Yeah, honestly that’s the primary, convincing argument against Brave, I feel: they’re helping Google monopolize the browser market, and, consequently, enabling Google to further dictate how the internet operates.
The article skipped over that entirely, and the author had never heard of LibreWolf, the current zeitgeist in privacy-focused browsers, so I question the motives for writing the article and question that the author has the technical chops to be able to speak to this issue with authority. Seems like he mainly doesn’t like that the founder of Brave donated $1000 to Prop 8, which, while fair, is hardly the main reason to not use Brave.
The really really concerning thing he actually mentioned was that Brave was at one point adding affiliate links to URLs without the users’ permission, but that was buried lower in the article under comments on Eich’s admittedly cringe politics and weirdly angry blurbs about Brave’s crypto token, which he never mentions requires a voluntary opt-in (probably because he didn’t know).
He’s not wrong, but he’s right for the wrong reasons.
Which is really sad, because I like Vivaldi and I like the team behind it and I like their post denouncing WEI, but at the end of the day Vivaldi is also a chromium skin. They're Brave without the personal baggage, but they still carry the much heavier technical baggage of being downstream from Google.
and there's still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager
I think "lots of people" here can just be simplified to "nearly everyone". Anyone that is ware of a package manager and why it's useful and thinks to look for an equivalent for Windows is not going to be bothered by a few extra configuration steps.
I run it secondary to Firefox when I need to use IPFS, have been for about 6 months now. I also occasionally use it because it also blocks Youtube ads by default, AND when combined with privacy badger, it is the only browser that still works while giving half decent anti-fingerprinting. Firefox, Chrome, nothing else even gets close. They just straight up lie about your screen rez and plugins to keep you from being fingerprinted.
Their account sync is pretty nice. Encrypted P2P syncing of configs and bookmarks. No need to make an account with them to store your settings.
Yeah, if you use their new tab page, there's an crypto option there which you can remove. Their new tab page sucks and I don't use it anyway.
There is ONE crypto button to the right of the URL bar, which you can right click and hide. The other stuff is actually the controls for their PWA install , share and privacy/ad block settings. You can just run full block everywhere and flick off the extra blocking for a site if it's a problem.
I also refuse to use their search, but it does work really well last time I tried it. DDG is good enough and the smaller the company selling my data, the better.
Updates don't generate any crypto popups for me, perhaps because I don't use their front page.
It's open source, so they at the very least aren't hiding what they're doing.
The fact that they offer shitty crypto with hideable buttons should be the least of your objections.
They replaced webpage ads with their own when you enable bat. (I don't crypto so I don't see those)
They swapped referrer links on unreferred things to make money. (which is sunset now, but is an indicator of how they DGAF)
They used their crypto as a pyramid scheme to sell to investors, even got in trouble over it with the Government.
Once their crypto pyramid scheme fails, They'll either fold up, or double down on selling data passed through them.
They have an insecure TOR implementation
They are likely to sell your data
They are likely to sell your data to AI projects.
Their CEO is a POS, but that's hardly unusual these days.
If a product creator’s ideologies are the deciding factor on whether you use that product… That’s OK. I think there’s some interesting territory for conversation with that attitude, but I’m sympathetic.
But just say that. It’s enough reason to not use something. Stop there.
When you have to also make a bunch of bad faith arguments about the actual functionality that just don’t hold up it undermines what I think is the more valid (though still murky, as you pointed out) concern of supporting harmful attitudes.
Brave as a product seems fine. It’s not the second coming of privacy jesus. It’s not the absolute dumpster fire of browser purgatory. It’s fine.
Apparently one of the main developers of GrapheneOS is a bit unhinged (see the Louis Rossmann video about that if interested), but he makes quality software so I highly recommend other people use it.
I’m never going to agree with everyone who makes software I use, I only care about the quality of the software. In fact, I very much disagree with the politics espoused by those who make lemmy, yet I’ve contributed code and spend a lot of time here.
Firefox is my main browser, but I use Brave when I need a chromium-based browser. I disagree with the politics of a lot of people at Mozilla, and I disagree with Brendan Eich as well. Both are high quality browsers, so I use them.
In this case it makes a difference because there has been an alarming increase in harmful lies made by the far right. This is a purposeful spread of misinformation that many people hesitate to get involved with in any way, and for good reason.
I do not trust the creator of Brave to be aligned with the far right and to still be guided by ethical conduct that I can trust. If you align yourself with people who lie and put others in danger for profit and control, you're condoning such behavior and may be capable of it yourself.
I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people,
Why exactly? The tricks like "optional things to click" are explicitly targeted on less tech savvy people and defeat the point of privacy focused browsers.
I've literally installed Firefox and uBlock Origin for elderly people, and walked some other elderly people through installing them. In, like, 2 minutes. This is not difficult.
Just getting somebody on Firefox with ublock origin is enough IMO. I’m not going to also remove their ability to use Google search. Especially if they’re older. I am very privacy oriented but you have to make some compromises for people lol.
Those are choices, not requirements. Using Firefox is better than using Chrome. Doing the extra stuff is even better, but if doing that means someone gives up and goes back to Chrome, that doesn't help, either.
If these people really want to ban technology based on the views of the author then they might as well live in the stone age. And even then the tools they used was probably invented by some nasty people. The US space program was built by literal Nazi scientist. Most of the research on how humans survive in space was based on experiments done to Jews. The first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research are the HeLa cells taken from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks. She did not consent to have those cells taken nor was she or her family compensated. Are we gonna boycott cancer research because of this injustice? No? Only the things that make them feel uncomfortable?
You mentioned that politics should not be mentioned with software. Consider Hans Reiser, the author of reiserfs. He murdered his wife and was sent to prison. Would you be okay with running code written by a murderer on your computer? How about a vase made by a murderer in your house? Would you enjoy the voice of a murderer in music?
It is an extreme example, for sure. I thought I’d mention it to test your moral boundaries with open-ended questions. Everything is subjective, and morality is fluid. There are quite a few people that decided not to use reiserfs from the circumstances, though. Even though it wouldn’t make as much of a difference to you personally, I’m sure you could probably see how this matters to some.
Go look up all the nasty stuff stallman's said and firmly believes in. I don't see people boycotting gnu which is a vital part of linux as a result of this
People are already aware of the shit Stallman does. Hell, you don't need to read the shit he writes, dude's a real-life creep.
And besides: GNU project's tools have continued popularity despite him. Do I need to remind you of XEmacs? EGLIBC? EGCS? A whole lot of projects that reminded GNU equivalents to "oh yeah, maybe we should get gud instead of being an inferiour code base" (XEmacs) or "oh yeah, this fork is clearly superiour, we should merge and call it official" (EGLIBC, EGCS). And now people are like "Hey guys, I just found this compiler called Clang and-" and GNU is like "FFFFF-"
[Ad experiments and crypto] is opt in.
If you download an ad blocker, I'm pretty certain that you don't want to "opt in" to any advertisements by default.
Hey, you thought that was easy to debunk? How about this: When Brave advertises that content creators are able to accept BAT crypto tokens as donations, should the content creators themselves first opt in? They most certainly didn't. Brave specifically said that they would accept donations on behalf of all content creators and held the donations on their behalf until they would opt in.
If these content creators never would actually opt in, what then, I wonder? Did they just deceive the fans of those content creators?
This is dangerously close to the whole rhetoric NFT bros had during the peak. "Why, someone made illegitimate NFTs of your creations? Well you SHOULD have minted those NFTs while you had the chance. Oh, you prefer to NOT participate in this whole NFT ecosystem on principle? Have fun staying poor!"
I would love to use librewolf but somehow it stops being able to resolve web pages where every other browser I have installed is still able to. It’s the only thing stopping me from making the jump full time.
Sure, you have to sign up for it but you can’t remove the hardcoded crypto wallet extension and therefore can’t actually opt-out of having it shoved in your face (at least, it was the time i tried their browser and found it to be inferior in every way to just using Firefox and uBlock Origin).
The referral links weren’t. That should have been a thought that crossed a developers’ mind and immediately left it. It definitely shouldn’t have made it into a test build, and it super shouldn’t have made it into a public release. That it ever made it that far is enough reason to never use the browser again. The developers have proven that they cannot be trusted with your privacy.
Yup, that’s a huge red flag about the culture there. That said, Mozilla also enabled Pocket by default as an opt out feature, so it’s unfortunately common.
I use Firefox where it works well: on my laptop. On Mobile it is a shell of its desktop variant. I use Brave on Mobile because nothing works as well. I don’t use Chrome for obvious reasons.
I have not gotten good suggestions that aren’t in the vein of “shut up and do what I say.”
The crypto stuff is opt-in. You don’t have to use Brave Shields (in browser ad blocker). It can be turned off. Now you can use uBlock Origin or another ad blocker.
About the CEO, I can’t see nothing about his beliefs reflecting in his work. Looks like he kept them separated. I’m not for said beliefs.
You can turn off the crypto nonsense in the settings. I like the browser. Actually what I like is their search engine. Maybe I could think about using a different browser but using Brave search.
If you are basing the use of a product on the politics of people involved in the project, then you are going to end up with no products to use.
If you are basing it on it being based on Chromium and having a crypto scam built in, then I get that. That being said, the browser isn't super bad, just not good. Viva La Firefox.
especially with opensource stuff, a lot of devs are either extreme right or extreme left. That doesn’t mean they can’t make a great project. Suckless is a good example for extreme right. Lemmy for extreme left.
I feel like it’s got to be Google putting all these hit pieces out on Brave right? They know they have to deal with Firefox but they also need to get the other stragglers out of the way first.
If we’re gonna start talking about how shitty CEOs are then there’s a lot of other companies we need to talk about before this one…
I dont use brave now, but I have quite a bit, never for crypto/BAT, just for the ad blocking etc and it was a great browser. Idk what kind of installation people are having where they say it feels bloated Etc but it certainly wasn’t my experience.
I’m not ashamed to say that I switched to Firefox when I heard about all this chrome nonsense, because I figured Braves time was limited since they’re a fork of Chrome. That’s really the only reason. Idgaf about CEO contributions, especially that small.
For macOS, Firefox works really well. For iOS, I guess brave is probably the best because they still have their ad blocker (Firefox can’t build for iOS, and the Safari-based Firefox browser they ship can’t include extensions and they don’t include an ad blocker).
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