Brave is essentially just Chrome with an adblocker, a bunch of bloatware, and a bunch of controversies.
Brave took BAT donations in YouTuber’s names without their consent, with them keeping the money if the YouTubers didn’t claim it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/
Brave’s search engine crawler hides itself from websites by pretending to be Googlebot, and Meta (Facebook) buys API access from them to train their AI. https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
The business model of Brave rewards as a whole is to block all other ad networks to replace them with their own, which is unfair as only YouTubers and websites that have joined can make money from most Brave users.
If Brave actually cared, they would create an acceptable ads style feature which was free for everyone and allowed simple contextual banners while blocking ads which track you, take up most of the page, or have NSFW content.
Their approach is monopolistic as they have full control and can strangle YouTubers and websites by dropping pay at any time.
And Brenden Eich has said on Twitter that he plans to release “Brave Origin”, which is a paid version of Brave without the bloatware. That name is ironic as he is admitting that his browser is commercialised and bloated, which is similar to when gorhill gave uBlock way to Chris Aljoudi who commercialised it, which led him to create uBlock Origin.
If you use Brave, ditch it and look at using Librewolf or Helium instead, which both include no ads nor tracking and don’t have Brave News, Rewards, Wallet, Talk etc bloatware.
I am pretty set with Firefox in Android and desktop to be honest.
I cringe a little when users praise Brave as being the best ad-less YouTube solution (especially android users since we have revanced here!), no bro, there is no way using the web version of YT is better than revanced, or any other apps on mobile.
After decades of being a Google fanboy and using nothing but Chrome, my bf proudly told me he’d installed Brave after he got tired of his favorite websites being nothing but ads. I wouldn’t use it personally for the reasons you mention, but I think it’s a positive step for some people.
I’m too ready to ladybird browser to be ready in a few years.
An extra reason: Eich is a homophobic asshole and an anti-masker
…and? Are you going to stop using the transistor?
Man’s dead.
Don’t matter what he thought when he’s rotting in the ground.
Does when you’re still alive
Oh I see, outrage of convenience.
Brave is the browser version of Honey. It blocks 3rd party ads and inserts its own, taking the money. Either block the ads or don’t but this is shitty.
I never used it specifically because of it being run by Brenden Eich. I have no intention of knowingly throwing my towel in and helping to enrich someone who’s thrown his money around to strip people of the right to marry who they want because he finds it icky.
I’m sure there’s other bad shit from him but after that I just treat him and anything he does as pure toxin.
If that sounds harsh, well, I don’t give a fuck.
I won’t use a chromium based browser at all, especially Brave.
I always use and recommend hardened Firefox + Ublock. As a search engine, I use Qwant, which is based in the EU and uses its own search engine whenever possible rather than Google, Bing, etc. And there is another reason not to recommend using Brave. Among its investors is Peter Thiel, the most controversial figure in the investment world. Search for Peter Thiel’s controversial statements in your favourite search engine and you will see for yourself.
This is pretty nihilist to say, but we probably need to stop using what we’re calling the internet today.
The web is not the innocent platform it once was in the 90s and early 00s. Privacy is practically nonexistent and the workarounds like disabling javascript break so much of it that what’s left is hardly usable.
There’s no worthwhile alternatives imo. There’s no major competing internetworks or ‘web browsing’ alternatives outside of modern html/css/js… and there really should be.
The internet evolved towards money making and nobody really stopped and made offshoots that are just cool fun things without the endless goal of capital.
If you want to experience the old internet: https://kagi.com/smallweb
A curated list of sites with specific criteria, I’ve found a bunch of good stuff from there
The problem with the internet is not the internet itself, but the big tech platforms.
By using sites like Mastodon and Lemmy, using a browser with uBlock Origin installed, and disabling Web & App activity, personalised ads, etc on your phone, you are taking a stand, and routing around the bad stuff exactly as intended.
It just isn’t enough man. We’re still dependent on a handful of sources for everything. Adblockers break for me practically every single day.
I don’t have solutions. I just see privacy slipping away at scale and i’m afraid where we will end up in just a few years.
We can’t opt out of the system either because too much of it is necessary. Can anyone truly say they don’t need google? ever? I stick to stuff like lemmy and I use duck duck go, but I don’t think ddg is permanent.
Everything just seems aligning for us to have digital IDs and fingerprints that are tracked with metadata and sold freely to any buyer with enough money. Combine that with technologies like flock and all the facial recognition tech everywhere, payment being basically completely digital today and sold/shared to anyone willing to pay… and every move we make is completely tracked and known.
We’re at a point now where the tech used in The Dark Knight by batman to solve crime at the expense of everyone’s privacy is here, and it’s even worse. Nobody will destroy it because it’s too powerful to make money and crush dissent. With how dire the political situation is and how they are literally telling us now to not believe what we see, instead believe what we say… i’m worried, like so many others are.
No one person should have as much power as even a billionaire has, and there are so many who have more than that. The only end to tyranny is our lifespans, until that is no longer a limiting factor from technology.
Install uBlock Origin and disable any others then the ad blocker problem will be solved.
As for other things, look for backups. If DDG shuts down, search up alternatives. If piefed.social shuts down, find another instance, and do on.
We can’t opt out of the system either because too much of it is necessary. Can anyone truly say they don’t need google? ever?
Yes. I switched to Qwant some years ago, and about a year back I switched to Kagi. Haven’t seen the Google Search page in years at this point.
The only thing I use from Google still is YouTube. There are also alternatives, I’ve spent some time with PeerTube and found things I enjoy, and I don’t mind supporting Nebula, which is also a nice platform. That said, I could probably just cut it all off. It frees up time to do something else.
Can anyone truly say they don’t need google? ever?
Using Invidious or other front ends allows me to watch YT without Google tracking.
My Gmail address is only used by as backup to access my own domain and I am ready to move that away from Google.
I don’t need Google.
We can still build small, text-based websites for free.
I have built fileshare and chat before switching to OSS solutions, which I can selfhost.
No adblocker needed, I can enjoy my part of the internet with people I care about.
Also Wikipedia.
I’d say we don’t need go go so far as to stop using the internet (there are open and free services we can use), but I’d agree that we need to reduce our overall internet usage as way to fight aginst the system. Many times, there aren’t alternatives to things, and the alternative can be doing something else! Doing something with out life time that the corporations have been stealing.
And the tech industry have become the main players int he economy and in many destructive and unethical practices in the world, that by reducing our internet usage, we are working against them.
Technically, there’s Gemini (protocol) and Gopher as alternatives to the usual web stack, but they’re still pretty niche in usage.
Honestly what do people have against Firefox that can’t be fixed with plugins? It’s the only decent browser that isn’t chrome based, and I think that deserves support. And with plugins and sync it’s a great experience.
Firefox is great. Mozilla, however, is making some weird moves every now and then. A lot of people don’t quite trust Mozilla to have their interests at heart anymore.
The obvious solution is to use a Firefox fork. I have no idea whether there’s a meaningful difference between the various Firefox forks, and would welcome a summary.
I switched to LibreWolf, which is a Firefox fork that prioritizes anonymity and privacy. I like it, but there are definite quirks:
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it will tell every website your time zone is UTC+0, which breaks some stuff. Proton Calendar works if you tell it your actual timezone.
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no password saving and cookies delete every session, so you have to log in to every website every time you restart. This is intentional but I don’t understand the rationale. You can install a password manager though and self-host it if you want.
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because your device fingerprint is generic, a lot of websites incorrectly assume you are a not. I have to use FF for GrubHub, for instance, as they won’t play nice with LibreWolf due to restrictions on the HTML5 Canvas element, for instance.
You can turn off the fingerprint protection in the Librewolf tab of the settings page.
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I’m just glad people are finally starting to mention LibreWolf as the first go-to.
Do people realize that if Firefox dies (in the many ways that could be interpreted), all of these downstream forks will also die right?
Like, the work to in essence remove unwanted parts of a code base is admirable but its an utterly miniscule fraction of the work that goes into maintaining a modern browser, keeping up with standards, sending people to be voices at conventions, etc.
The beauty of open source projects is that if they are abandoned, other people can pick them back up. Sure it may be difficult, but if it wasn’t FOSS it wouldn’t even be possible.
Thats the beauty to silly idealists who pretend they can’t understand that hundreds of employees getting paid full time wont materialize out of thin air to keep a massive project like a web browser alive in the absence of that structure.
Ok, but which browser should we use.
I am on opera
Literally Firefox.
I feel like the reasons are obvious and I am constantly amazed at people who choose offshoots that end up having problems jsut as bad or worse than Chrome.
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Firefox actually uses an engine independent of Chromium
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Firefox keeps developer documentation for the actual open web in a a clear fashion better than anyone else with MDN.
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Firefox is responsible for all of the heavy lifting for any of the browsers downstream of it that people seem to want to switch to so that Mozilla is less supported and the browsers they are on also break (which is bizzare footgun behaviour in my opinion, and exactly why the people who are idealists inherently can’t win. They shoot themselves in the foot with idealism so hard that companeis don’t even have to care about their opinions).
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Firefox has more resistant than the engine makers of any other browser to anti autonomy web changes like Chromes manifest 3, tvarious new tracking mechanisms and more.
Excuse a little bit of snark at hypothetical responses below, but Im just so frustrated Ill let off a little steam here:
bUt Ai.
So they have a few AI features you have to purposefully find or stumble into, and that means you are going to do everything in your power to make sure your last actual chance to avoid completely Google domination dies too?
You are basically begging for the even more intense enshitification that will come if Firefox actually dies.
bUt SoMeOnE eLsE cAn CoNtInUe DeVeLoPmEnT
Oh yeah? Someone else is going to take on this project with a massive amount of legacy code, inside knowledge and hundreds of people working on it constantly to keep it completely up to date??
You must have been confused when I mentioned above Mozilla does the heavy lifting for the browsers down stream. Just because someone makes a fork that removes features doesnt mean they are equipped to handle the level of work done in the code they are downstream of.
Anyways, the bottom line is, for now, if you actually value open source, the answer is Firefox.
Or one of Firefox forks. I like waterwolf due having a mobile app
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