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Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser
(www.spacebar.news)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
I see no reason to use any other browser than Firefox and maybe Librewolf.
I am forced to use Chromium on my work laptop because MS Teams doesn't work (all the features) on Firefox.
Edit: I should elaborate this a bit. There are 2 reasons why I use Chromium on my machine.
All other MS services function fine on Firefox.
Which features I've never had an issue
Same. I use furefox for everything* at work, despite everything being heavily integrated with teams, sharepoint, et.al.
*: The only thing that doesn't work with firefox is this inhouse web service that hasn't been updated since 2017. It's about to be replaced anyway, so nobody bothered to fix/update it.
The custom background effects don't work on Firefox
Simple one-to-one calling is disabled saying it's only available on Chrome. I'm pretty sure it's recent since I had calls a few months back on Firefox. I'm also sure that it's not some group policy since I'm on Ubuntu without any sort of ActiveDirectory so it's a pure browser issue. Also, they force the old UI in Firefox due to some reason. Typical BS from Microsoft.
Does changing user agent mitigate some of those issues?
In a just world, the fact of changing the user agent fixing the issues would make for a slam-dunk anti-trust case.
If you confront Microsoft with this, then they will say they don't have enough resources to test "thousands" of browsers which is why they have restricted their efforts to Chromium only, while making billions of dollars in profits each year.
I've tried it today and yeah, 1-to-1 calls magically/unsurprisingly start working. In fact, the whole UI gets a facelift and lots of new features.
If I had to guess, I'd say Microsoft keeps around a version of their UI, which hasn't been maintained in over a year, and serves that to anyone initiating communication with a user-agent string they don't like.
If that's true, that's a massive security vulnerability. Admittedly, also unsurprising for Microsoft. @xavier666@lemm.ee
Thanks a lot for this...time to get an extension.