TL;DR: The article claims that the Brave web browser is bad and should not be used.
The author points out that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, co-founder (and ex-CEO) of Mozilla, and founder of Brave, donated 1,000 USD in support of a proposition to ban same-sex marriage. Along with making the claim that Brave’s goal is not to act as an ad-blocker, but instead to build and grow their own advertisement network, and he also believes that the network has several flaws:
Brave Ads paysout in a form of cryptocurrency, called BAT (🦇).
As BAT is a cryptocurrency there is high volatility.
BAT can not be redeemed for fiat (“actual”) money directly from within the Brave Wallet.
The author also believes that “it [the network] has largely failed” but that it “has generated a lot of revenue for Brave,” via the ICO (Initial Coin Offering; IPO for crypto).
In addition to these key points the author also:
Claims that Brave prompted FTX, before the scandal.
Cites the The Brave Marketer Podcast where ex-CMO of Crypto.com Steven Kalifowitz shares an ambitious goal of being a “‘brand like Coke and Netflix.’” The author then mentions that:
In 2023 there was a report from The Financial Times that Crypto.com traded against their customers.
In 2022 the company try to hide the severity of its layoffs.
Mentions Brave’s integration with Gemini, and how the crypto exchange is under investigation for lying about FDIC insurance.
Mentions a partnership with the the 3XP Web3 Gaming Expo where they sponsored the Esports Arena and rewarded contestants with the BAT token.
Claims that Brave added affiliate/referral codes to URLs, such as “binance.us.”
Finally, the author lists Firefox and Vivaldi as alternatives to Brave, and ends the article with “Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.”
I am human, please let me know if I’ve made a mistake.
Brave is still bad. With their “incidents” they had. Brave is chromium = Google controlled in a way. Brave is a coorperation, yes a PROFIT seeking company. Mozilla does nit promote google, it uses duckduckgo as its default search engine. There are forks from Firefox too that hardens the browser and the develop/ceo is not a complete *ss. The referal link “scam” was real, they injected it in Amazon links…
Screw Brave go search for a real alternative to google.
Oh yeah i forgot i used librewolf too much XD. Brave Search creeps on you. Privacy Policy is unreadable and unreachable. Tbh. if you want a privacy protecting search engine. Use Searx(ng).
Brave is way worse using Chromium. That is the point. Its dependent on google 100%. I dont know Fitefox? What is it? Is it a rare fox? Brave injects ads (targeted ads) into your websites. Injects referal urls into their results. The CEO is a corrupt bad person. They implemented in their earlier stages a hidden crypto miner. Recommending Extensions? Are you sure that chrome doesnt do it too?
Doesn’t iOS only use webkit based browsers? I would imagine the reason you can get ad blocking through brave is some kind of deal they have with google. Which probably means they’re just giving them all the data google would collect normally.
Firefox on iOS doesn’t have ad blocking because apple took support away in webkit. The only way brave could be doing it is by being white listed by the company serving the ad to you somehow.
Both Mac and iOS have issues with VPN usage too but that’s unrelated to webkit.
Yes Apple forces everyone through webkit and won’t allow third-party blockers. Brave on iOS was forked from Firefox anyway, and iirc uses the same API to block ads as Firefox Focus. Google is most definitely not involved, particularly because both block YouTube ads (and is my primary reason for using Brave anyway).
I’m not sure what you’re referencing in regard to VPN usage; I have had zero problems with mine.
Hopefully the Digital Markets Act in EU will put an end to iOS’s browser monopoly. When that happens Firefox might be looking to port their Android browser to iOS which supports addons like uBlock but nothing is for certain right now.
I know it isn’t hope you’re looking for, but it’s the best I can do with my current knowledge.
I appreciate that but my response was more intended to chastise the guy blanket labeling people cultists and idiots for no good reason because they hate a browser someone else uses.
The system-wide AdGuard app handles most things well enough, and Brave does its thing on YouTube ads without issue.
Firefox Focus will also take care of YouTube ads (if anyone else stumbles down this rabbit hole), but it’s too heavy-handed for me because I actually stay logged into my account and use my history.
My Pi-hole install also handles all but YouTube if I’m at home, so there’s that.
With how much revenue comes from those deals, we might say it’s practically financed by Google. FF is more Google than Chromium-based Brave if you follow the money.
The author points out that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, co-founder (and ex-CEO) of Mozilla, and founder of Brave, donated 1,000 USD in support of a proposition to ban same-sex marriage.
My impression was Brave got started after he got hoofed out of Mozilla or left on his own accord after the backlash for showing his ass to be a homophobe. Redditor types were of course very angry about this blatant disregard for frozen peaches and jumped onto his new venture in droves
If he’s bad, shouldn’t everything he touches be bad? Why web site that uses JavaScript should be just as bad. Any browser based on Mozilla should be bad. Why is it just Brave that’s bad for what he did in 2008?
It’s really hard for the creator of Javascript to make money off of javascript, and it’s unlikely he has any financial interest in the Mozilla corporation anymore since they’re a nonprofit and thus don’t have share holders. However, he directly profits off of Brave.
No. Couldn’t care less what the founder did or didn’t do. We need as many non-Google browsers as possible. The problem with Brave is that it is a chromium browser.
No, I’m not. Chromium doesn’t exist in Windows unless you install a program that includes it. Chromium web engine is “native” to the chromium web browser, not to any OS (except maybe ChromeOS). As espi mentioned, Internet explorer’s mshtml is the only engine “native” to Windows. Just look at the Opera browser, they changed web engines from Presto to chromium; that’s not using “what’s native to the platform” (Opera works across all OS’s with chromium, except for iOS for the restriction I mentioned before), it’s using what the developers/company want to use to render their pages. Nothing in Windows itself provides any of the chromium engine “pieces”
Chrome has EMET disabled because it’s own memory protections conflict and it just won’t execute.
When you’re make a web view for Windows you’re either bringing a long your own rendering or using Edge because it’s included.
No one wants to secure their own rendering which is why they all use whatever is already there which is EMET which is a pita to test so they just go with Edge.
native is just jargon for “what is already there.”
EMET? The framework that was end-of-lifed in 2018? I’d bloody well hope Chrome doesn’t use something that isn’t supported anymore.
Chrome’s sandboxing is weird and prone to breaking, but at least it isn’t stuck relying entirely on a kernel framework exclusive to an OS that people are extremely hesitant to keep up-to-date.
What does this even mean. Chromium or Webkit are not "native" to an OS. OSs don't magically include browser engines, its not a critical component of an OS either.
Most OSs do come with browsers preinstalled, but they are programs just like any other. You can remove Safari from macOS (albeit its pretty hard because root is read only and signed), you can remove Edge from Windows. In my desktop with Windows 10 the only browser I have is Firefox (not even Edge), does that make Gecko the "native" browser engine?
If anything, the native browser engine for Windows would be MSHTML from Internet Explorer.
Brave works for what I need it to do. I don’t like lending credence to bigots(secret or otherwise) but if someone is gonna say “don’t use this browser” they need to list a replacement that has the same functionality. And it can’t be “just use duckduckgo” because we all fucking have that on our phones and none of us can use it as our primary browser and we all know exactly why. 😒
Do you have a source for the claim that DuckDuckGo browser is selling user data to Microsoft?
You might be referring to the time when the DuckDuckGo browser was blocking all known trackers except Microsoft trackers. After that information was made public and users complained, DuckDuckGo was able to renegotiate its agreement with Microsoft so that it can block their trackers.
Furthermore, DuckDuckGo now publish their blocklist on GitHub.
So this privacy issue has been rectified now. But even if it hadn’t, failing to block Microsoft trackers isn’t the same as collecting data and selling it to Microsoft.
But if you are aware of DDG browser selling data to Microsoft, please share a source.
For me personally, the one and only reason I don’t main Firefox is because it doesn’t work with Chromecast and I use that a LOT. I would switch to FF tomorrow if I could easily and reliably cast with it.
On Android, Firefox is still less secure than Chromium-based alternatives: Mozilla’s engine, GeckoView, has yet to support site isolation or enable isolatedProcess.
I mean, does that mean Edge is a Google browser, too?
Chromium is open-source. Even if Google adds something malicious to the source code (such as that Web Environment Integrity stuff), it can be removed by someone else creating their own browser based on Chromium. That’s the very definition of open-source.
Related side-note: Lemmy itself is open-source, too. If the creator of Lemmy added something to the software that someone running an instance didn’t agree with, they could simply fork the original software and remove the unwanted addition. Some people do disagree with that person’s views, and yet they’re still here. Many of them joined .world and other instances instead of .ml because they disagreed with the creator’s views.
While Google, the creator of Chromium, isn’t a good company for the consumer, I personally think Chromium itself isn’t a bad idea. It’s just that Google and some other companies modify it for their own means, and those means aren’t always consumer-friendly.
All that to say: while the company that originally created Chromium is bad, the software isn’t. And while some of the companies and people using that software are bad (including Brave, IMO), some of them are looking out for their users’ interests, and those forks of Chromium are generally ok. (You should still actually do research and not pick a fork because the company developing it said it’s okay, though. Take a look at what others are saying and verify it.)
I mean, does that mean Edge is a Google browser, too?
Yes.
All that to say: while the company that originally created Chromium is bad, the software isn’t.
Only to the extent that websites are built for chromium compatibility, due to its monopoly on the internet. It’s great software because it’s the most popular software so all other smaller providers that serve that software have to focus their resources into ensuring compatibility. Chromium(Blink) itself is pretty mid, and definitely equal to WebKit or Gecko, not better or significantly worse.
In fact. Mozilla rely more in Google. If i wasn’t mistaken 90% of their money came from Google and they rely Google safebrowsing wherein it exposes your IP to Google
plus they have Google Advert ID Permission in Android. Tell me who is more creep. Crypto-things can be disabled within a few clicks, While mozilla’s trash can be disabled using a bunch of configuration in about:config
it was a similar article that made me switch from Brave to Ungoogled Chromium a few weeks ago, as a backup browser for the handful of sites that don’t work in Firefox.
Tbh the homophobia was just the last straw on the hill of crypto nonsense they piled on the browser over the years. I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with Brave the more “fluff” they added, so going back to bare Ungoogled Chromium has been pretty good.
To be honest the best chromium based browser I’ve used (when I’m forced to use a chromium based browser) is the Samsung internet one. It has a dark mode that actually works and protects my vampire eyes lol.
Never used brave because I heard all of the scammy ad network and crypto stuff years ago, immediately put me off it. Now learning that the creator probably hates me, it’s just another reason not to touch it.
I’ve tried it, looks cool, and using the flag “enable with selective inversion of non image elements” really helps eliminate all the issues with dark mode
I disagree with the article. It appears to make two points, both don’t convice me.
The first one is about a political donation made by the founder 15 years ago to the tune of 1000 USD. It was against gay marriage. While I somewhat support gay marriage, I find it totally acceptable to be opposed to it. It depends on what marriage means, and people don’t agree on that. For some people it just means a strong bond, stronger than a normal relationship. With this definition, gay marriage isn’t an issue.
But to other people marriage is an envelope that’s supposed to foster reproduction and family building. With this definition gay marriage isn’t exactly straightforward. Neither should it be for people with fertility problems and women over 50 in general. Are convervatives also against that? I guess they should. Whatever. I started off thinking I could defend the stance, now i don’t think i did. Either way, ditch a browser over this nonsense?
And if Tim Berners Lee spews some BS, will you stop using the Internet? Or if your country elects a stupid president, will you boycott the country and leave temporatily?
The other issue is what Brave does with ads. While I agree it is imperfect, I think in general the approach is among the better ones around.
I’m pro gay marriage, and merely attempted to reconstruct the opposing logic, and apparently failed halfway through.
Now, whats homophobic about this? The fact that in general to people of the same sex won’t reproduce? That seems about as outrageous as the thought that obesity is a medical condition.
The thought that your (or anybody’s) relationship values are justification for taking away people’s rights is homophobic at best. Any defense of this mindset shows that you don’t value a person’s legal rights to some extent. That’s why you’re getting pushback.
Well, legal rights depend on the law. So when arguing about the law it’s silly to refer to legal rights. It’s like conservatives who want to keep pot banned because it’s illegal.
What do you think about a triangular marriage with three people?
At the time, same sex couples already had the right to marry in California. He donated money to take that right away from them. Would your stance be the same if he donated money to remove civil rights protections for racial minorities?
I think civil rights for minorities are super important.
I find marriage much less important. It’s essentially just a symbol. (Or is it about the tax benefits and legal protections in case of death? That’s substantial)
Yeah, just a symbol until your deceased partner's family tries to take your house. Just a symbol until you realize you can't sponsor your foreign partner for immigration because the government doesn't recognize your relationship.
Those legal protections around property are the whole point of the law recognizing marriage.
No, this article is pretty much idealistic rant aimed at hating the ceo. The product is fine.
Edit: the ads and crypto are opt in. I’d like to see if anyone ranting here about them has actually used Brave and went so far as to opt in to things they don’t want
Can someone explain how Brave siphoning some money from Amazon specifically impacts privacy? Does the affiliate get a list of accounts that bought something? Names? Addresses? Or does some money just show up in their account?
What information does Amazon get? That the person clicking is using Brave? They already know that from the user agent.
Some OSS developers, independent review/news sites get affiliate money to stay afloat. Amazon requires them to state this clearly. Brave didn’t declare it and probably stole (replace) innocent referrals. This is level 100 spyware/malware tactic.
I mean… I’ve been using Firefox since Google silo’d all log-ins together.
On the other hand, search.brave.com is freaking incredible. It’s so much better than Google, Bing or DDG at this point, it’s shocking. I switched a couple weeks ago and it’s surreal to see so many usable, useful results on the first page again.
well, I just came across the article on Mastodon and wanted to share it. I mean jeez, imagine sharing and wanting to discuss interesting topics just for fun?
and I posted the article on !technology and then cross-posted it here, because I thought it was also an interesting community to discuss it. I saw a bunch of people cross-posting it elsewhere, so if you’re seeing it a bunch of times then it’s probably because those communities probably also have something in common with the article. I personally think every community have different people and different discussions to have, so I don’t see it as particularly bad.
[Eich] donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Even though I do not agree at all with the donation and support - out of the things that influence me into choosing a browser, 15 year-old private donations of appointed CEOs is pretty low on that list.
And the whole BAT thing is opt-in and they’re very transparent about it. I don’t get why people get so triggered when the C word - crypto - is involved.
But the data collection sounds like it's counter to its supposed goals. Multiple campaigns have been discussed that just make it believe they don't actually care about privacy considering all the ways they keep trying to do stuff is counter to that. Why stay? Tor Browser is available. Hell, Firefox itself is already able to take you pretty far and extensions can do the rest.
Why make the sacrifice of your personal data? Like, how many attempts at collecting personal data do you need to have occur before you realize it's always been their goal?
I would also imagine there are a lot of people that did not support same sex marriage back in 2008 that do now. I do not know the Eich personally, but it doesn’t make sense to hold this stuff against people until we find out if they have or haven’t changed their views.
15 years is a long time. I know someone who did a complete 180 on their beliefs within a few years: from a conservative, homophobic, and religious pov to the exact opposite. I myself changed some political views I had 5 years ago.
I have no idea about Eich, but if I let this affect my choices of anything, frankly I won’t do anything else in my life facing the millions of variables before me.
TBH it’s not that he opposed same sex marriage that bothers me. People make poor decisions. It’s:
He donated to the campaign AFTER it became clear that campaign was using the funds to put up ads claiming gays were a danger to children.
His response to people working under him who were upset and had legitimate concerns they wouldn’t be treated fairly was: “the donation does not in itself constitute evidence of animosity. Those asserting this are not providing a reasoned argument, rather they are labeling dissenters to cast them out of polite society.” He has never withdrawn this insult and made little attempt to deal with it before or after becoming Mozilla CEO.
I’m also pissed that the right wing has managed to lie about what happened to the point that if you go against the false narrative, that falsely claims Eich was fired from Mozilla for his hateful views, he was actually promoted to CEO and resigned after a lot of outside pressure made it clear he was harming Mozilla by keeping the role, then you tend to get flamed, downvoted, modded “Troll”, etc in most tech forums.
I’m inclined not to boycott products because I dislike the people who made them’s views, but that said I don’t particularly want to find I’m contributing to the monetization of something that goes to a homophobic asshole, especially at a time when LGBT people are under attack at a level I haven’t seen in 30 years. So I will not be using Brave for that reason, regardless of what I think about the product technologically.
California voters approved prop 8 by a sizable majority. It was thrown out by the courts. That kind of dilutes my “oh no” over one persons donation. We’d need to boycott a good portion of Californians.
Today I think it’s relevant to point out he was an outspoken against masks, shutdowns, and was calling Fauci a liar. Basically everyone’s conservative family member in 2020.
I think the only relevant criticism I see is adding affiliate codes to urls (until they were caught).
The author also forgot the polemic of adding twitter and facebook trackers to the whitelist, and impersonating people in their ads. There are some interesting criticisms against brave, I don't understand why their detractors are obsessed with the CEO and crypto.
Exactly. They do a lot of things I don’t like, which is why I don’t use them. However, I do recommend them over Chrome if someone isn’t willing to use Firefox (or Safari on iOS with an ad blocking extension).
That said, the ad replacement thing was an interesting idea, and if it got better click-through rate while preventing sites from stealing PII, they probably could’ve cut a profit sharing deal and users would’ve been better off vs the status quo. They could also have a “premium” option where they pay a certain amount for no ads, and that amount gets split with websites who would normally serve ads.
There are some good ideas there, but unfortunately the good ideas don’t seem to have really worked out as intended. I still think they’re better than Chrome, but things can change.
BAT can be distributed to publishers of content you go to based on percentage of visiting those sites. You can purchase BAT or subscribe to the ad program. Nobody in this thread knows even the basics of BAT, smh.
Well nobody is perfect, this thread is making that abundantly clear. If they were still doing all that shit years later everyone might have a point. Make mistakes and learn from it and move on is the only thing I can really ask of anyone. Brave is doing the right thing IMO. As to your comment about BAT, it’s the classic problem of what came first, the chicken or the egg? Not recommending it because it’s not being used so nobody’s recommending it lol.
I don’t recommend it because there are better options. Firefox is privacy respecting, and since it still has an independent rendering and JavaScript engine, it’s better for open web standards. On iOS, all browsers have the same rendering engine as per Apple’s rules, so I recommend Safari with an ad blocker.
If Brave actually offered something tangibly better for the open web, I would recommend it. But it doesn’t, so I recommend something that does.
However, if you need a chromium-based browser, I think Brave and Chromium are about on par, so I recommend both.
By default, pocket makes suggestions to you based on your browsing history and then the aggregate of that is sent to Mozilla. How is that privacy respecting again?
The aggregate of your interaction with sponsored content is sent to Mozilla (sponsored links you’ve seen, clicked on, and how many times you’ve clicked on them). Your browsing history is never sent, either in whole or aggregate. It also sends your region, country, state, and county, but not your IP or anything that could uniquely identify you.
Since you aren’t being identified, nor can you likely be identified, it’s privacy respecting. Other advertisers attempt to build a uniquely identifying profile on you where they grab as much information as they can. When compared, Pocket looks a lot better than every other advertiser.
Regardless, I’m not comfortable with Pocket, so I disable it. I can’t disable advertisers tracking me.
Firefox by default sends search queries to your search provider to help you discover common phrases other people have searched for and improve your search experience if your selected search provider supports search suggestions… Learn more, including how to disable this feature…
…
If you enable “Improve the Firefox Suggest Experience,” we and our partners may also receive your search queries.
So it sends search queries to get search suggestions. I didn’t see it mentioned one way or the other, but I’m assuming Firefox doesn’t send any personally identifiable information with it, though the server probably can track you somewhat with your IP address.
Your idea of ethical is overwriting affiliate links from small journalism sites that clearly state they’re affiliate links and instead quietly replacing them with links that benefit a corporation that raised money off of crypto?
did not know about the founder’s past, cheers for this. whenever i’m forced to open a chromium browser for something from now on, i’ll be using vivaldi.
Is Vivaldi good? I’ve heard it’s like the old Opera, which I used to love (I used Opera from 2003 until around when they switched to Chromium, 2012ish)
I used to use it and I liked it quite a bit, I even replaced my gmail accounts with vivaldi.net accounts, though I may migrate to proton sometime. I use Firefox exclusively but if I needed to use a chromium-based browser, that’s the one I’d use. I’m not a power user by any stretch so my opinion probably has less weight than those of others on here, but that’s my two cents anyway.
i like vivaldi a lot :) mostly because of its UI and extremely easy in-depth customization. in my opinion it is the greatest-looking web browser (if you don’t factor in all the css fiddling you can do in a text editor with firefox, of course. but even then i don’t recall seeing any custom firefox user style that looked better than vivaldi to me).
the reason why i switched away from vivaldi and back to firefox after ~2 years of straight usage was that vivaldi had a weird performance bug for me where if i had too many tabs open for too many days in a row (laptop, no shutdown), it would randomly start freezing and i’d have to restart it. but when it was running on a fresh start, it was amazing. also the more ethical choice of using a non-chromium browser was part of the reason
it would randomly start freezing and i’d have to restart it. but when it was running on a fresh start, it was amazing
Weird, that’s the exact problem I had on my old desktop and have on my laptop with Firefox. Both were 8gigs of memory and I figured out that the freezing coincided with memory being depleted. My new desktop has, funnily enough, no problems with its 32gigs of memory. I need to purchase a new ram block for my laptop…
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