I only use brave at work because it somehow bypasses the firewall there and I can install and use it. I run it to watch videos about cooking or traveling and reading news when I have nothing to do at my job.
At home I usually run tor browser (tbb) and firefox with addons to block ads and tracking.
I’m not sure I should turn to brave as default browser. How do you see it?
I’m against it. Their crypto angle is/was a joke, and now the AI data harvesting pushes it further down.
I also found most Brave users to be some of the must infuriating people I met in real life. Not that brave it self did it, but most people I used to work with that used it was “privacy focused” libertarians with some bad takes.
Used it for a while years ago, hated all the crypto stuff it tried to push but could still ignore most of it. Then saw the CEO sharing antivax propaganda and decided to try different options, ended up finding much browser options out there. These days I’m running Vivaldi. I think I would only put brave ahead of chrome itself now.
Philosophically, Brave does a lot of shady user tracking and crypto shit of their own, and I choose not to use it for that reason. Better than Chrome. Worse than Firefox. In my opinion.
Brave do shady stuff to get money like change your URL to include a referral code for them, that’s not ethical as the “AI training models” they do with their search engine, I don’t trust them. All what you get with Brave you can do the same with Firefox. If you want to browse Tor on Firefox I recommend you using Firefox containers + github.com/bekh6ex/firefox-container-proxy and one container names Tor and proxy it to your Tor socket (should be localhost:9050) and done.
I’ve used it on my phone once, and had trouble trying to change my home page. Searching for it, apparently it was because of an option that was glitched. Turning it off solved it. This glitch was present for years, from what I read, and still wasn’t solved.
It had the A.I. controversy that people mentioned. So I guess it’s not very reliable in the privacy section, even if it’s their main “appeal”.
I’m using Firefox on both PC and mobile. Only experimented with Brave for a short time. Can’t say much more about it.
Apparently you need to follow your own advice and do a search because it takes 30 seconds to see they are collecting data from their search engine not the browser. So if you don’t use their search (which is pretty shit anyway) it’s not relevant to the browser side of things. The browser is completely open source and everyone can see what the code is doing.
And isn’t using search data to improve search results a pretty reasonable usecase for AI? Seems like a nothing burger. For the record I use librewolf but I find the constant Brave hate to be undeserved.
Ahh yeah I actually remember that now that you mention it, I used to be a heavy brave user since then I’ve moved to ARC, is pretty cool also built on top of chromium just like brave.
If you opt in, you’ll contribute some anonymous data about searches and web page visits made within the Brave Browser (including pages arrived at via some, but not all, other search engines). This data helps build the Brave Search independent index, and ensure we show results relevant to your search queries. By “data” we mean search queries, search result clicks, the URLs of pages visited in the browser, time spent on those pages, and some metadata about the pages themselves.
So just don’t opt in then? They’re not selling the data, it’s completely optional, and they explain exactly what they’re collecting, how they’re collecting it, and what they’re using it for. This is all completely reasonable. They have to get this information for to improve the search somehow. Even the actual collection component is open source. I’m not sure what the issue is.
My reply was purely to get to the accurate information versus your reply which says that they are “collecting data from their search engine not the browser” as it’s important that people reading know what’s actually going on.
I’m not here to argue about whether they should or should not do that and I’m not going to (and when I used Brave I consciously went into the menu to opt into this to improve their search engine so we could have a competitor).
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