Stop using Brave Browser

Its a bad chromium fork with a crypto snowball scheme attached and some very scummy practices done.
- Hear that guys?! The pyramid scheme is opt-in! Not scummy whatsoever
  
  The referral links weren't. That should have been a thought that crossed a developers' mind and immediately left it. It definitely shouldn't have made it into a test build, and it super shouldn't have made it into a public release. That it ever made it that far is enough reason to never use the browser again. The developers have proven that they cannot be trusted with your privacy.
  
  Sure, you have to sign up for it but you can't remove the hardcoded crypto wallet extension and therefore can't actually opt-out of having it shoved in your face (at least, it was the time i tried their browser and found it to be inferior in every way to just using Firefox and uBlock Origin).

- I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people,
  Why exactly? The tricks like "optional things to click" are explicitly targeted on less tech savvy people and defeat the point of privacy focused browsers.
  
  I've literally installed Firefox and uBlock Origin for elderly people, and walked some other elderly people through installing them. In, like, 2 minutes. This is not difficult.
  
  I'm no privacy expert, but TechLore has covered Brave a lot and it's one of his recommended daily drivers.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eRlAbyjKfU
- Last I checked Stallmann wasn't "CEO of Linux". Such a thing does not exist. Eich is CEO of Brave. Apples to oranges.
- Go look up all the nasty stuff stallman's said and firmly believes in. I don't see people boycotting gnu which is a vital part of linux as a result of this
  People are already aware of the shit Stallman does. Hell, you don't need to read the shit he writes, dude's a real-life creep.
  And besides: GNU project's tools have continued popularity despite him. Do I need to remind you of XEmacs? EGLIBC? EGCS? A whole lot of projects that reminded GNU equivalents to "oh yeah, maybe we should get gud instead of being an inferiour code base" (XEmacs) or "oh yeah, this fork is clearly superiour, we should merge and call it official" (EGLIBC, EGCS). And now people are like "Hey guys, I just found this compiler called Clang and-" and GNU is like "FFFFF-"
  [Ad experiments and crypto] is opt in.
  If you download an ad blocker, I'm pretty certain that you don't want to "opt in" to any advertisements by default.
  Hey, you thought that was easy to debunk? How about this: When Brave advertises that content creators are able to accept BAT crypto tokens as donations, should the content creators themselves first opt in? They most certainly didn't. Brave specifically said that they would accept donations on behalf of all content creators and held the donations on their behalf until they would opt in.
  If these content creators never would actually opt in, what then, I wonder? Did they just deceive the fans of those content creators?
  This is dangerously close to the whole rhetoric NFT bros had during the peak. "Why, someone made illegitimate NFTs of your creations? Well you SHOULD have minted those NFTs while you had the chance. Oh, you prefer to NOT participate in this whole NFT ecosystem on principle? Have fun staying poor!"
- why do the author's politics make a difference?
  In this case it makes a difference because there has been an alarming increase in harmful lies made by the far right. This is a purposeful spread of misinformation that many people hesitate to get involved with in any way, and for good reason.
  I do not trust the creator of Brave to be aligned with the far right and to still be guided by ethical conduct that I can trust. If you align yourself with people who lie and put others in danger for profit and control, you're condoning such behavior and may be capable of it yourself.
- Quite the opposite, brave's defaults are very good. An alternative to brave on the firefox side would be librewolf, which gives firefox great defaults, but the issue with that is that they disabled auto updates, and there's still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager (even though many exist).
  bullshit integrated into it.
  And again, there's no "bullshit" if you don't explicitly opt into the crypto.
- because you should never mix politics with technology.
  What does this mean?
- If these people really want to ban technology based on the views of the author then they might as well live in the stone age. And even then the tools they used was probably invented by some nasty people. The US space program was built by literal Nazi scientist. Most of the research on how humans survive in space was based on experiments done to Jews. The first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research are the HeLa cells taken from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks. She did not consent to have those cells taken nor was she or her family compensated. Are we gonna boycott cancer research because of this injustice? No? Only the things that make them feel uncomfortable?
- You mentioned that politics should not be mentioned with software. Consider Hans Reiser, the author of reiserfs. He murdered his wife and was sent to prison. Would you be okay with running code written by a murderer on your computer? How about a vase made by a murderer in your house? Would you enjoy the voice of a murderer in music?

Be "Brave" use a better browser.
[winks in Firefox]
- winks in librewolf with uBlock, LocalCDN and altered UserAgent and fixed resolution of 1920×1080
  PS: I am paranoid
  
  There's also the lesser-known Pale Moon browser, of which I actually tried using, to quite a normal success, on our former desktop PC, two years ago.
  
  I would love to use librewolf but somehow it stops being able to resolve web pages where every other browser I have installed is still able to. It's the only thing stopping me from making the jump full time.

Let's see if the brave fanboys REEEEEEEE on Lemmy as hard as they do on reddit and try to brigade this post.
- Yeah I don’t really get the fanaticism around that browser
  
  Anything with crypto seems to get some people all hot and bothered
  
  To be fair it goes both ways. I don't understand the hate for it either. Is Brenden Eich an asshat? Maybe, but that doesn't affect how good the browser is or isn't. And the crypto/ad stuff is opt-in. You can leave it off and it is just chromium with a built-in ad blocker.
  What else are you going to use if you don't want to use Firefox? Vivaldi is the option suggested the most but that isn't open source. And extensions and codecs are a pain point with Ungoogled Chromium. As far as I'm aware Brave is the best currently available open source chromium-based browsers.
  I don't even use it, I use librewolf for the record.

Author of this article, Corbin Davenport, should also stop using Facebook.

I never started in the first place.
It always seemed like snake oil to me.

If you are basing the use of a product on the politics of people involved in the project, then you are going to end up with no products to use.
If you are basing it on it being based on Chromium and having a crypto scam built in, then I get that. That being said, the browser isn't super bad, just not good. Viva La Firefox.
- especially with opensource stuff, a lot of devs are either extreme right or extreme left. That doesn't mean they can't make a great project. Suckless is a good example for extreme right. Lemmy for extreme left.
- I wouldn't be using Lemmy at all if I had to agree with the creators political views lol.

Never started. What have they done now?
- Nothing new. It's just an overview of how shady and scammy the browser is. I still see a lot of people recommending it without knowing the backstory.
- AI summary:
  Brave Browser has marketed itself as a privacy-preserving web browser and has gained attention from cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
  The company behind Brave, founded by Brendan Eich, faced backlash due to Eich's previous donation in support of California's Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage.
  Brave initially planned to replace ads with its own ad units and split revenue with publishers, but this idea was met with legal issues and criticism from both inside and outside the company.
  Brave introduced Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) as a way to reward users for viewing ads and content, but the rewards are minimal and the value of BAT is volatile.
  Brave has incorporated various cryptocurrency-related features, including a full crypto wallet, but many of its crypto partners have faced controversies and scandals.
  Brave was involved in a privacy scandal in which affiliate codes were added to URLs typed into the address bar, allowing the company to collect revenue from user signups or purchases.
  The article concludes that Brave is a flawed software project and should not be used, recommending Firefox or Vivaldi as privacy-focused alternatives.

Brave has always seemed shady as hell to me. I don't understand why so many tech people keep recommending it.

The article appears to be biased against Brave Browser and its associated company, presenting a negative viewpoint on various aspects of the browser's development, functionality, partnerships, and the background of its founder. The tone is critical and skeptical at best.
- This reads like ai generated text.
  
  It's perfectly acceptable to have reservations about a browser, but this article seems to be quite exaggerated.
- Found chatgpt.

It’s not a sign of intelligence to choose to ban a technology because of the opinions of its creator
- And if we're going to start talking about creators let's start talking about the people that made this site LMAO maybe it's not the best candlelight to hold this issue against..

I challenge anyone to cite an incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.
Well for starters you donated $1,000 in support of prop 8

Can't stop using something I've never installed.

Nah i love my built in adblock/open source/privacy features. You can turn off crypto stuff. Author can shove his politics up his ass.

TL;DR : The Brave web browser has gained attention as an alternative to mainstream browsers, marketed for privacy and backed by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. However, it’s been criticized for its association with Brendan Eich, who faced backlash for supporting a proposition against same-sex marriage. Brave’s attempts at a privacy-centric approach included plans for a unique advertising model, which faced legal challenges. The browser’s cryptocurrency, BAT, faced volatility and its ad replacement system didn’t provide substantial rewards. Additionally, Brave collaborated with controversial crypto entities. Privacy concerns were raised when the browser added affiliate codes to URLs, and its complexity and associations have led critics to recommend other browsers like Firefox or Vivaldi for privacy-focused users.

Okay, first and foremost: I do not use brave. I have used it years back (long before the URL-Rewrite-thing) and thought it felt weirdly bloated with stuff I didn't use (a little like Opera). I would not recommend Brave to anyone at this point, because it's... weird. I was out when they started to wave at you with their strange pseudo-currency-wallet that had to be set up and all. I would not recommend such a browser to someone who might then just ask me questions about the weird things the browser I told them to install does. No way, Jose!
Now for the but: The article is bad. Like... baaaad.
Let's have a look, shall we?
"Some higher-up of the company did something that is not moral"
You do not become CEO of a company íf your moral compass is a high priority for you. Period. We still need to keep the perspective here: the donation shows views I really dislike, yes. But given how much many of those suited-up nutjobs in upper managements give to really shitty causes... these 1000 dollars were peanuts. Besides: How does a CEO with indefensible political views make the product bad?
The Peter Thiel bonus fact:
Can we stop to attribute any investments by large funds as a morally motivated thing? There was a guy at Peter Thiel's fund who saw the project and went "Eyyy that's gonna get us some Dollary-doos". That's it. That's how business works. Those funds constantly shift tuckloads of money into truckloads of projects.
There was a super stupid idea in the initial plans for the browser
Yeah... thing is: They didn't do it. You'd be surprised how many really "scummy" ideas get pitched in companies every day and how often some management-guy just kinda runs with them. That's just business as usual really.
BAT
It is kinda weird, yes, but remember: At the time they started this, crypto was everywhere and it made the company money. I don't see why the mere addition of this stuff is a reason that "Brave Browser is irredeemable". It doesn't interfere with the browser's functionality, it just adds bloat. The article doesn't distill that though. It just says "It has crypto in it", goes on with something else and then concludes that "therefore bad" out of nowhere. What about the BAT thing makes the browser bad? Tell me, author!
Brave had FTX-Partnership-stuff and didn't apologize
The apologize part is what baffles me.
They some (probably paid) partnership with a company that tricked lots and lots of people. Why do they need to apologize for (unknowingly, naively perhaps) working with a firm that turned out to be fraudulent? Does your ISP have to apologize for every scammer who did scams over their landlines?
Random listing of crypto stuff
What is bad about this? Tell me, author! They went into the booming crypto sphere and got some users that way. I dislike the crypto-bubble as much as the next guy but why does that make the browser bad? My bank sponsored a local motocross-event. I do not like motocross. Is my bank account now bad, too?
Please tell me why the product is bad if you want me to think that the product is bad.
Affiliate scandal
finally something of substance. Yeah, that one was a shitshow.
But as much as I try to resist, I have to be nerdy here:
This is not an argument now, I just could let this one slide.
I’m not aware of another browser ever rewriting what the user types in the address bar.
aren't you now? So how does "does this browser rewrite stuff in the adress bar?" typed into my adress bar become
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=does+this+browser+rewrite+stuff+in+the+adress+bar%3F&atb=v388-6&ia=web ? I didn't type that.
Again, not part of the argument, the affiliate-thing was bonkers and justifies scolding, just that one phrase ground me gears, as they say.
Ultimately, Brave Browser is the apparatus of an advertising company
hey, another real reason to dislike the product, to the point. See, author? you can do it! No need to ramble on for pages over pages without any point or conclusion! Just a few words do the trick!
Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.
\ Tell me why!
No really, that's my main issue with the article: It lists a bunch of stuff and leaves it to the reader to assume that the listed stuff is devaluing the product of this company, basically because the tone of the article is "Brave bad", but the article never reasons why the things brought forth makes the browser bad. it never concludes any point, just rambles on to the next like a slightly tipsy Thomas the Tank Engine between stops.
- Is... this your job?
  
  No, my job is teamleader, so I'm used to a) picking people apart and b) firing away emails before ppl start to ask me questions.

What‘s the best alternative for iOS and macOS? The first articles that come up, rank Brave as one of the best for iOS.
I liked that it blocked all YT ads by default and had tab management.

I sometimes need it because of its functionality to connect to the Tor network. The Tor browser itself is just too slow for what I need. Yes, I am aware that using Tor like that is significantly less secure than it would be with the Tor browser. I just NEED the speed increase it provides over the Tor browser.
Does anyone know of a way to do the same thing in another browser? Preferably Firefox? I would love to be able to use something else.
- I've never used it and can't actually recommend it but a 1 second search for "firefox tor" found this:
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tortm-browser-button/

"Some higher-up of the company did something that is not moral"

The Peter Thiel bonus fact:

There was a super stupid idea in the initial plans for the browser

BAT

Brave had FTX-Partnership-stuff and didn't apologize

Random listing of crypto stuff

Affiliate scandal

Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.