Please, do not use Brave.

I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.

Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.

Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.

After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.

Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.

One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.

Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.

bruhprivacy ,
@bruhprivacy@mastodon.social avatar

@eya Oh wow, I'm using it as a daily basis. I think using mullvad browser is an option now.

DigitalJacobin ,

There are many, many good reasons to not use Brave. Being spyware is not one of those.

Boycott Brave for real reasons like their CEO and owner being a raging anti-gay reactionary or because of their cryptocurrency bs.

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

The spyware portion of the post was one sentence.

Edit: Half a sentence

asphalt ,

Those are good reasons and it's sad to see so many downvotes on a community that should know better :/

nothingness ,

I will

amir_s89 ,
@amir_s89@lemmy.ml avatar

How about the Opera Browser?

n3m37h ,

Vivaldi

abbenm ,

If you absolutely have to use a Chromium project, then Vivaldi is the one, but at the end of the day it is still unfortunately Chromium.

n3m37h ,

I only use it as my piracy browser that’s routed through a VPN. All other browsing I do is via FF/LibreWolf

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Chromium, proprietary.

abbenm ,

They got sold to a Chinese firm and it appears that much of the core development team abandoned the project and restarted under the name Vivaldi.

amir_s89 ,
@amir_s89@lemmy.ml avatar

So the recommendation seams to be Vivaldi. Will check it out during this week.

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Proprietary, controlled by the Chinese Government, spyware, Chromium.

sleepybisexual ,
@sleepybisexual@beehaw.org avatar

Don't touch opera, avoid it like the plague

amir_s89 ,
@amir_s89@lemmy.ml avatar

I have installed it on all my devices. Firefox is standard from now, becouse of its open source culture etc.

Stahlreck ,

Does this all matter though? Afaik the browser if fully open source, even the crypto stuff so all the shady stuff would be detected (and has as in your examples). Like all of the issues you linked at this point are years in the past. I don’t use Brave personally but it being completely FOSS is a huge plus even if the company itself might be weird. On the other hand you have something like Vivaldi that looks like “the good guys” but you’ll always have to trust them as well because they’re not fully open source.

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Using Chromium at all is supporting Google’s dominance over the market. If you want to support a company that has taken advantage of its users, and committed actual crimes while doing so, be my guest. This post is a recommendation, not a rule.

klyde ,

OMG shut up. Go use Firefox and leave people alone.

Ashe ,

That is absolutely a false equivalence

Stahlreck ,

Using Chromium at all is supporting Google’s dominance over the market

Of course it does but that is a moot point and a different discussion altogether. It doesn’t change the fact that Brave is fully open source, even their shitty stuff and that it’s better for privacy than using a proprietary browser like people here suggest. It also doesn’t change that Chromium has a better security model than Gecko.

I personally right now prefer FF (Librewolf and Mull) for different reasons still. The Chromium dominance is…well it is what it is. Definitely not the reason why I use FF. It’s a losing battle. FF has been losing users forever now. The few % market share it still has will not change that Google is going to “win”. When the EU forces Apple to open up iOS for Chromium the last “wall” that is in the way of total Chromium dominance will fall. FF will not do anything about that except just exist until either too many websites break or someone does something about Google controlling Chromium. Until then I’ll just choose whichever browser fits my needs in terms of FOSS, privacy but also features. Right now FF is good enough despite them lacking behind in security (severely even on mobile).

elias_griffin ,

Spyware is a bit of a stretch. However, let’s talk about Firefox. Mozilla Corporation is a Billion Dollar Corporation that is tied at the hip to Google and runs uses 115+ servers to track every single thing you do.

Chromium explicitly uses shared memory and is technically able to write and execute not only shared data from private/incognito to regular windows or tabs but adjacent processes. You can search for mmap in the Chromium repo or try to use Chromium with FreeBSD or GhostBSD sysctl.conf set with kern.elf64.allow_wx = 0 - it won’t run.

The Precise Geolcation Timeout for Firefox is 68 years.

Gooey0210 ,
  1. I use brave on android, because there’s not much choice. I really-really-really loved bromite, but noupdatess for like a year Recently I found out there’s cromite so I think i will check that one out
  2. On desktop I use librewolf, only
  3. For any people using google chrome/yandex/edge/opera I install brave and disable all the crypto/advertising/crap. It would be nice to have a script that does it automatically. Or another browser that just doesn’t have that
Jomn ,
@Jomn@jlai.lu avatar

Any reasons why you do not consider Mull, or even simply Firefox on android ? Mull works really well for me and can really be seen as the Librewolf equivalent for Android.

Zastyion345 ,

What is better in Brave then Mull(firefox fork) or firefox ?

I switched from Bromite and Vandium to Mull and it is so much better with the addons you can install (ublock etc.)

Stahlreck ,

The security aspect really. FF on Android has terrible security compare to Chromium and Mozilla is making really slow progress it seems. Fission is still not enabled on mobile despite being on desktop for years. And even then it seems the sandboxing on FF desktop is just not considered quite as robust as Chromiums. Doesn’t matter much though because on mobile FF has none of that.

I still personally also use Mull but that is something to keep in mind. Brave has all of that because it has the Chromium base of course.

Gooey0210 ,

The second comment really explains it. Chromium based browsers are more secure on android than any ff as for right now.

Also I would like to add that at the time when I was hopping browsers ff was way slower, and i’m pretty sure it will be slow these days if I install all the extentiions

Also, another thing, in my experience, password managers work a little better with chromes, and also just websites look prettier, and the PWAs

And a word about brave and ff, tbh they both suck

Mull is fine, brave has some nice features useful for me To be honest, today I tried that chromite I mentioned yesterday, and oh man, oh man, oh man, this is a whole new level

Designate6361 ,
@Designate6361@lemmy.ml avatar

Or just use Edge cause Microsoft is already syphoning your data so you might as well go the whole hog and use Edge

Kalcifer ,

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.

Ibex0 ,

I have used Firefox for years, and I can’t believe it’s actually losing market share. Oh well.

LWJanniesRCucks ,

Not reading all that, still sticking to based Brave 😎

WarlordSdocy ,

I used to use Firefox but have been using Brave cause I was getting tired of having to open Edge every time there would be an addon or tool that was Chrome exclusive. So unless there’s other options for privacy focused chromium browsers I’m just gonna stick with brave.

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

What addons are you using that are Chromium exclusive? Also, Ungoogled Chromium exists.

Daryl76679 ,
@Daryl76679@lemmy.ml avatar

Ungoogled Chromium doesn’t have a lot of the security features that Brave, Mullvad, Tor, Librewolf, or even Safari have.

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Fair.

HKayn ,

How about we just let users use what they want? I don’t use Brave, but it has some legitimate anti-fingerprinting tech.

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

This comment is just confusing. Sure, go ahead and use whatever you want, but at least be informed about what you’re using. As for the anti-fingerprinting tech, Firefox has had that for a very long time.

gornius ,

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.

Omega_Jimes ,

If people want to use Brave, or Windows, or install screen doors on their submarines who am I to complain?

The fact is for a lot of people, Brave offers a superior out of box experience compared to firefox or almost any other browser. In terms of ad blocking, speed and ease of use, it’s pretty much second to none. The fact that you install it and go is really appealing and how easy they make the slider to adjust the aggressiveness of the script blocking is great ui that my dad mother could use.

Yes, the company isn’t very good, it’s headed by a guy with a questionable history and has a poor track record when it comes to monetization strategy. I stopped using Brave this year, but for ages it was my goto because I could just install it and have an improved web experience.

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I made this post because people in this community are recommending Brave to other people in this community. People in this community generally are fine with messing around with settings to increase their privacy which is why I don’t talk about out-of-the-box-experience.

eya OP ,
@eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Basically, look at what community this was posted in. This is less a warning to the average joe and more to the people that actively care about their privacy.

caron ,
@caron@lemmy.zip avatar

What do you use nowadays?

droidpenguin ,

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.

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