Technology

Just use Firefox.

The ceo is a bigoted asshole, Brave is chromium, it was initially funded by Peter Thiel and they're literally just trying to make their own adsense network.

The self-proclaimed privacy focused browser is tracking your browsing and want to serve you personalized ads, and I think they want to use that tracking data for AI training as well, meaning other people can potentially access it.

And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. Which they seemingly unironically called it "Basic Attent Tokens"..

TL;DR: The company is basically a sham company trying to usher in a dystopia. Where you'll get paid for staring at ads, while having all your data stolen and sold back to you.

The fact that their founder wants to ban gay marriage is enough reason for me to avoid it like the plague.

I dont know why anyone would leave chrome and land on something like brave.

If youre ditching chrome, which you should, go to an actual different browser and use Firefox.

I have absolutely no idea how Brave got the reputation it has. It's business model is disgusting and extortionate, it's like paying for warez. Been clear as day since day one.

Brave is a marching band of red flags. It claims privacy while injecting ads, affiliate codes and crypto into the browser. It's kind of sad to see someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side and pretend this is all fine. It isn't.

Best advice I could give for anyone who wants privacy is use Firefox or a branch of it. Firefox is out of the box the most privacy conscious mainstream browser and add-ons make it more so. If you want absolute privacy you could even use a derivative like Tor Browser.

The fact that its main 2 gimmicks are a shitty ad blocker and integrated cryptocurrency should be enough of a red flag, honestly. Just use Firefox, people!

Firefox is king 👑

the hateful browser

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.

Elon, as CEO and on the X/Twitter brand:

• "brainwashed" https://www.news18.com/buzz/elon-musk-causes-uproar-with-anti-lgbtq-anti-vax-meme-insults-random-twitter-user-6714733.html
• https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-twitter-makes-millions-off-anti-lgbt-groomer-tweets-report
• https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitter-pronoun-rule-invites-bullying-lgbtq-groups-say-rcna87336
• https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-triples-down-on-making-twitter-terrible-for-trans-people/

Meanwhile Brendan:

• Literally stepped down as CEO https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-resigns-as-mozilla-corporation-ceo/
• https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/
• made personal blog post about inclusivity shortly after https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
• invented and worked on/for javascript, brave, firefox

Gnubyte

Use Firefox or Safari, the more people use Chromium-based browsers the faster we get to the situation where Google completely owns the Internet (and they almost do now).

Vivaldi? Trusting a closed sourced application for privacy? What?

Not even defending brave here, just weird that the author say that.

Today I learned that people take it VERY PERSONALLY when you criticize their chosen browser. 😂

Long time Brave user here. This made me uninstall Brave and move to Firefox. Thank you !

I can't think of a reason why anyone would use a browser other than Firefox and it's forks.

This article is useless trash. There is no real technical argument here except "founder bad".

I do have reasons for not using Brave, but it's to do with the annoying defaults and the crypto integration. They default whitelist Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook garbage that I have to go and toggle off.

Given the level of effort and extensions like Facebook container on Firefox, I just prefer the better experience for me. This bullshit about getting on identity politics agendas I find abhorrent and repulsive. This author's a stupid fuckhead.

I just use Firefox and DuckDuckGo

Oh boy, this comment section is gonna be spicy. I can already smell the smoke from the Brave enthusiasts heads exploding.

Thanks. Whenever I raised the issue of homophobia or his general support of right-wing causes that threaten people's privacy (see the aftermath of Roe v. Wade for example), I got downvoted, be it on the PrivacyGuides sub where they adore the browser, or right here just weeks ago.

I ditched Brave ages ago when the ad and crypto bullshit really ramped up, and finding out Peter Thiel was involved and Brendan Eich was a bigot, were more than enough to keep me away from Brave.

I currently use Arc on desktop because it makes my life as a busy dev much easier to organize, and Safari on iOS because every browser on there is just Safari anyway. iOS Safari + custom DNS to block ads. Works for me.

I’d use Firefox but Arc’s organization features have become insanely useful.

Things wrong with Brave: #1- It isn't Firefox/a Firefox derivative

I get people wanting an alternative Chromium based browser. Vivaldi, IMO, is a much better than Brave, and doesn't have all the annoying crypto weirdness.

I don't use either, though, I use Firefox

I've read the article via Firefox, with NoScript enabled. Am I doing this right?

"If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong."

I stopped reading here. If you would like to present objective technical arguments, please try not to sound like a 5 year old "I'm right, you're wrong, blah blah".

Use Brave or use Firefox. They both work great for privacy, but I find Brave is easier to configure to be private.

I started using Brave about a year ago... I didn't know any of this.

The Prop 8 stuff is enough of a reason for me. Firefox it is, I guess.

The writer is proposing Vivaldi, a closed-source browser, as an alternative to Brave, which is free and open-source. I think a better alternative would be Ungoogled Chromium.

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.

Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he 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.

Besides this I cannot find another good reason not to use brave. Nobody point to a specific line of code that ruins privacy, not enough reasons.

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.

I agree that you shouldn't use Brave browser cause of things they've done in the past but, oh Jesus, that article is so stupid it reminds me the Hogwarts Legacy boycott.

Unfortunately, there are the ame stuff about Firefox too. Mozilla Foundation is such a corrupt organization with extreme shady finances.

Foundation's main income is royalties by google: 567M per year.

Donations: 7M (which almost goes to the CEO's bonuses)

the CEO gets 700K salary and 4.6M bonuses. Lmao.

I'd suggest, using Firefox but not donating to them.

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.

Firefox works well enough for me. Never given me any problems or grief. I don't really understand the fascination with chromium forks or the insistence on using them instead of Mozilla's engine.

I use Brave as a backup browser. My main one is Firefox.

You can turn off the crypto stuff. 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.

Well, fork, I hadn't looked at this team behind Brave. I use both Firefox and Brave. Bye bye Brave...

I think that the number 1 reason to not use brave is that is based on the chromium engine. The number 2 is that they use limited anti fingerprinting tools and support his self built tracking and ads. The others about ideology of the CEO i think are not so important.

I just deleted it on my phone. All roads lead back to Firefox.