No fan of all the constant Brave threads myself but the calling everyone who isn’t against Brave a Brave Employee is very tinfoil hat, not sure if it was meant ironically or not but can we stop this “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is a paid shill” nonsense. I despise Brave, and hate the CEO, but I don’t think everyone who doesn’t is getting paid for it. 3 of OP’s 35 posts and 21 comments are even about Brave at all.
The CEO is also known to be homophobic, has some ties with some far right chat boards, and has been resistant to privacy checkups/audits, which is a red flag on its own. I wont post links, but there are plenty of threads here and on other forum/aggregator sites where they can be found. These points are obviously something that is less about the browser itself and more the people running it, but if the people running a project are untrustworthy or exhibit behaviors that are exclusionary, one has to consider using or supporting their products.
It’s true Vivaldi is not free open source, the code is owned by Vivaldi however, the source code is freely available to audit which is the main security benefit you would get from a FOSS browser like Brave and Firefox. It is plainly not spyware.
Yes there is the security risk that someone might find an exploit in the source code, and if Vivaldi is notified, users would have to wait for Vivaldi to fix it. As opposed to a third party potentially issuing a patch quicker.
But this is also basically true for Firefox and Brave. If a security flaw is found it’s more than likely going to be the Firefox or Brave team that fixes it first.
If you advertise yourself as a “privacy browser” then you need to have absolutely spotless track record. Brave doesn’t, so even if their browser is objectively good, I just don’t care. They have demonstrated that they can’t be trusted and that why I’ll stick with Firefox.
I’m not SUPER concerned about privacy tbh, I mean I care about it, but I’ll make some concessions for the sake of convenience, like in the form of a mozilla account to transfer settings and addon’s between computers. So I probably wouldn’t be a good example, but I use waterfox, it recently just went independent after being bought by a company awhile back, and I like it. But if you’re looking for a privacy/security focused browser librefox I hear is a good one. It’s based on firefox and has a lot of security features built in by default.
If you’re looking for a VPN solution I highly recommend mullvad vpn, super secure, makes an effort to respect your privacy, and is genuinely one of the fastest vpns I’ve used.
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