I’ve been trying out the DuckDuckGo browser lately on mobile. It uses the Chromium backend, so some sites work better in it than in my normal Firefox.
The neatest feature of the browser is the ability to generate random email addresses in signup forms, and those emails all get forwarded to your real email address. As it forwards the emails, it removes trackers from them. You can click a link in one of the forwarded emails to disable that address from being forwarded any more if it gets spammy.
I use brave as it really blocks the things from foking meta, and goo gel, even if i think javascript is a warcrime against human kind, and against IT, and its created by eich
Yes, it’s powerful but it has downsides. Why pay for processing when you can just have the end-user do it? I just disallow all JavaScript and give permissions to sites one by one.
A lot of it is for tracking anyways and now most sites use it for styling and animations meaning it’s unusable without allowing JS. Of course I use JS, it’s useful and powerful but in the wrong hands it’s dangerous and no matter what website you go to the JS is ran automatically. Maybe your AV might catch it but that also requires $$ that most personal end users don’t spend.
The problem with the author is the idea of lumping together some good reasons to avoid Brave and some really bad reasons. The idea that the company behind brave depends on ads for revenue is good reasoning, the fact that they have a volatile cryptocurrency to use as payment is another. But when you mention that the founder is a bigot, or that he was associated with Peter Theil, or that they CONSIDERED a shady ad practice are not really reasons to avoid the product.
In the end, you want to have some competition in the browser market (that means not using the same base browser with a skin and some features). I would recommend Firefox over Brave for that reason alone.
I just read it all and I don’t entirely agree with all the reasons that the writer stated to not use brave (the CEO donating to ban same-sex marriage and the idea of BAT in itself I find interesting and I like but I ended up disabling it because I got nothing from it and I read somewhere how they were taking the donations that people made to the creators that do not have BAT or know about it without telling the users) but let’s say he got me to question whether I would recommend Brave anymore, either way with what Google is doing right now I’m recommending Firefox to everyone I know whenever I can for the cause
Holy shit man imagine if we judged every huge project by one asshole at the top. There wouldn’t be a single thing to enjoy in this world.
Edit:
I am going to add more perspective to this, because holy shit people are so into eating nothing burgers.
Reddit/Twitter was a database and API that everyone was centralized onto, there was no choice. Brave you can literally fork because its open source. Aside from that this was literally the CEO’s personal donation of $1000…in like 2014. Almost 10 yrs ago.
Underrated comment - the top is filled with toxic scum. Like if one really looked into it, everything would have to be boycotted (not that it isn’t a worthy thing to do, but it gets exhausting and scumbags seem to own everything)
Calling something Ubiquitous isn’t arguing any point. It’s just a statement of observance. It’s not a call to action. It’s not a reason to do one thing or another. If anything, it’s a symptom. A pattern. And patterns can be a reason to change. Happens in psychology all the time. In fact looking for the patterns is in part in identifying a problem. So congrats on identifying something everyone else already knew. But you certainly can’t argue that a pattern as enough of a reason to not change a pattern.
I don’t personally resonate with the idea of “boycotting” things, mostly for the fact that these companies will never miss the $20 I would have spent on them. “Boycot” to me, implies some sort of noticeable statement.
For me, when Im thinking about getting a Chik-Fil-A or something, the question is simple: “Do I want to give my money to these people?”
I don’t know what it is, but a fair number of people are incoming these types of arguments these days, especially in academia. What started this trend?
I’m not sure if you mean to say people like me arguing to separate patrons, artists and the art - especially where this is open source - or people like the writer of the article in the OP.
So I’ll speak to it from both ends: people naturally want to vote with their time and money. If money is seeing ads and generating crypto for someone they don’t support; fine. I think everyone understands where they’re coming from. On the other hand I can google github + project-name for brave and find all the code and fork it…if you don’t like something about brave just fork it or use a stripped down fork.
I don’t use brave to begin with but the public executions are fucking obnoxious when the product hasn’t taken a unilateral shift in direction. Twitter and Reddit were proprietary platform you were locked in for if you used them daily. There was never an alternative way to use those products in their full functionality; both had to be 100% recreated on mastodon/lemmy. If you don’t like Brave’s CEO you can literally fork the project, remove the shit you don’t like and use the work for free.
Sorry, my comment got mangled and I had some typos. I agree that we can separate artists and art. I am annoyed that so many people try to argue the contrary. In academia, many are currently trying to argue that you cannot separate the artist from their art (at least, in music circles). I find that perspective juvenile.
The article isn’t judging by the one asshole, it breaks down specific flaws in the core of the product itself. Also when the “one person” is the CEO who guides the decisions the become the spirit of the product, one bad person can be enough. Twitter is now irredeemable because of the cancer of elon musk at the top, for example.
Also, a little tone deaf to make a statement like yours on Lemmy; a place basically populated entirely by people leaving Reddit because of the toxic, user-hostile decisions of spez on Reddit.
Don’t you don’t think that a CEO highly affects (if not sets and controls) the strategy, priorities and direction of an organization?
If you agree with that, would you then agree that a CEOs values and way of doing things highly affects they way he sets strategy, prioritizes and in what direction the organization should move?
Calling something Ubiquitous isn’t arguing any point. If anything, it’s a symptom. A pattern. looking for the patterns is in part in identifying a problem. So congrats on identifying something everyone else already knew. But you certainly can’t argue that a pattern alone as enough of a reason to not change a pattern. Go back to identifying the sun as the sun while the adults talk.
No. That is factually wrong. Brave is open source. This is more like if we discovered the creator of mastodon was donating any profits he managed to make to some bigotry party. You wouldn’t see me barking down the nice people who host mastodon or contribute to its code.
Separate the patrons, artists and art. Because it is not the same and that logic cuts all sorts of ways.
Ok but like that asshole is using his money and power to donate to horrible stuff. Even if we take the stance that you shouldn’t let someone’s opinion ruin what they make, you’re still helping him support his causes financially through using his platform.
Or wow, it’s almost like people care about that sort of thing on the platform were most people came from Reddit or twitter because of the awful actions of their respective CEOs or something
Oh believe me I get it. But at the same time the CEO didn’t rename brave browser “anti woke browser” and force it to not load “woke sites man”.
Shits all open source right? Even if I disagree with him politically that’s on him. I can use my money to donate to my political designation and even fork the brave browser if I don’t want to support it.
Elon and Spez were one way no choice fuck you CEOs. We didn’t get much choice there. And they use their platforms to remind you of that. I don’t really feel like brave does that at all.
Edit: I’m also going to add that I don’t use brave. I also don’t care much about politics outside of leave me alone, leave my neighbor alone, and make things affordable.
If the huge asshole at the top uses their money earned as CEO to fund bigoted causes, yeah, I generally stop patronizing that business. Maybe you don’t have the energy to care about things, and that’s fine. Last time I checked, the Mozilla Foundation was still fairly ethical.
I think most leaders of companies apologize and take ownership when they publicly screw up. The problem in Eich’s case is he doesn’t think it’s wrong to strip same-sex couples of their equal right to marry, so he felt he didn’t need to apologize for helping to make that happen.
That 1k donation, from years ago, is very usefull to someone. I dont know who cares so much to destroy this Brave founder, but that story for a 1k donation keep being repeated over and over.
Some people gave millions to have trans right banned… we never hear about thoses people. But 1k, big deal!
The issue with the donation has multiple stages. Stage 1 was the donation itself. Stage 2 was the intellectually insulting way that Brendan Eich defended his actions. Stage 3 is the negative impact that Proposition 8 had on California for many years, during which time millions of dollars in taxpayer money was wasted on legal proceedings to walk back the amendment banning marriage for people who dared to be of the same gender.
It just works the best. Ad-blocking is unrivalled. I’ve tried Firefox+extensions, Duduck Go browser etc, but none match Brave’s ad-blocking capabilities on mobile and desktop.
And I’m all on board with the dream of users receiving a return on their attention. Yes the quantity is small now, but that’s because it’s just starting out.
I used Brave on mobile for a full week about a year or so ago at the suggestion of a coworker before realizing it gave me nothing over Firefox and added the bizarre crypto angle to everything.
This was during my (thankfully brief) crypto interest phase and I tried to see if I could accumulate any of the BAT coins the browser would give you for viewing ads…that never worked somehow so I accumulated zero, which was certainly one thing that led to me getting fed up with it and going back to Firefox.
Beyond that, the interface was weird, it was prone to crashes, and it was generally a hassle. 100% flash-in-the-pan cash-grab effort.
Funny the different experiences we have. I switched from FF to Brave only on mobile because FF mobile doesn’t correctly interface to Android clipboard for scrolling screenshots. (I think that’s because they assume everyone uses Samsung, which brings its own, but I’m on real Android and loving the experience over Samsung’s bloaty mc bloatface experience.)
That was only one feature that I rarely use, but, once I tried to switch back to FF on mobile, I realized some other problems came back to me and were only happening on FF. Perhaps it’s one of my plugins, but every other scroll-up motion is ignored. The only reason I have plugins is to give me dark mode on accessibility-challenged sites, and that ability to do that with plugins was initially FF mobile’s edge over others, but dark mode is natively built into Brave.
I still prefer FF on desktop, and I want it to win on mobile, especially for its reading mode that I don’t think any other browser comes close to implementing.
You can actually turn off all the crypto stuff, thankfully.
As for the crashes, I never experienced that in the past year that I’ve been using Brave. (I recently switched to Firefox not because of this article but because of Google’s recent proposal.)
I tried Brave for maybe 2 days before going back to literally anything else. The heavy push for Crypto made me wary, and it really didn’t seem to be doing anything specific to increase my privacy online.
You can use ad-block extensions on Firefox mobile as well. You cabe even use.extensions to have dark mode on every website. Never had an issue with it.
If you’re really privacy concerned try out Privacy Browser on F-Droid, it’s pretty nifty (+ builtin tracker/ad blocking lists, and a ton of other stuff like javascript disabling)
I stopped using Brave over the whole BAT thing, it just felt shady and weird. This article just validated my decision even more. Happy to be back with Firefox, even though Mozilla has its own issues.
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