this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023

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Stop using Brave Browser (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Just gonna leave this here.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Its a bad chromium fork with a crypto snowball scheme attached and some very scummy practices done.

[+] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago

Hear that guys?! The pyramid scheme is opt-in! Not scummy whatsoever

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

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).

[+] [email protected] 33 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago

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.

[+] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Just getting somebody on Firefox with ublock origin is enough IMO. I’m not going to also remove their ability to use Google search. Especially if they’re older. I am very privacy oriented but you have to make some compromises for people lol.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Those are choices, not requirements. Using Firefox is better than using Chrome. Doing the extra stuff is even better, but if doing that means someone gives up and goes back to Chrome, that doesn't help, either.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Actually, the librewolf installer for windows has included an updater for some time now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago

Last I checked Stallmann wasn't "CEO of Linux". Such a thing does not exist. Eich is CEO of Brave. Apples to oranges.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

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!"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

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.

[+] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

and there's still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager

I think "lots of people" here can just be simplified to "nearly everyone". Anyone that is ware of a package manager and why it's useful and thinks to look for an equivalent for Windows is not going to be bothered by a few extra configuration steps.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

because you should never mix politics with technology.

What does this mean?

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Be "Brave" use a better browser.
[winks in Firefox]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

winks in librewolf with uBlock, LocalCDN and altered UserAgent and fixed resolution of 1920×1080

PS: I am paranoid

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Let's see if the brave fanboys REEEEEEEE on Lemmy as hard as they do on reddit and try to brigade this post.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Yeah I don’t really get the fanaticism around that browser

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Anything with crypto seems to get some people all hot and bothered

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

I never started in the first place.

It always seemed like snake oil to me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I wouldn't be using Lemmy at all if I had to agree with the creators political views lol.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Never started. What have they done now?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This reads like ai generated text.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

It's perfectly acceptable to have reservations about a browser, but this article seems to be quite exaggerated.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Found chatgpt.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It’s not a sign of intelligence to choose to ban a technology because of the opinions of its creator

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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.

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