Ask Lemmy

@cannedtuna@lemmy.world is the author of everything that follows:

This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don't want to however, here is a summary of the key points:

• Brendan Eich's anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement

• • Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.

• 2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads

• • Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as "blatantly illegal".

• 2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign

• • Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.

• 2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets

• • Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.

• 2020 — Brave puts ads in user's home screens

• • Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.

• 2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature

• • Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests

• 2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites

• • Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google's crawler.

• 2024 - So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection

• • Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.

• And More!

• • Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to "Forget the Fox". When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
• • The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
• • Brendan Eich's feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be "independent".

Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.

In addition to what others have said, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund invested in Brave. You know, the Palantir guy who thinks Greta Thunberg is the antichrist? I'm not going within a country mile of anything his blood money touches when I can help it.

It's a crypto scam wrapped in a protection racket, built by an incompetent misogynist asshole on a base that supports Google's hegemony over web standards.

Ahh yes. Brave the bloated browser with very dodgy behaviour. You get a chrome fork with crypto shit, leaky VPN, ridiculously bad search, and a full blown ad engine that hijacks your notifications and tracks you in an 'anonymized' way. FUCK.THAT.SHIT.

There is some crypto bullfuck and AI shit you can easily opt out off, and some talk about some CEO making homophobic comments.

I feel like you know the reasons already then.

If having to install an adblocker is the biggest hurdle that means you are willing to put up with the rest of the BS, that’s your choice.

I’d rather take 40 seconds to install a adblocker on a different browser and not support shit CEOs or software that comes loaded with crypto AI shit, but that’s just me.

For me it boils down to it pretending to be different from Chrome while using the same rendering engine, thus keeping more power at Google.

As someone who lived through the time when IE was dominant and seeing the web stagnate until Mozilla released Firefox and began competing with new features and better speed, I never want to go back to a world with just one main rendering engine, we are sadly there again with Blink, but I am not going to support it.

the ceo is the creator of javascript, some alone would say thats a big enough sin, but the man has also donated money to anti lgbtq bills before, so more than just offhand comments.

Because crypto bro behaviour and I can install ublock in my firefox browser in both android and desktop.

What makes/does Brave better?

Also, in addition to what others said, Brave has been involved in some shady stuff like ad substitution/injection. See:

https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/

Similarly enough, Brendan Eich's feed also contains some worrying content, in my opinion. Ranging from, again, retweeting right-wing activists, to weird Republican propaganda. He claims to be independent and not a Republican, but this does not make me any less worried about the type of ideas he follows.

But yeah, if you are a big fan of AI and crypto, and are okay with having advertisements in the user interface out of the box, are okay with past attempts to steal money from websites and collect donations towards people who wouldn't necessarily even receive it, plus you can put up with occasional privacy mistakes… use Brave!

Besides all the reasons everyone else has already provided in this thread, a browser containing as you so colourfully put it "crypto bullfuck and AI shit" isn't something I want to use.

FYI: I know this is not "built in" but on Firefox it is super easy to install an AdBlocker, like its about 6 seconds with a decent internet connection and precise mouse movements. Have to opt out of AI shit as well though.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin

It's chromium, which means Google is probably tracking you though it, like they have been caught doing before.

They used to do affiliate link injections

Why use Brave when you can use Helium or Cromite?

Helium has full (not lite) ublock origin built in, and no junk. That’s the gold standard of Adblock.

Cromite has rather obsessive antifingerprinting, making it extremely difficult to track you compared to Brave.

Basically, people use Brave because it’s got SEO; it’s the first result when people type in “Adblock browser” unfortunately.

Just use Firefox or Floorp with Ublock Origin. No crypto bullshit to be had.

It's chromium based, I'd rater a more open web, so I use FF

Orion on macOS and iOS also have built-in ad blockers, I don’t really understand your point. You could just as easily run a non-hostile browser that supports plug-ins cleanly.

Can someone recommend an alternative browser for android?

I hate the Firefox ui layout on Android, I like brave for that.