adamant about being 100% politically/morally correct I wouldn’t use any product, ever. I don’t pay for it and I don’t feel like it’s taken advantage of me. So I’m going to keep on using it sporadically like I do now.
For reference, I only use it in private window mode.
They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
a for-profit company partially funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, of Palantir fame. the same Palantir spying on Americans in order to allow nazis to round up immigrants and throw them into concentration camps. the same Peter Thiel that said democracy is not compatible with freedom.
The same one who wants to create the apocalypse and believes the anti-Christ is anyone who isn’t fascistic
- it’s fucking Chromium
Go use some Firefox-derivative like Librewolf or Fennec, like a sane person.
Yeah, this is important. Fuck Google. I will only ever use a chromium browser if I have to for work or for a misbehaving website.
I will reject the misbehaving website rather than resort to using Chromium.
Occasionally though, life requires using a shit website. I do avoid it if possible though
Your attitude is very reasonable. I strive to be as unreasonable as I can.
reference
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
This is hilarious for me if only because at some point ages ago I tagged you with, simply, “seems reasonable”.
Fortunately, I also agree with your reasoning for being unreasonable, thus returning you back to the realm of reasonability while striving to be unreasonable.
Self awareness is good haha
I don’t know enough about browsers to really know anything about chromium. But I did see a statement from Google which I believe stated that they were removing support for adblockers from chromium based browsers. It was at that point that I decided I did want to continue having a usable browsing experience, and immediately swapped.
Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features
I agree, I know why they do it and I can appreciate it, but it’s just not for me. I do not want my history and cookies cleared when I closed the browser, for instance. That is massively inconvenient and not really relevant to my “threat model.”
So I guess I wouldn’t say they are bad, but certainly not ideal for me.
What’s the problem with the defaults? I use pretty much the default settings with no issue
Forced English language, light mode, fixed window size or borders, cookies removed after closing, no history(? Not sure about this one)
Want those or just one of them? You have to remove ALL fingerprinting protections for some reasons. Might as well use Firefox then…
Never used librewolf.
But it sounds like the conveniences you want are a compromise for fingerprinting.Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good.
The internet has been significantly ruined by large companies.
There is a loop where companies with the resources to create and maintain frameworks/tooling/whatever are large enough to help define “features” for browsers.
Browsers don’t make money, not really. To even be considered, they have to be able to run what the big companies are pushing.
All of this makes it very easy for smaller companies to deliver better websites. Or abuse the features big companies are pushing.It’s like: email was awesome, then spam emails happened. Websites were accessible, then SPAs happened. Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.
I don’t know what I am trying to say.
Other than browsers do not get the support they deserve to actually be decent unless they are backed by a company that wants to loss-lead them… Which has resulted in the web being pretty fuckedDon’t let perfect stand in the way of good.
Same can be said about fingerprinting protection.
Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.
Google’s quality has decreased, but other engines have improved, and LLM search summaries are really good (brave search is a good example of this)
I think LibreWolf enforces compromises I’m not willing to do, instead of using different techniques
LibreWolf doesn’t update itself on OSes other than Linux, it’s a security nightmare for an average person.
No, go use Google Chrome like everyone else.
They added referrals to links you clicked. If there is one thing a browser should do its go to the link you click without modification.
As far as I remember, there is some browser with a feature of stripping tracking id from the URL, that is modification, but I find it good (if I can opt in, and if the feature is visible enough to know what to try if it doesn’t work)
And you chose to do that or it was a feature that was advertised to you. Adding referral IDs to links you click so the browser company gets money is not comparable to that at all.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that was crappy, just that not any modification of links is bad
I would argue that if you know your browser is stripping tracking info for links then the link you clicked on doesn’t have tracking information.
I’m surprised to read the whole thread and nobody mentioned that TorBrowser is the goat for daily anonymous browsing.
That you’re even suggesting this tells me that you don’t use tor regularly. Many clearnet sites dont want to be accessed through tor and will just block you. If you encounter any recaptchas thats basically a dead end. The time from opening the browser to having a fully loaded site is minutes.
If you don’t plan on doing serious crimes and your not an opposition leader in a totalitarian state, tor is not a good default browser.
I missed that part
The time from opening the browser to having a fully loaded site is minutes.
I think it depends on the region. To me, full browser restart with reconnect is maybe 10 seconds tops, usually less. I use Tor Browser as a default one on my phone, and it opens random links quite okay.
For me, the main issue is exit node blocking, then I need to restart the browser 1-2 times.
You are correct that Tor is not as convenient. I use Tor Regularly but I use another browsers if I need to login. Sometimes I have to restart Tor Browser because of blocks.
Tor is ridiculously slow for daily use.
It worth okay for me.
I thought people gave up on Tor years ago when it was revealed that it wasnt as anonymous as people expected due to the number of entry and exit nodes controlled by governments and spy agencies.
The NSA wasn’t able to break Tor fundamentally, even with spanning numerous exit nodes to intercept traffic, and high-scale traffic correlation between enter and exit nodes
“We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption
Do we trust a 12 year old article sourced from the government to be honest about current/past capabilities? Genuinely asking.
This question is unironically very deep. As it’s privacy we’re talking, you decide what to trust on your own.
My understanding is that Tor provides anonymity for my threat model (ad-tech corporations).
But trust need to be placed somewhere. Do we trust Mozilla? All their emploees? Do we trust OSS? Does anybody actually review open-source code? What about supply chain attacks?
I am, a nobody, was personally invited to a Contagious Interview (a person, pretending to be a client for consulting was trying to place a rootkit on my machine via GitHub repo).
What about AI-assistet coding that actively tries to eliminate security gates?
In this case I would. Its from the Snowden leaks and from the government for the government, never intended for our public eyes.
Also if you don’t fully trust tor, just add another layer (e.g. VPN). If the government dissuades you from secure open infrastructure and gets you to use closed ones, they have won because companies can always be forced to comply. Algorithms on the other hand, can’t.
who and what is your threat model? as @macros@feddit.org pointed out this article was probably rather accurate.
if you just want to browse anonymously - it is likely, that even the biggest tech corpos can’t de-anonymise you.
if you do small time crime, like buying and selling contraband - likely law enforcement would try to catch you in the real world. you have more vertices and vulnerabilities there, different enforcement agencies are experienced exploiting these.
if you paint a big ass target on your back and get the interest of the CIA or similar - you are probably fucked one way or the other. they may have the ability to de-anonymise you. but if you listen to people that did get caught or do the catching (e.g: darknet diaries), most of the times it is a small mistake. if you only ever play defence, that is enough to loose the game. but what are your options if your adversary is a national agency?
You should never use TOR as a daily driver.
Why not? If more people use onion router the network only becomes better.
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