Brave is literally a grift. Too many people are falling for it.

Brave is not spyware. That website you linked is horrible and full of misinformation. They also claim that Firefox, and even Tor Browser, are spyware. They act as if any and all connections a browser makes are automatically bad and used for spying/tracking.

I won't disagree with the other criticisms of Brave that you made, but just wanted to point that out. That website is just highly unreliable and makes verifiably false claims about the browsers it reviews.

Let's not forget one of the biggest investors is a right-wing billionaire who runs a corporate intelligence agency that contracts with the DoD. And the only proof we have that he doesn't collect data on Brave's users is the questionable word of the devs.

If nothing else, I would recommend Firefox over Brave for the sole reason of the latter being yet another Chromium browser. It would be nice if we could eat away some of the browser marketshare from Google.

Brave was also made by a guy who got kicked out of Mozilla for being homophobic. The cryptocurrency stuff is brave also a major scam, it's a crypto that must first be converted into another crypto before it can be converted into real money. How is that a "currency"?

For the comments, can anyone give me an actual reason to use Brave over Firefox (and it's forks)? I guess the cryptocurrency aspect is a reason, but I wouldn't say it's a very good one.

getfirefox.com

Personally I agree with the OP; and I refuse to use Brave. This isn't based in dislike of cryptocurrency in general; but I DESPISE both ADVERTISING AND SHITCOINS (Basically any token or sub-token of a main standalone blockchain that has no real, significant, usable real world value).

Therefore Brave DOES NOT reflect my values. I don't care if advertising networks make any money, I actively hate them enough I want to deprive them due to their behaviors anyway for being so violently anti-user.

I don't use Chrome or Brave because they DO NOT reflect my beliefs regarding web standards either, and I refuse to allow Google and the Chromium and Chrome project to dictate standards either. Particularly of note is their utter failure with both FLOC and WEB-INTEGRITY; both of which are stupidly retarded anti-user and anti-privacy features which are horrible.

Brave behaving like Win XP era browser with gazillion toolbars installed, with a pinch of crypto and crypto promoting ads should be a giant red flag.

FOSS =/= trusted by default. Why are there so many FOSS evangelists, but such a damn tiny part of them are programmers, let alone programmers able to examine a source code behind such a giant codebase as web browser?

I use Vivaldi, at least their business model is clear, and developer is kind of trusted, and not crypto scammer and homophobe.

Might I add brave's BAT wallet is garbage. You had to sign up to some random exchange and upload your ID (I didn't), but even that you couldn't even backup your wallet into a new install, so hope that you would never have to format or reinstall or change devices - it'll be a pain to restore, if it was even possible.

Firefox over brave any day.

Newsflash: everything that isn't free and entirely open source is generally spyware these days.

It's amazing how we pilloried RealPlayer and burned its parent company to the fucking ground over two decades ago for far less egregious transgressions than what we now let Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc get away with.

The issue is wider than Brave. Nowadays, companies build uncritical communities around their products.

If you try to be critical, you loose the community in which you're involved on one side. And, if you are critical from the outside, "you don't understand" like in the "you're not the choose one".

Brave always marketed itself as hardened privacy browser and the second I saw their shitcoin immediately bells went off.

Either way, I use Librewolf on PC and Mac and lately been giving Arc a try on Mac and I like it.

making (presumably) thousands of dollars off their users

I agree with this post completely but for some reason you finishing with this makes me chuckle.

Oh no! Thousands! They might be able to pay rent for a month or two!

I'm just being cheeky, and while its true what they did was scummy, it also feels like a really.... smallish amount of money?

If we're literally just talking thousands, and not tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

But yeah, fuck Brave.

Firefox gang and Hardened Firefox gang here to stay.

Mozilla's got its own problems but that's a story for another day.

Now try saying that at https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides

Even if they were amazing, it would still be worth using Firefox instead to suppport an alternative to chromium.

I used them for a few weeks before they rolled out their crypto scheme. It honestly felt like they monetized “privacy”, nothing more. So I bailed having zero faith any of their shit worked like they wanted us to think it works.

I see this exact thread every week now and it's between the same people:

"Oh ok i stopped using it" to "Naw i'll keep using brave"

At this point can we stop this? Brave is trash but people are either too stubborn or just don't care anymore (which is ironic). Either mods just pin this thread and treat this as a "brave is trash" megathread or I don't know.

I used to use Brave, then used Bromite but that got abandoned. I think there's another fork of it, but ultimately I just use Firefox which has worked better for me overall.

Browsers are a big attack vector for exploits and security is very important. Firefox releases patches regularly and I don't have to worry about it being abandoned like some others. I disabled whatever telemetry / sponsored stuff they have enabled by default and feel it's a good balance of security & privacy + doesn't have the DRM crap chromium is trying to add.

Their extension support is nice too.

I tried them a few years ago before I knew more about things like this, their CEO, etc. I had a problem with them continuously taking over my home page on desktop with their own homepage (much the way Firefox on android does now) after every update. I contacted them on social media where they went on a two day stent of making fun of me for having a problem and gaslighting me that there was a problem because zero other people had ever complained. Super professional there.

Never used it, I saw some twitter comments from it's CEO and this guy isn't trustable.

I go with Firefox and sometimes epiphany. Last one tries to accomplish the level of the well known ones but is mostly years behind. That's sad, because I really like it.

Guess what, Firefox also gets the same score on ghis site :) https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox

Look, just… just use fire fox! Sure some sights aren’t optimized for it, but it’s a minor difference in performance from a chromium based browser.

And the more people use fire fox the more sights will have a reason to optimize for it.

Anything that is using chromium is still using something built by Google, and thus if Google tries to alter chromium to make ad blockers stop working, or some other asinine idea, there isn’t much a browser can do about it.

@eya I made sure I’d never use brave when I found out that the ceo is a massive homophobe