Well. I get the rating criteria of this website. But it's useful of adding telemetry to learn crashes and feature usage. If we all obey these criteria, we would need to read every line of codes and build it by ourselves. That would be the safest way of living a digital life.

I hate Brendan Eich, I hate the constant annoyances of Brave adding cards and sponsored backgrounds, I hate the dominance of Chromium, and I hate cryptocurrency.

But this is a fight I've lost.

I'm one of those insufferable Linux nerds who has spent $50+hours/month setting up a Nextcloud VPS, calling my friends Nazi-adjacent for using Twitter, etc. I'm horribly opinionated about software. I WANT everyone to use Firefox.

But I just don't have the spare time for Firefox anymore.

I've had irreconcilable, breaking issues with vanilla Firefox installs on almost every major desktop and mobile OS (excluding KaiOS and Apple WatchOS) every time I tried to switch to it during the past few years. This is not exaggeration.

From crashing because it can't handle keyboard-arrow down on iPadOS, lacking good built-in adblock controls (like Brave Shields) on Android and iOS, to being unable to load hCaptcha on desktop even after hours of user.js flitching. This is on top of the inconvenience of not having a good alternative to Chromium's Profile UI, the inconvenience of needing to test on Chrome when doing webdev, etc.

Brave is a putrid steaming pile of shit, but it's the best choice I've found. This post exaggerates a lot of the very real issues Brave has. This isn't praise for Brave, but rather an indictment on the state of browsing and personal-computing.

I write here very sparingly. With this comment, I hope someone will tell me I'm an idiot who's missing a wonderful browser out there.

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

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.

Well, 1st, your sources are are weak here. However, it is a fact Brave is also run by con artists and swindlers.

The issue many users have is compatibility. Firefox zealots ignore the fact IT folks must work with Chromium. I cannot get the tools I need to work reliably on Firefox (or LibreWolf, Mullvad, etc.).

So, within the Chromium limitation, , I work on 7 systems regularly, I must have bookmark replication, MacOS/Linux/Windows/Android support:

Ungoogled Chromium = rough, no bookmark replication Vivaldi = worse than Brave, because no full source code Opera = Chinese Iridium = Indian Brave = source code available, privacy focused Edge = lol Chrome = lol

Winner? Brave. I use it with Pi-hole DNS on my home network, forced to use it with work DNS on their networks. I do also use LibreWolf (aka Firefox) with the Mullvad extension. I use it along with Brave, and hopefully at some point I can switch. I've tried 3 times in recent years, but too many web interfaces have Firefox issues, since it's blatantly not being used to QA websites anymore.

I really like Brave on my Android phone, with the build-in ad-blocking it's a really nice experience. Firefox on Android sucks imo, but I do use Firefox on my laptop as my primary browser.

If you need a Chromium derivative, then Brave is probably the best choice. It's open-source, and includes ad blocking. Just don't use its crypto token.

I prefer Firefox over Brave, but sometimes I might need a Chromium derivative for a particular site.

Why should I trust Mozilla over Brave? Just because Mozilla is a nonprofit subsidiary doesn't mean that they don't have an incentive to make money for their profit handling corporate division, the Mozilla Corporation. I tried playing around with Firefox and not having the option to directly add a less-used search engine than the ones given without extensions was pretty sketchy to me. All of the complaints people have about Brave like ads and the weird crypto thing are very configurable in the settings, and I have a lot less compatibility issues compared to Firefox. Also, the source linked claiming all of this is a sketchy Neocities site that anyone could have made that doesn't even prove why Brave isn't private. I get that people are loyal to their favorite browsers but this is silly. If you really want to be private, use the Tor network, but all browsers and extensions need to track you in some degree to function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

How about the Opera Browser?

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.

I use FF but you just cannot deny that using a Chromium based browser has many security advantages over Gecko, especially on mobile. I takes Mozilla seemingly years and years to implement security features like Chromium. They don't put the necessary priority behind this.

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

I hate Mozilla more than whatever Brave has been accused of in the past. Brave makes it easy to configure a private browser, this is not an opinion. There's no browser that will ever have a monopoly on privacy.