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Its a bad chromium fork with a crypto snowball scheme attached and some very scummy practices done.
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Hear that guys?! The pyramid scheme is opt-in! Not scummy whatsoever
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.
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).
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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.
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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.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
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Actually, the librewolf installer for windows has included an updater for some time now.
I’m no privacy expert, but TechLore has covered Brave a lot and it’s one of his recommended daily drivers.
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Last I checked Stallmann wasn’t “CEO of Linux”. Such a thing does not exist. Eich is CEO of Brave. Apples to oranges.
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!”
why do the author’s politics make a difference?
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.
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Quite the opposite, brave’s defaults are very good. An alternative to brave on the firefox side would be librewolf, which gives firefox great defaults, but the issue with that is that they disabled auto updates, and there’s still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager (even though many exist).
bullshit integrated into it.
And again, there’s no “bullshit” if you don’t explicitly opt into the crypto.
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They are constantly bugging you to sign up for it
No, the browser asks you once.
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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.
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.
because you should never mix politics with technology.
What does this mean?
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?
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Be “Brave” use a better browser.
[winks in Firefox]winks in librewolf with uBlock, LocalCDN and altered UserAgent and fixed resolution of 1920×1080
PS: I am paranoid
There’s also the lesser-known Pale Moon browser, of which I actually tried using, to quite a normal success, on our former desktop PC, two years ago.
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.
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Let’s see if the brave fanboys REEEEEEEE on Lemmy as hard as they do on reddit and try to brigade this post.
Yeah I don’t really get the fanaticism around that browser
Anything with crypto seems to get some people all hot and bothered
To be fair it goes both ways. I don’t understand the hate for it either. Is Brenden Eich an asshat? Maybe, but that doesn’t affect how good the browser is or isn’t. And the crypto/ad stuff is opt-in. You can leave it off and it is just chromium with a built-in ad blocker.
What else are you going to use if you don’t want to use Firefox? Vivaldi is the option suggested the most but that isn’t open source. And extensions and codecs are a pain point with Ungoogled Chromium. As far as I’m aware Brave is the best currently available open source chromium-based browsers.
I don’t even use it, I use librewolf for the record.
For the record, have you also tried the Goanna-based Pale Moon web browser, and compared how well it stands to all those other browsers you’ve actually dug deeper info on?
I never started in the first place.
It always seemed like snake oil to me.
Author of this article, Corbin Davenport, should also stop using Facebook.
Brave has always seemed shady as hell to me. I don’t understand why so many tech people keep recommending it.
Never started. What have they done now?
Nothing new. It’s just an overview of how shady and scammy the browser is. I still see a lot of people recommending it without knowing the backstory.
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How is the article inaccurate? Do you suggest that we should support a company regardless of agreement with their politics? Why?
AI summary:
- Brave Browser has marketed itself as a privacy-preserving web browser and has gained attention from cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
- The company behind Brave, founded by Brendan Eich, faced backlash due to Eich’s previous donation in support of California’s Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage.
- Brave initially planned to replace ads with its own ad units and split revenue with publishers, but this idea was met with legal issues and criticism from both inside and outside the company.
- Brave introduced Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) as a way to reward users for viewing ads and content, but the rewards are minimal and the value of BAT is volatile.
- Brave has incorporated various cryptocurrency-related features, including a full crypto wallet, but many of its crypto partners have faced controversies and scandals.
- Brave was involved in a privacy scandal in which affiliate codes were added to URLs typed into the address bar, allowing the company to collect revenue from user signups or purchases.
- The article concludes that Brave is a flawed software project and should not be used, recommending Firefox or Vivaldi as privacy-focused alternatives.
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.
I wouldn’t be using Lemmy at all if I had to agree with the creators political views lol.
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.
The article appears to be biased against Brave Browser and its associated company, presenting a negative viewpoint on various aspects of the browser’s development, functionality, partnerships, and the background of its founder. The tone is critical and skeptical at best.
This reads like ai generated text.
It’s perfectly acceptable to have reservations about a browser, but this article seems to be quite exaggerated.
Found chatgpt.
Can’t stop using something I’ve never installed.
I challenge anyone to cite an incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.
Well for starters you donated $1,000 in support of prop 8
It’s not a sign of intelligence to choose to ban a technology because of the opinions of its creator
And if we’re going to start talking about creators let’s start talking about the people that made this site LMAO maybe it’s not the best candlelight to hold this issue against…
Nah i love my built in adblock/open source/privacy features. You can turn off crypto stuff. Author can shove his politics up his ass.
TL;DR : The Brave web browser has gained attention as an alternative to mainstream browsers, marketed for privacy and backed by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. However, it’s been criticized for its association with Brendan Eich, who faced backlash for supporting a proposition against same-sex marriage. Brave’s attempts at a privacy-centric approach included plans for a unique advertising model, which faced legal challenges. The browser’s cryptocurrency, BAT, faced volatility and its ad replacement system didn’t provide substantial rewards. Additionally, Brave collaborated with controversial crypto entities. Privacy concerns were raised when the browser added affiliate codes to URLs, and its complexity and associations have led critics to recommend other browsers like Firefox or Vivaldi for privacy-focused users.
