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whotd uses brave
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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I think a lot of people don't know any of the controversy related to brave and just use it because they know it as the most private chromium browser
Marketing has really worked for Brave.
That is the sad state of the world. Mass manipulating sentiment like some commercial psyop is a built in "feature" of the system.
I know of the controversies, I just don't think they're all that big when you actually examine them.
Homophobia
I'm part of the LGBT community and I just think there are bigger fish to fry. One of the guys involved made a $1k donation to an anti-prop 8 campaign like 15 years ago. That's it. That's the controversy. Like, yea it's shitty, but there was a lot more hate toward the community back then. People have grown and changed their views a lot in the years since. If we boycott every single company or individual who ever did anything even remotely homophobic, no matter their actions since, we'd essentially have to be living in a commune growing and making literally everything ourselves. Btw, this same guy is the one who developed JavaScript and I don't see even remotely the same level of hate for that, so it really feels like people are just being selectively upset.
Cryptocurrency
It's opt-in. It asks you once, and then never again. It was developed at a time when crypto was popular and was a feature people wanted. It was seen as a good thing when it first came out. Public opinion on crypto has soured, but plenty of people who wanted it still use the feature on brave. They have no good reason to scrap it. Especially because, again, it's opt-in only. Don't like it? Cool, don't use it. They aren't pushing it on you. But people hear the word crypto and immediately break out the pitchforks.
Do you even know what the goal of their cryptocurrency was? I think it's safe to say its failed at this point, but the goal was to completely rework how ads function on the internet. It would have killed the modern advertisement methods where ads are shoved in your face and you get nothing for it. Instead, it would have directly paid you a tiny amount any time you saw an ad, with you being able to choose how many you saw, or even if you saw any at all. Then you'd either be able to either keep the money for yourself, or donate it to websites/content creators of your choice. Take away the crypto part of it, and that's actually a pretty admirable goal in my book.
Ad affiliate links
Brave's biggest, actual, controversy is that they replaced some affiliate links with their own. Specifically links to binance.us, which is a crypto market. When it was found, Brave changed their code extremely quickly and claimed it was a bug. Now, companies have often lied through their teeth and claimed malicious actions were a "mistake" or a "bug", so maybe that is the same case here. But considering it was one site only, it was fixed almost immediately, and when you look at how it was actually replacing links (suggested auto fill in the address bar, pulled from browsing history) I am leaning toward it actually being unintentional.
Conclusion
I think people just like to hate things, and will find any reason to continue to do so as long as their little corner of the internet tells them they should hate it. People most vocal with their complaints rarely take the time to dig into the facts and see if it's really as bad as they claim; or they fully know it's not as bad, but never want to let the truth get in the way of a good ol' fashion, hate-boner, circle-jerk.
Is Brave the best browser? Hahahaha no. It's still a chromium fork and has been a little too eager to integrate AI in my opinion. But it's FAR from the worst and is the probably the best privacy focused browser for those that don't understand technology and struggle to use third-party ad-ons. It's just a little ridiculous that while there are legitimate things to complain about, most people's arguments seem to always stem from the 3 topics above.
Now cue the downvotes because I'm clearly some crypto fascist boot-licker for daring to believe "nuance" isn't a made up word.
A couple points: Brendan Eich, the one that made the prop-8 donation, is the current CEO of Brave, not just "one of the guys involved". In a related problem, I find it a little difficult to believe that someone who doesn't still hold their anti-gay views would be quite so eager to take cash from Peter Thiel (via his Firm Founder Fund) and I especially do not want to be involved with a browser supported by Thiel when the terms of his investment are private (like, does he have access to brave's user data? We'd like to think no, but boy are they shaking hands with the devil while asking us to trust them.)
Another big piece of criticism that was excluded: Brave created a bunch of profiles for content creators without telling them then used those to solicit donations on behalf of those content creators, then not only refused to refund users who were deceived they kept all the money they said would go to the content creators.
Trying to present aspects of this as overblown is possibly true - their affiliate link scam was just to binance.us and that gets left out of a lot of this, but at the same time that's a damned difficult thing to sell as just having been a mistake when it was auto-replacing the links to something they were the beneficiaries of.
Well sure, but he's not actively the CEO of javascript, and as far as I'm aware hasn't ever been involved with javascript since it was rolled into the OpenJS Foundation.
(Also: Brendan Eich shared a bunch of covid conspiracy theory / misinformation stuff. Sure that's a minor point, absolutely everyone sure was doing that back then and why should we judge, but still it's not a great look.)
Wow this is so... sane.
Being childish and reductive I wanted to downvote anything supporting Brave, but I find you've challenged my views on this.
That said, I think I'm just going to re-frame my dislike for Brave users by assuming they're all crypto-weirdos.
I agree with you on all these. The only problem I have with Brave is they choose to exclusively shit on Firefox recently as their marketing strategy, while there are apparently much much bigger fish to fry. I thought their whole mission is to stop people from using Chrome, not another way more privacy focused browser.
Calm down with this logical and thought-out response.
Appreciate the write up!
That's really well said.
In the end they are just browsers. It's great to have people that inform others and lead them to better alternatives and Firefox has many of them who are very passionate. But then many of them are way too passionate.
Dude you are the most logical and coherent person in this thread, congrats. I should add that most of the bloat Brave has can be disabled via policies, even IA things.
While I'm sure you are right I think Brave also likely pays for maintaining opinion on social media and posting positive comments supporting it. Many others learned of doing that (for example musk has bots astroturfing its image pretty much everywhere.) Similarly for example you don't see controversies section about Brave.
Which it isn't, and also Chromium sucks, so they're really just mag dumping into their foot
The web sucks, because of Google's EEE approach with Chromium; there just isn't a good way to use the web anymore. I use librewolf, it's okay.
Google really needs to be kicked out of the W3C and have Chrome taken from them.
Yup librewolf for all the stuff I can. Google Meet has all kinds of wierd problems on firefox, especially in Linux. Whne you're hosting you can't share just one tab with sound and in linux getting the video/mic to authorize is hit or miss and takes a good 20 seconds on my boxes to authorize even when it works.
Librewolf breaks some site and other FF features, I don't think if it's usable enough for day by day.
Chromium sucks? chromium is objectively more secure and performant AND compatible than gecko could be.
Based on what?
GrapheneOS cites security issues with Firefox.
Citation
In terms of performance, it's well known that Blink is faster and it can be tested by just trying both. Firefox stutters and lags while Chromium maintains a smooth framerate.
I disagree with compatibility however. Chromium's wayland support is iffy and it barely integrates with XDG or VAAPI
GrapheneOS's objections are irrelevant because you should be using security extensions if you're old enough to get online without parental supervision. JavaScript has not run on my web browser since Bush Jr was in office. Considering Graphene is made by weirdos who get hysterical if you start asking questions about the difference between admin permissions on a big device that lives on your desk versus a small device that lives in your pocket, they're pretty firmly relegated to being unserious.
Omg this idiot saying no one should use javascript... This is un realistic unpractical and stupid.
Do you really think extensions are sufficient to manage proper process isolation in the browser engine itself?
Are we serious? You can't claim that security is irrelevant for everyone because you cripple your web browser to be functionally equivalent to
curl https://website.com/.There's little difference. I'm pretty sure they'd agree the traditional desktop security model (especially Linux) is extremely weak.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html
Skill issue detected
https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Can anyone reccomend good options fo browsers?
These are all the browsers I personally think are good and privacy-respecting. Sorry if I accidentally included too many options.
Desktop
Firefox-Based
Firefox
The standard for browsers where you aren't the product. For maximum privacy it does require tweaking settings, but it is reasonably privacy-friendly out of the box. It has light customization options including a sidebar and customizable button placement, and can be much more heavily customized with user themes.
Librewolf (Most reccomended for privacy)
A custom version of Firefox with enhanced privacy by default. Comes with Ublock Origin installed.
Waterfox
A Firefox-based browser with some additional privacy features, enhanced speed, and additional features.
Floorp
A browser based on Firefox with much more advanced customization options and many additional features, like workspaces and web panels. Doesn't add any additional privacy-focused features. They recently also added support for chrome extensions. This is my personal choice of browser (with the Natsumi modification).
Zen Browser
A Firefox-based browser with a sidebar+workspace workflow, and lots of stylistic changes and customizations that help put the focus on the webpage. Very nice and usable for productivity, but doesn't add any additional privacy-focused features.
Chromium-Based
Ungoogled Chromium
It's Chromium, but without Google. Pretty self-explanatory, it's simple, and it works.
Vivaldi
An extremely customizable browser packed with a massive quantity of additional features that can be toggled and tweaked for varying needs and methods of usage. It supports MV2 extensions.
Helium
A chromium-based browser with enhanced privacy and speed. Comes with Ublock Origin pre-installed, and supports MV2 extensions. It's a pretty new project.
Android
Firefox-Based
Firefox
The de-facto privacy-friendly browser, although for maximum privacy it does require tweaking settings. It (and its forks) are the only privacy-friendly browsers on android that support extensions.
Waterfox
A fork of Firefox with more private defaults, and extra bloat removed.
IronFox
A hardened private Firefox fork. Heavily focused on privacy and security, it sacrifices some usability for privacy.
Chromium-based
Cromite (Most reccomended for privacy)
A chromium fork with enhanced privacy and built-in ad blocking.
Vivaldi
Very customizable chromium-based browser. It does not come with an ad-blocker.
iOS
All browsers on iOS are limited to the WebKit engine which Safari is built on, so just use Safari. The benefits of other browsers on iOS are negligible.There is so much controversy with every browser and people working on them that I find is better just not to read anything about any browser anymore.
Maybe, if you've only heard of like 5 browsers.
I mean, yeah. I’m not a computer person, so ~~five~~ six browsers seems like a lot to just know off hand. I don’t know as many cola brands or Russian Czars without looking them up (I clearly don’t know what a normal comparison would be). People do talk mad shit about Firefox, chrome, opera, brave, safari, and edge though, which have got to make up the vast majority of the browser market.
Having to cross out 5 and make it 6 because you actually could name more than 5 off-hand really seems to undercut that point.
But people talk shit about all of them. Plus, does edge really count? Also, wasn’t that really your point? I can think of more than five and people are still shit talking them.
From a non techie perspective, I don’t know why one is better than another.
Maybe. I tried a lot and my personal experience is that Chrome is at least a level above all else in UX for general use. So chrome with some privacy features out of the box seems a good way to go.
Chrome is the worst, there is no privacy with Chrome. The UX is also trash, it’s only good if you haven’t tried anything else.
Also Sergey Brin is in the Epstein files.
Well i respect your personal experience, but it doesn't at all correspond with mine.
You can prefer the UX of Chrome, especially since so much of the web is designed for it. But it's not a subjective personal experience that it is not private. Google exists to harvest your data. And the fact that everyone just accepts it is why the internet is so shitty.
We are taking about brave, not chrome. I don't think you get any more harvested than you do with Firefox.
Oh, sorry, for this comment thread yall have been saying Chrome.
But no, even with Brave, you aren't safe from Google tracking. All chromium browsers have been found to feed data back to Google.
Not sure what that has to do with your claim that "every" browser has "so much controversy", but okay.
In conversations humans don't talk like robots or like they are writing a code. People often use lose expressions, colorful language, exaggerations and everything else that I have no idea about.
I didn't think I'd need to explain that when I said every browser before, I didn't really think every single browser. Yet here we are. That's why I didn't actually think you will call me out on it and just continued with other stuff. 😀
So yeah, not every browser 😁. Only a few. Although with so many new questionable ai ones, the percentage is going up for sure.
So by "every browser has so much controversy", you meant, "maybe a few browsers have some controversy".
Apparently it's robotic to point out gigantic overstatements.
🥱
Sure, keep lowering your rep. Helps flag you to other users.
Omg dude. Oh no, my rep 😂. Grow up.
that's so sad
Privacy features? Google harvests your data regardless of your settings. It also furthers Google's monopoly on the web. I'm sure anyone can see the problem with an advertising giant hungry for data being able to dictate how you access the internet, and what the internet even looks like. Google has power over all of that, split between their influence in the W3C, their Chrome browser, their Android OS, and Google Search.
Google decides what you see, how you see it, and how the underlying technology functions; that's literally their business model.
That's the real problem with Chrome and any Chromium based browser.