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)
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)
I don’t think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.
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
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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.
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.
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It’s the hype from Cryptobros pushing it because it has crypto functionally and its own shitcoin.
Personally, I never liked how it wants to monetize your browsing time constantly and pushes a lot of crypto shit in its advertising. Vivaldi is much better as an alternative imo.
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Oh, Vivaldi. I really want to love it, I love the interface and general ideas, but the fact that in 2023 they didn’t manage yet to have an app for iOS and decided to focus first on embedding an email client inside the browser throw me off the boat. Also, there were plenty of bugs often with new releases. Maybe now it’s better but a few years ago it was quite annoying.
I guess you can install whatever browser Apple lets you then.
The reason why Vivaldi is not on iOS or iPadOS is because Vivaldi hasn’t developed it, not because Apple doesn’t let them in. All the other browsers are on iOS.
vivaldi’s UI is overbloated though tbh
It’s as bloated as you want it. Everything’s customisable.
I used Brave for a out 6 months, but I’m really turned off by the devs. I switch to FF and am loving it. It’s much improved from when I last used in decades ago.
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Firefox? How so?
People are still crying because Mozilla removing the security nightmare that was XUL that was an anything goes type of interface for making extensions.
I use it as my main browser and I honestly can’t go back to Firefox, but I really dislike some parts of it and of it’s community. The browser itself is fast, its default ad-blocker is awesome and there are a couple functionnalities that are nice to see, like Tor integration. But they block ads to show you their ads instead, that you cannot block even if you deactivate the “Brave Rewards”. The whole reward system in BAT is kind of shady; they need to authenticate you before you can withdraw anything and it’s worth peanuts anyway. When I complained about those issues on reddit, I got answers that looked like they were produced by sect members, and it wasn’t even on a related sub.
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I really despise Firefox because (checks notes) I, uhh… love giving Google hegemony over web standards?
Sure, I can, but it would be a hassle and I’m kind of comfortable with what I have now. The first thing that hit me when I tried to get back to firefox (a couple weeks ago) was actually the time to load a page. It felt long compared to what I am use to. Sure it’s anecdotic, but I opened a game called factoryidle that ran capped at 200 fps on Brave, it was only at 70-80 fps on Firefox. The adblocker I had installed was also inferior to Brave’s. I guess it may be due to some extensions or I don’t know, but something was wrong and I didn’t want to do the effort to fix it.
It’s like I want to believe, but as you say, I’m too lazy. I will try Ungoogled Chromium since you recommand it.
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I am forever a Firefox fan but Chromium is just faster on all my devices. Chrome without Google is great.
Can I ask where you see Brave ads? I deactivated everything and haven’t seen any of their own ads
If you use Brave News (to display a RSS feed), you get “news” about Brave’s functionnalities. They appear as any other widget in your feed, but are marked as “Advertisement” on the upper right corner. Here is an example from my feed : https://imgur.com/a/RJV2Px2 .
Looks like it’s not the case anymore, but when I opened a new tab, some time ago, I used to get ads from Binance or other cryptocurrencies exchanges displayed as “cards” on the right of the window. Right now, I only get “cards” showing about “Brave Talks” or rewards, but it used to be advertisement about other products, such as Binance or other cryptocurrency company.
I can’t reproduce it right now, but some “new tab” backgrounds are (or were) also advertisement for crypto-related products.
There was also a controversy some time ago where they were injecting their own referral link when you typed a cryptocurrency exchange’s URL on the search bar : https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caught-adding-its-own-referral-codes-to-some-cryptcurrency-trading-sites/ . They stopped after it got viral.
At least they are tagging their ads as such, but it’s weird how you can’t block any of it when they decide it’s there.
I see, thanks for explaining. I used to get ads on every other new tab, but found that I could disable that in the Customize menu. I’ve only been using Brave for a few months, but it’s been a really good experience as it’s been the fastest browser for me, especially for maps. I still use Librewolf as well, which I highly recommend. I am privacy-focused, but honestly this article doesn’t deter me from using the browser and it seems like a lot of the comments here didn’t read the article or don’t understand that Brave Browser is different from Brave Search. I’ve been happy with Duck Duck Go for years, so I don’t use Brave Search.
Brave ads are opt-in.
At some point you opted-in.
If you don’t like it, then next time opt-out now or don’t opt-in next time.
I opted out and I still see ads. That’s the problem.
that’s why I point people at librewolf
Read the article though. It’s bullshit
Sorry, elaborate
They misunderstood what Brave said. Brave provides an API to help machines do search queries, and they understood that Brave provided data for LLM training. That’s completely different
It’s a shame that there isn’t a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn’t have much by the way of good ad blockers.
It’s a shame that
there isn’t a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn’t have much by the way of good ad blockersApple infringes on your property rights by refusing to relinquish control of your device to you, the owner, even after they “sold” it to you.FTFY.
A little agressive, but yes, they dont reliquish access to your devce after purchase. “Calling home” being the catch-all term for devices that are fully or parially sending requests to its true owners for commands to run or data to give.
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What are your setting os Firefox? What do you recomend?
@Compactor9679 @PrivateOnions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Multi-account Containers, Facebook Container, and Decentraleyes are the basic extensions you’d want. Then disable pocket and telemetry in settings. There’s more but that’s a pretty good starting configuration.
install just adblock origin and consentomatic and the quality of your internet experience will increase 10 fold. that’s really all you need and then you can add on some more extensions later.
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The Containers extension is the only thing you really need IMO. Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
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lol no, firefox without adblock origin is like sex with a hooker with no condom.
With First Party Isolation is place, containers now add up very little to your privacy to be honest. They are mostly helpful in convenient compartmentalization of your browsing activities without actually having two different browsers.
Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
Partially incorrect. There is unnecessary telemetry that you would prefer to get rid of, for an example there is a setting for extensions recommendation as you browse. Also, probably because of their deal with Google, Firefox defaults to Google’s location services even though Mozilla has its own. You may want to change that as well for better privacy. I am only citing a handful few examples, there is more for you to dig in. uBO is a must have with right set of filters enabled according to your own privacy threat vectors. There is a reason hardening is a common practice among Firefox users.
Didn’t Firefox install adware on everyone’s instance in an overnight update? Like idk why people swoon over Firefox.
I dont know what you mean exactly, mabe fennec (and other ff forks) is keeping me safe from these changes
Lol, no
Brendan Eich, the guy who co-founded Firefox and developed Javascript, is the CEO of Brave. His politics aside, I think he’s a pretty trustworthy guy.
I hate to burst your bubble but when it comes to 6-7digits of cash at stake what does “trustworthy” even mean? You mean between millions and his word to you he will choose his word? His previously stated values and principles?
The guy who made waterfox seemed pretty nice, friendly, committed to the cause, then sold the project to a data-miner, and so did the honest people who made startpage, the trustworthy privacy minded search engine? Now they see waterfox is independent again and not part of the big multi-natinal data miner.
Mozilla once again made a sudden change that breaks your previous profile or other functionality and if you dare roll back the upgrade your profile has been ruined in transition, so you are forced to start from scratch reconfiguring, setting up you std tabs, bookmarks, history … Same stuff with TB, addons/plugins disabled, new “features” added, whether you trust them or not, added dependencies … you roll back you lose.
The google chrome-engine is so intrusive in the way it runs, degoogled or not, it is hell to have on a system. Maybe inside a vm without anything else other than specific browser session may be ?ok? for fluff work, nothing private I hope.
The naivity of people to accept and sometimes welcom large corporations producing FOSS is what got us to this mess, and I don’t mean users, but devs, distro managers, … if it is legally FOSS it is OK, even if it is a huge trojan horse manufactured by corporations to penetrate an other wise safe and secure system. FOSS - no corporate involvement - may be it, but will it boot? LinFound. gets millions and millions to have board seats to influence kernel, and it seems to be dancing with their wishes.
So if Firefox and Chrome are dogshit, what do we use to browse the web?
lynx elinks links :)
I think FOSS is enough because as long as you can fully read the code, it can be audited and even forked to remove BS. So I’m fine with companies developing FOSS. I don’t even really care about EEE. We can always maintain a fork of the standard at the moment you fucked with it. We can even still get your upstream changes just with the shit cherry picked out! It’s always a win.
Have you audited any of it? Would you like to try gcc or systemd for that matter? By the time you go through 1% of it the code has changed already. How many times in the past years has tremendous security breaches been caused by FOSS and was discovered months after it was in effect, and some of this by coincidence, or corporate teams that review code.
The fact I haven’t doesn’t mean I can’t read auditors who have, who do keep track of these changes. Zero days are usually caused by things no one noticed, not things that were intentionally added by corporate overlords to spy or back door a FOSS app.
Speck was pushed and provided by Google to linux, they added the content to the kernel having your naive belief, it was later found containing a backdoor to ALL systems, and Google raised their hands up and said it was passed to us by NSA. Is this what happened? Or did I dream all this up?
Facebook provided 0 FOSS, not a bit, suddenly they make an algorithm they “bought” including the author, and make it foss, to build it it needs google software, like a bush fire more than half of distributions adopt it and all data provided as comparative to xz are false, based on poor use of xz to make zstd appear better, while still admitting zstd can never attain the level of compression, but it is fast (ONLY when xz is run on a single thread while zstd is multithread by default). They claim xz sums are different when run on 1 cpu or many, still not true.
Just wait for that bomb to explode, the guy who wrote the code for zstd doesn’t seem possible to have enough knowledge to write it, he appears as a front for something.
Things that smell like shit don’t have to be actually tasted to be called shit.
Fair points.
Brendan Eich, the guy who… developed Javascript
You say that as if it’s a point in his favor, LOL.
If not for that asshole, we could’ve had a decent language embedded in the browser, like Scheme or Python!
I mean… if there wasn’t someone inventing a usable open source language for the browser it could have been some weird proprietary Microsoft language and our sites would still look like web 1.0
I didn’t mention Scheme and Python randomly; they were the other options Netscape was considering.
Oh.
What he took credit for he didn’t invent himself, Also he is a total piece of shit.
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
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
i still don’t get why there aren’t more firefox based browsers, i’m on librewolf, but there aren’t as many firefox based alternatives, as there are for chromium. why ?
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
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?
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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.
Firefox users: Another Chromium drama? People never learn
Everyone knows the only safe way to browse is to scrape webpages and print the content to your terminal.
Lynx FTW
I like to send the HTML, CSS, and JS to my laser printer personally.
I use curl to pull the text in a bsd jail running on a qemu instance running on a qubes vm and then copy it down on engineering paper and reconstruct it in my brain
Such a noob didn’t even pipe it through grep to block advertising. Get outta here corporate shill.
Use a VPN, and pipe the text-only output to your printer
I hope people finally quit that shit of a browser.
I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives…
rendering engines. I use multiple browsers depending on context
Agreed, like what do chromium based browsers really have over Firefox? Real question.
It works with Google Cloud’s dashboard lol, I swear they broke it in Firefox on purpose.
But seriously it’s like the IE days, some sites are designed with one target in mind and that target is now Chrome instead of IE, partly because the Chromium engine is now the de facto one to embed and rebrand. So sometimes you just have to use Chrome.
However I use Firefox 99% of the time myself and only use Chrome when needed (mostly when managing my Google compute engine VMs, sigh)
Google integration. That’s all. Anything else is anecdotal, is ill-informed hubris or is a combination of both.
I’ve been using Brave for a few years now on my desktop and after reading the threads lately about it, I’d like to switch. I don’t seem to have the issues other users have, but I don’t want to use it based on the CEO’s views on some things.
I’ve always had Firefox installed with uBlock Origin and I use it occasionally. One of the things Chromium based browsers have is built-in tab grouping. I know there are extensions and I’ve only tried Simple Tab Groups but it didn’t behave how I was expecting it to behave, which is like how Chromium handles it.
So far that’s the only thing I’ve noticed.
I had to use a chrome based browser on Android for a couple of weeks since Firefox had a problem. It was like a nightmare. It is common in IT history that worse quality product wins.
Think about MS-DOS. Microsoft also sold Xenix,a UNIX system that time.
Convenience and performance.
I’m a dual user of Firefox and Brave on different computers. In order to separate work and personal stuff and shopping, I use different profiles. Easy on brave, needs extension with separate app on Firefox, that doesn’t work on librewolf. And too often I have to stop my browsing because this Firefox setup is less stable and crashes once in a while causing annoyance.
Plus Chromecast. I like the ability to search for a video on the laptop and cast it to the TV.
It’s always a balance of convenience and privacy plus ethics, can’t have both.
Using it on Android is honestly the best experience
For me it’s because Firefox is (or at least was) noticeably slower. Didn’t support all the extensions I use. And didn’t allow YouTube playback with audio beyond 4x play speed.
All of those items led to me to choose brave over Firefox since I encountered every one of them on a daily basis.
Also I hated the default font (or perhaps it was some other quiirk of the layout) of Firefox. I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
I use FF but Chrome is objectively better in side by side comparison. It’s faster, more web pages load correctly, its UX is much nicer. For most people, you just install it and go. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to faff on with a browser, much less for something as poorly understood as privacy. It has features Firefox doesn’t, such as tab groups which Mozilla stupidly decided to remove and no addon does the same job as well.
Mozilla just sucks, to be frank. They can’t seem to have any coherent idea about what Firefox should be. The big redesign alienated a lot of the people who used it for its customisation. Adding in unwanted features like Pocket integration made people doubt the credibility of Mozilla’s claims of privacy. And cockups like everyones’ addons stopping working, despite being warned by the community it would happen, leave a bitter taste in peoples’ mouths.
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?
wasn’t bunching crypto garbage not shady enough?
