I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can’t recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
lmao still thinking moz corporation is your friend
Firefox. The slowest browser, the least compatible browser, the most annoying when it comes to bugs and issues (Firefox snap anyone?)
I just cannot disagree more. You seriously have to gaslight yourself into liking it.
What a strange take. I switched from Opera to Firefox like 15+ years ago (whenever Firefox added extensions, so I could use Mouse Gestures (why I was on Opera in the first place))
I never have issues with compatibility or speed. I don’t use Google products so I don’t have Chrome to compare it to, but it’s certainly as fast as/faster an IE/Edge.
Firefox has been my browser for eons, but I admit I think Edge is faster. It doesn’t matter to me in the end though.
Edge feels like the same speed to me, but our household has monster computers!
Edge is Chrome.
*Chromium, which is not the same. But I get your point.
Yes, there is a difference, but it’s minor and big stuff, like adblocking not working as well, are true of Chrome and Chromium.
Wow, that is quite a presumption there. Every couple years I try Chrome again and I am done with it in a few hours. The thing is archaic and its interface uncustomizable. And the only reason it could maybe have more compatibility is because of its market share and peoples’ bias towards it. There was once a time over ten years ago when it was good, but it’s not anymore. Not to mention the privacy issues.
Firefox has been my browser for 10 years or longer.
To each their own.
Every couple of years I try firefox, and it doesn’t take me long to be disappointed. Usually just some random incoherent firefox incompatibility with a major feature like logging in on a site or something.
Mozilla are dicks already lol
How so? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything negative against the company, but I’d love to know if I missed something.
The latest controversy was about Mozilla working with Meta in a project about privacy in ads.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/Don’t really know if this is a good or bad thing
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I can’t find the sources right now but it’s being shit I’ve been reading over the years. It goes from employee complaints against the corp, them not using donation money in the browser, etc.
I’ve seen an employee complaining about the impossible deadline they put for Firefox for Android, leading for the browser to come out filled with bugs, while also being very underpaid for a tech worker. In another news, the company direction has been getting huge raises for some years already.
Also, the money you donate isn’t going to the development of the browser. You can notice it as well, since the browser is very subpar when compared to Chromium. Mozilla isn’t making a good job at all and even though I still use Firefox, Mozilla has become a money bank for greedy directors, and I don’t support it at all.
You’re going to need to cite some sources for these fairly wild claims.
You can notice it as well, since the browser is very subpar when compared to Chromium
This is the most egregious lie of the bunch. Firefox is extremely close in terms of features, performance, usability, HTML/JS/CSS support, developer tools, etc. It’s privacy tools are, if anything, significantly better. And once Manifest v2 extensions stop being supported by Chrome (which is coming next year) it’ll have significantly better adblocker support.
Performance? That’s a big lie, performance-wise Firefox is very bad even compared to Safari. Dev tools I can agree with you, and the other CSS it’s on par with Chromium imo.
HUGE lie. Firefox is so freaking slow compared to basically anything else.
the payouts
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they’d offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
no, you are right. there is a lot of talk about the brave browser in this thread, a chromium based ad blocking browser by the brave company that gives you their own crypto in return for unobtrusive ads on the start page, which can then be used to donate to content creators on the internet (i think) or be cashed in. you and the op are talking about brave search, a search engine created by the same company
ah, that would explain it, thanks!
I’ve been using brave browser for years and, while I vaguely know what you’re talking about, it’s not something I’ve ever even looked at.
The defining feature of Brave for me has always been the built-in ad blocking.
I don’t think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.
I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I’m switching to Firefox tomorrow.
Yep, exactly my thought too. I’ve made too many hops but none of these products truly offer privacy.
I moved from Telegram to Signal for security only to learn more and more about the holes in Signal. At least Proton Mail is fine.
Yeah can I get adblock on iPhone with Firefox?
There are adblockers extensions for iphone, like adGuard. It will remove ads on Safari (doesn’t work with other browsers unfortunately)
You can use pihole and route your traffic there with a vpn such as tailscale to block ads and more
You can with Firefox Focus! Though to be clear, safari with AdGuard is much better. Even better when used together NextDNS and the HaGaZi blocklist.
When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.
Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.
I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 5~10€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).
Now that crypto account is mandatory it’s just useless…
I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I’m too lazy to replace it by something else.
On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?
I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.
I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.
The problem isn’t the ads, it’s the quantity. And they turn themselves into OS level alerts, that you train yourself to ignore
You can literally choose the quantity that you want to see though. You’re choosing to have them pop up, and how often, based on how much you want to earn. You can choose none, or every option between 1 and 10 per hour. I choose 10 because then I get paid the most and I literally just click “close” on the little popup that comes up in the bottom right of the screen, or I just ignore it.
Have you actually used it?
Not since the last time they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
So if my information is out of date, whoops. But they are still scumbags, particularly with that CEO
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I thought it was supposed to be the best privacy browser but after reading these comments my view has changed completely and have switched all devices to Firefox.
I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.
It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.
My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.
I might be wrong, as I’ve never used Brave, but isn’t it the case that they remove ads from the actual content owners and replace them with their own ads, basically monetizing other people’s content? I block all ads in my browser, don’t get me wrong, but what Brave is doing seems a bit shady to me.
No. The ads from brave itself are only on new tabs and notifications.
They do that, but not in that way. The websites will appear without ads, but once in a while their ad will pop up in a new window/tab. This is optional though
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No, you can take your own BAT out and sell it. It’s been some time but I believe they have a function to sell directly on an exchange. Else, you’ll need to buy Ethereum and use it to transfer to any other exchange
Brave is just too shady and I hate that it’s considered a “privacy” browser by people who don’t know better.
Brave is just too shady
It’s amazing how so few people seem to understand that Brave’s entire business model is an extortion racket wrapped in a crypto scam.
Of course, both that and the new bullshit described in this article is all just par for the course from the guy who (a) inflicted the abomination that is Javascript upon the world, and (b) got booted from Mozilla for being a bigot.
I found the juxtaposition of your comment to the one below yours to be pretty funny.
I love how you added yellow border for clarity
(I’ve screenshotted lemmy comments before and it looks utterly confusing without border lol)
I have no idea how they developed such a following. They’re shady AF.
Cryptobros who did a code camp and discovered their new brag
Well, it doesn’t help that privacyguides.org lists both Brave browser and search as recommendations.
Never liked Brave and never will. It is so overhyped by everyone because they are too damm lazy to configure Firefox or Ungoogled Chromium for Privacy and want to trust a shady company with “privacy by default”
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don’t understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you’re marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.
The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.
Also, he invented JavaScript. He got on my shitlist permanently for that alone.
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A necessary evil sadly. Never enjoyed having to program in JS, but I enjoy all the fanciness and convienence it brings the UX.
What does his political donations have to do with brave’s misconduct here?
It has nothing to do with it, but I was commenting on a parent level comment to add more info about the stunts they pull that reduce their credibility, making it relevant to the parent comment, but not the overall post.
I don’t understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
They replaced links to crypto exhange Binance with their own affiliate links that they profit from without the users concent. It’s bad because they did it behind their user’s backs hoping no one would notice. Makes me question what else they’re not telling me about.
Ok.
Brave had a thing where if you went to website.com, they would add /ref=brave to the URL so they get a kickback as if you clicked on their referral link.
Sneaky? Sure. A huge scandal? I don’t think so. No user data was being collected, no privacy was being violated. If I was the company doing the referral system I’d be mad, but as a user, it does not affect me at all.
Firefox fanatics just need something to point to and say “brave bad firefox good” and that is the worst thing they can find on Brave. It’s all browser wars to them, like iPhone vs Android or Xbox vs Playstation.
The article in this post also does not affect users in anyway, and has been updated after Brave responded, with most of the worst claims of the article now retracted.
Thank you.
Stealing referral URLs is lowest kind of spyware/malware tactics. Topmoxie which was another for of advanced java app coming with Limewire did it.
That’s why i use Firefox.
After their crypto crap, this doesn’t surprise me one bit.
And don’t give me that “You can disable the crypto” the fact is, you shouldn’t have to because it shouldn’t have ever been included in the first place.
Seriously, early on this company literally deployed a mass MITM attack against their entire userbase.
Any company that pulls some shit like that is just going to do it again whenever they think they can get away with it.
Breaking their users’ trust by appending attribution tags to their URLs should’ve been unforgivable but I still see people pushing their browser online
At least it wasnt an NFT? ive never used brave, this is all news to me
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One of the founders, Brendan Eich, donated his money to take away the equal right for same-sex couples to marry in California (Prop 8). He never acknowledge that it was mistake, so I can only assume that he truly wants to see the marriages of same-sex couples erased, which is quite a hateful thing to desire.
Not supporting is one thing but being so actively against, is interesting
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This is one of the most stupidest memes going around. https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/tocqueville-on-the-freedom-of-discussion-in-america.html
There’s something that doesn’t click in the article, they say:
the issue at stake about that proposition was declaring a marriage to be an union of one man and one woman
But just before that they link to the Wikipedia article:
support for the Proposition 8
Which states:
Proposition 8 […] was a California ballot proposition and a state constitutional amendment intended to ban same-sex marriage
So I fail to understand how this:
Even couple of LBGT employees of Mozilla Corp. defended Brendan Eich on their blogs claiming that there is no discrimination against them in Mozilla
Could be possible, I tried searching for their blog post, since the author didn’t link it anywhere, but not knowing who they are I wasn’t able to find anything. It could be true, but still, Mozilla isn’t the whole California, if they are treated well due to company culture good for them, but that isn’t an excuse to let gay people be discriminated outside of Mozilla
It seems to me like what everyone thinks is right, even if the proposition were made to “declare marriage a union of man and woman” it would just be a roundabout way to say “declare union between man and man/woman and woman not marriage” so… ban same-sex marriage?
I don’t select a browser or any software by political preference, donde Eich departure from Mozilla it went downhill hard.
i dont agree with it but he can do whatever he wants with his money. not sure it is relevant to internet privacy tho.
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While that’s fair, actually funding something to take away the rights of another person, like this guy presumably did, is a lot more weighty than just having an opinion.
ok? that doesn’t mean we can’t criticise/boycott/protest because of them
Don’t you get it, their opinion is worth more than yours because he has lots and lots of money. More money = more opinions /s
This slime funded efforts to revoke another human’s civil rights. That is not opinion.
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Loving v. Virginia (1967) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) ruled that interracial and same sex marriage bans violate the equal protections and due process clauses of the 14th amendment.
Yes and my opinion is that being anti-gay marriage is a shitty opinion that should be criticised.
Everyone knows the only safe way to browse is to scrape webpages and print the content to your terminal.
Firefox users: Another Chromium drama? People never learn
I hope people finally quit that shit of a browser.
I groaned hearing Louis Rossmann recommending Brave during one of his videos about Youtube ads. Firefox uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock would be a better recommendation.
or just librewolf \ Mull that comes with uBO already installed, if he don’t want to let his users (that are probably techie, so idk why) install add-ons by themselves. Otherwise, I can’t find a single reason of using brave lol
Brave provides a good balance between features and privacy for normal users.
I think many users will be uncomfortable with Mull and especially Librewolf.
(I personally use Mull but since it’s limited in functionality I sometimes have to switch to a more fully featured browser, that browser being Brave.)
I really have no idea why they’re limited in functionalities I think the only website that didn’t work for me on mull is instagram (fuck it anyway). And librewolf portable solved the no updates for me (although there is an addon for letting u know about updates), while letting me back up my data more easily
Looks neat, but it still depends on Firefox so I don’t mind supporting Firefox which is our last bastion against a Chrome monopoly.
As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
- Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
- Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
- Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
- Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
- Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
- DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
- Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
- Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
As a web developer you should really take a look at Firefox developer eidition. It comes with very nice features for web developers and you are always at the edge of new things FF will support so you see things that will come soon to the rest of the Firefox users.
Normally I would agree with you, but I often need to use the Postman Interceptor extension which is only on Chromium browsers
Workflow differs from person to person. Not sure what that extension does or why it’s needed, but I guess you are use to it.
Check out ungoogled-chromium. It needs some extra work to get extensions (and probably drm stuff) to work, but has good defaults otherwise.
Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
Actually, it does have extensions. You can download them through app store in both iOS and Mac OS.
But it is more limited compared with chromium and firefox environment, and most known extensions in those don’t exist for safari, although there are usually alternatives with other names
If you want you can just use Vivaldi like any other browser, I would think, what is there that needs to be set up that doesn’t in other browsers?
I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
I’m an ex website designer/dev and only tinker with websites these days. But I was doing this shit back in the days when HTML 4.01 was new. Anyways it was usual to use a bunch of tricks to get multiple different browsers (including different versions) to render the same or similar enough. I had to have a bunch of different browsers installed to test them all on because emulation wasn’t a thing yet either.
I think the last serious development I did was a few years ago but as browsers have become better at adhering to standards and rendering more consistently, I haven’t had the need to use anywhere near the amount of tricks and hacks as I used to. I’ve personally had little issue with browser compatibility.
Has something happened in the last few years to change that?
Firefox performs as well as chrome 99.8% of the time. The problem is chromium keep implementing things that haven’t gone through the spec process fully yet. This causes the following situation:
The other browsers don’t implement half baked privacy violating features which Google decides will be a new web API despite objections. Developers build features on their sites using that half baked crap. Users try to use the new features on Firefox and kick off about “Firefox specific bugs” because they haven’t implemented non standard APIs.
Safari is its own kettle of fish though and causes a lot of drama. Recently they’ve caught up a lot in terms of support for most standard features developers want. However there’s a big issue with supporting iOS Safari - it’s version is tied to the iOS version of the phone. So users with older phones will be stuck forever on older versions of Safari with breaking bugs for things like flexbox. If you’re in a market with lots of older phones then you have to spend a lot of time ensuring you support that older browser version. iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
Thank you for this explanation! I was so confused by people saying Firefox causes problems because my experience and AFAIK, Firefox adheres to standards the most. I always had the easiest time with Firefox and always built sites using Firefox then tricks to make other browsers work the same. Maybe it’s because as a designer/dev I have always been more particular about sticking to standards.
iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
sigh And here I thought after how many decades of standards, we would be past this shit by now. <insert rant about monopolising big corps forcing their moneygrubbing crap on people>
Any chromium based browser will force manifest v3 on you though, keep that in mind.
One point for Brave, is that they have specifically said they will continue to support Manifest v2 in their browser.
That’s nice. still not worth it tho lol
I have changed the homepage on brave plenty of times.
Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
I used to do QA for a Web portal, and issues with Firefox not scaling .svg files properly was driving me up the wall. There were more obscure issues, but this one was so basic that I couldn’t believe we still had to have a separate code for Firefox browsers.
Why even make shit for Chromium? Fuck everyone using Chromium.
Arc has been pretty good for me so far. But the challenge will be at what point they stop stuffing it with new ideas, and will that be before it turns into a bloated mess. Edge is a great example of this.
Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information
Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.
It’s quirky, for sure. The easel feature isn’t at all integrated which I find odd.
I refuse to use Chrome and I use Firefox for work since 99% of my time is on that.
Got any alternatives to use?
If Brave redirecting users to use their affiliate links without consent didn’t make people stop using it, I doubt this will.
On Firefox. But I do like Brave Search over something like DDG, their AI summarizer is quite good.
I think Librewolf is a much better option. BUT, I’m glad that at least Brave is taking a stance against Google. (the enemy of my enemy sort of thing). I hope all these firms are sued into following the proper copyright though.
Brave sucks Google dick by using Chromium like everyone else.
I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives…
wasn’t bunching crypto garbage not shady enough?
Your post just links to its own icon. Did you have an article to link to instead?
I’m assuming it’s this article.
If this is accurate that’s troubling
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Gracias
De nada.
I apologize. I included an image in the submission and it seems it hijacked the URL. I’ve edited the submission to include the link.
i have that issue too, sometimes. it’s either image or link. maybe you are not supposed to use both fields at the same time?