I’ve been seeing a lot of people hate and uninstall Brave. Why? It’s not like they’re tracking us or doing anything else shady. If so, what’s the privacy alternative?
Brave fucks with crypto. Never fuck with crypto. It’s also Chromium, which means they’re complicit in Google’s efforts to DRM the internet.
I’m pro digial cash / Monero … but it doesn’t belong in a web browser. Super sketchy shit they are doing with BAT, which means they are tracking you.
I legitimately would be fine with automatically paying authors. It’s not like I enjoy pay walls, ads, or AI garbage writing.
But yeah that’s a job for existing crypto and a Firefox extension. Nothing about this needed a separate money supply or browser.
The complicit part is the most bullshit thing I have ever heard.
They said unequivocally that they won’t support it, just like they didn’t support Manifest V3.
It still is more browser share for Chromium. Business owners will see that share and use it as part of the business case in implementing WEI. If you want it stopped, you gotta use a real alternative such as Firefox.
See https://www.spacebar.news/p/stop-using-brave-browser
The TL;DR is that while the browser is technically fine, the people that own it are really fishy and are always trying to turn a profit, whether it be pushing crypto or discussing having their own ad network. They also use Chromium which means Google can slowly push things into it. You should use Firefox with Ublock Origin and tune the browser settings for privacy. There are also forks of Firefox tuned for privacy but I don’t think most people need it.
Google sure is. Brave is a chromium-based browser - a browser that is built off of Google Chrome, so anything Google wants to put in their web browser to track you and devour your internet-soul is also in Brave and all the other “web browsers” that are just chromium skins like Edge.
Just because Brave forks of Chromium, that doesn’t mean they have to accept every change Google does and they can also do their own changes (ex: not supporting Manifest V3).
At least they are financially independent from Google, which you can’t say about Firefox.
At least they are financially independent from Google, which you can’t say about Firefox.
I absolutely love it when people bring this up.
It’s always funny, mostly because Google is, let’s see… A member of the GNOME Advisory Board, a financial supporter of the GNOME Foundation (scroll to the bottom to see their supporters), a supporting member of the KDE e.V., a Gold member of the Linux Foundation, and a major contributor to the Linux Kernel (you’ll see some other companies you absolutely hate in that list as well).
Almost nothing in the major open source space is untouched by Google. But sure, Firefox in particular is evil because “Google money”.
If you don’t want to use something with financial support from Google, feel free to run FreeBSD and browse the web with, I don’t know, Lynx or something.
Or Apple devices with Safari only. That’s a pretty good option, actually, provided you like proprietary software and a super locked down system (except WebKit which is open source and I honestly believe more browsers should be based on it).Lol, edit: Google pays more to Apple than Mozilla to be default on Safari, so nevermind that.Apple devices with Safari only.
Google pays Apple over 30 times what they pay Mozilla ($15 billion vs $450 million - both annually in 2021) to make the Google search engine the default in their browser.
Ooh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing!
That’s actually quite the sum, but I guess considering Safari’s reach, it makes sense.
I just think it’s stupid people are always crying that Chromium forks are “controlled by Google” when they can do whatever they want with the fork.
I’m not saying that Firefox is bad because they take Google’s money.
I just think that if you consider that, they are more dependent on Google than Brave is.
And since one of the main complaints of people is that they want to turn away from Google stuff, that should be taken into consideration.
It’s also about avoiding full control over web standards being given to Google.
Completely agreed that a fork of an open source product shouldn’t be hated purely because* it’s Google code.
I just think that if you consider that, they are more dependent on Google than Brave is.
I think we’re defining “dependent” in two different ways here. There’s financial reliance (which applies to far more than Firefox when it comes to major FOSS projects) and software reliance. I don’t particularly think either is better or worse, but there are significant differences in the result of either.
Financial contribution in exchange for defaulting to a specific search engine is very different from using a Google-led project as the base foundation of your software.
Unless Brave actually hard forks Blink/Chromium, they’re literally depending on Google’s work for the entire base of their flagship software.
They can choose not to implement certain features, but without Google, their browser as it currently is wouldn’t exist. Theoretically (this is highly unlikely, but just as an experiment) if Google were to somehow move to a closed source model for future versions or ditch all work on Blink, Brave would very likely die.
If they wanted to keep it alive, they’d have to fork the last open source version of Chromium, maintain it alongside everything else, and still push out something secure that adheres to web standards. None of which is easy and requires a lot of work.
Financially, yeah. Firefox has more reliance on Google than Brave. So do GNOME, KDE, and the Linux Foundation.
When it comes to their software, Brave is far more reliant on Google than Firefox could ever be.
The only major browser not reliant on Google at all is Safari.(Edit: ignore this; Google pays Apple a shit ton to be default on Safari as well.)Despite my dislike of web monopoly, I don’t particularly care what browser people use, provided they’re being honest about it.
I don’t like Google. I don’t trust them. But it would be incredibly shortsighted to dismiss their contributions (financial or otherwise) to open source. Whether people like it or not, without them, we wouldn’t have a lot of shit we take for granted.
If people want to “get away from using Google stuff”, they might as well just ditch tech altogether. Google’s fingers are in just about every big FOSS cookie jar, whether financially or via software contribution.
Think about it this way. Brave needs Google. Google doesn’t need Brave. At all. Mozilla needs funding from Google. Google doesn’t need funding from Mozilla. Google requires very little of either of them, but they both rely on it for different reasons. One approach isn’t worse than the other, but the effects are very, very different.
I’m with you up until the use of all of this to discourage getting away from Google stuff. Just because Google is also involved in open source doesn’t mean that their other projects become more trustworthy, or that the safety of those open source projects should automatically come into question.
If Google pulls out of Gnome, it’d affect Gnome but it wouldn’t obliterate it. Likewise, somebody would probably take over some form of a hard fork of Chromium. But if Google drops support on something you’ve made an essential part of your workflow, you’re in trouble.
The point of getting away from Google as much as possible isn’t to exist in a world without Google, it’s to avoid having a single point of failure and to avoid putting literally all your data into the hands of a company that will use it however they can to profit. Half my duck duck go searches get a !g at the front, and Firefox or no, I’m still on an android phone, but that doesn’t mean I’m trying to hand them all my notes for work that isn’t finished yet so they can regurgitate its component parts. Train on my stuff all you want, but at least let me finish it first.
Google right now is like a bad relationship. It’s gotten completely wrapped up in our way of life to the point that it’s overly comfortable doing a half-assed or self-serving job and knowing most people won’t bother to shake things up looking for something better.
It’s probably best if we all get a little space from megacorps like Google, even if we don’t abandon the relationship entirely.
If Google pay the best search price that funds browser development, why not? Firefox aren’t in the search market. They could easily go bing or yahoo like they used previous, but more income means more money away for building modern web browsers which are millions of lines of code.
Brave don’t need to do that because Google codes their browser for them.
I was a brave user and just got sick of the gimmicks.
I’ve been on permanent team firefox now on all my devices 😁
they sent me notifications that were ads
To be fair, they’re opt-in. They won’t show if you don’t use the BAT wallet.
I didn’t opt in and I never used the BAT wallet.
Brave has a crypto token and that turns Alot of people off of brave. They also heavily encourage people to use custodial exchanges which turns some crypto people. They have also have added their affiliate links on cert pages when users would visit and they had nasty bug in their sync which mixed up user data. Otherwise Brave removes Alot of the bad parts of chrome and brave search is pretty solid. The privacy alternative is Firefox or librewolf. If you need chromium for whatever reason brave or ungoogled chromium
I find myself switching between Brave and Firefox. The anti-Brave crowd is mostly dissatisfied with the Brave ownership and the crypto/ad features. I myself don’t have a problem with either. The crypto and ad features can simply be disabled. If you like Brave and it does what you want then you should use it
A large part is also that it’s Chromium based. I agree about the features, the first thing I do with Firefox is go around and disable all the random stuff they’ve added (eg: pocket)
A large part is also that it’s Chromium based.
Ah right, I forgot about that. It’s a valid argument.
Super satisfied Vivaldi user, checking in. Chromium based and removes a lot of the Google. Custom settings are a power users dream.
Brave is a well market browser but does as much as any other chromium/firefox browser
