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Stop using Brave Browser
(www.spacebar.news)
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Technology
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I love Brave, use it daily, and this article didn't convince me at all. Vaguely motioning at the founder's ancient political donations or the optional crypto features, doesn't make a strong case.
2008 is not ancient. Nor is same-sex marriage some minor technical legal point.
Nor has he repented.
That's the important point for me.
People can change after 20 years. But he prefers to double-down instead.
So? He’s the CEO of a company that already gets no money from me.
Online forums pick the weirdest hills to die on sometimes. You’ve probably used hundreds of products today alone made by companies whose CEOs are worse dickwads than Eich. But this gave you a chance to feel superior online so you had to take it lmao
As a gay Californian, I took prop 8 personally. I spurn its supporters as I would spurn a rabid dog.
Chromium should be enough of a reason to get rid of it.
You have the choice between the engine made by Google and the engine paid for by Google.
Brave at least has its own search engine, something Mozilla doesn't even dare, as that's where they get all their Google money from.
Or because they're aware that it'd be a huge waste of time and money? It'd be a lot of work to build a search engine anywhere near as good as the existing alternatives, so it'd give worse user experience and waste time.
And yet Brave Search has done so. You got to have to come up with better excuses for Mozilla's failure here.
Mozilla pushes DuckDuckGo. That is a feature, not a failure.
How exactly are they pushing DuckDuckGo by making Google the default? And anyway, DuckDuckGo is just a wrapper around Bing, so that's not even much of an improvement.
Just because you like Brave the search engine doesn't mean you have to use Brave the browser. The two have no inherent connection.
Edit: While we're on the subject of money, I'd be more worried about that Peter Thiel money Brave took. That man openly claims freedom and democracy to be incompatible and supports efforts to create independent libertarian societies on international waters and in space.
I use brave search from firefox, seems the least shitty search engine so far.
Nothing against brave the browser, I've just been using firefox for about 10 years so have a lot of inertia.
Or there’s Safari or Orion, neither of which are what you listed. Also, Firefox is not “paid for by google” they get funding through their nonprofit as well.
Around 85% of the $450 million they get each year come from Google.
It's not like google is guiding their development processes, come off of this horseshit.
You see, when someone is known to make bad choices it makes sense to approach what they do with apprehension. This guy not only has a history of bad choices, he's also the CEO.
You're free to do as you like of course, but I'd say it's hardly fair to say the article is unconvincing.
Depends. As long as he doesn't rub it in my face by putting it into the browser, I don't care much. So I understand people who are pissed off because crypto is being rubbed in your face with Brave. But since I can disable that (and disabling it syncs to my other devices), I am also fine with that.
In return I get a browser where I like the sync model, with integrated Tor private browsing mode, and which is based on Chromium (which has sadly still the best dev tools, IMO).
Even MS Edge has some nice features and I used it for a while (I very much like that you can specify in which browser profile you want to open external links in). But they started to put more and more of their Microsoft bullshit into it with each version trying to sell me on all the different fucked up services they offer. Saying "no" once or twice: no problem. Saying "no" every fucking time they update the browser: fuck off.
Given their crypto functionality uses a third party which has been found to skirt the legal system I'd be a lot more concerned about this integration even if I don't intend to use it.
Keep in mind the stuff you read about is only what has been surfaced so far. Who knows what skeletons are still hiding?
Personally, I don't see any point risking it when there are perfectly viable alternatives such as Firefox. Granted the same guy infected Mozilla, but they stood up and ousted him so credit where credit is due.
Go and have a look? https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
My argument is that Brave is a Chromium browser with questionable business goals, but it is also the most private and secure, open-source, mainstream* Chromium browser. These keywords cannot be said about Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium and many other projects unfortunately.
That said, I primarily use Vivaldi because of its customizability and added features, something Firefox seems to reduce with every new version.
Being open-source doesn't automatically make you secure or reputable. Especially considering the open-source ecosystem in particular is a big target for exploitation right now. And auditing a software project of this size by its source code alone is no small feat.
"Mainstream chromium browser" is doing most if not all the heavy lifting there. Fair enough if that's what you're after, but mixing "private and secure, open-source" in feels disingenuous.
Last time I played with either Vivaldi or Brave you had to literally monkey patch the source code in order to customize things further than what the extension SDK allowed you to. You could do the same thing with Firefox, except they make it slightly harder because much of the source code is shipped in archives.
That said it's been years, maybe this can now be done purely through the extension SDK? It'd be news to me.
They offered a tenuous high yield lending program, that the SEC only jumped on after it collapsed from the FTX contagion. Litigation is pending afaik and depends on whether the program qualifies as a security, but the SEC has been losing ground in their optimistic claims of what they think qualifies as a security (outcome of Ripple lawsuit etc.).
Don't get me wrong, any such program is sketchy and I trust Gemini less for having offered it, but IMO it doesn't put them on the same tier as an exchange like FTX or make me think they would inject malware into software they have a connection with.
Yeah that's fair. I'd say it falls into the same boat as the argument against the CEO; they haven't done anything clearly malicious, but their bad decisions are enough to give you pause and reconsider.
Yeah this article is not very convincing
Brave is great! No ads, Tor built in, and can install Chrome extensions. I don't use their crypto wallet and it's never bothered me
Ad will be injected soon. Tor is not built in.
Source? I've used Tor with Brave
You've used onion links. Brave implemented unsecured onion protocol in thier Chromium browser.
Anything using Firefox as a base can run onion links with a simple add on because Tor is just Firefox. Vivaldi comes with onion support right out of the box, doesn't support hate and is malware free.
I use brave and think it's the best browser available, so I'm not arguing against it or anything, but technically it just supports use of the onion protocol, it does not provide the same full suite of protections that the tor browser does
As Brave says themselves:
https://brave.com/tor-tabs-beta/
"Just learned about this company that's led by a raging bigot who has used his wealth and position to try to oppress others and strip them of civil and human rights, and I fully support that and am now a proud supporter"
They also sell userdata more than Google, have installed malware knowingly and thier shitcoin skirts the law.