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.
Let’s not forget one of the biggest investors is a right-wing billionaire who runs a corporate intelligence agency that contracts with the DoD. And the only proof we have that he doesn’t collect data on Brave’s users is the questionable word of the devs.
Brave has been off limits for me ever since I saw my QAnon nutjob father using it lol.
I would appreciate if we don’t bring politics into the conversation. They are completely subjective and only serve to stray away from the original point.
Edit:
Yes, I’m aware I’m in the wrong here.
Privacy is a political subject.
Brave is literally a grift. Too many people are falling for it.
Might I add brave’s BAT wallet is garbage. You had to sign up to some random exchange and upload your ID (I didn’t), but even that you couldn’t even backup your wallet into a new install, so hope that you would never have to format or reinstall or change devices - it’ll be a pain to restore, if it was even possible.
Firefox over brave any day.
I would recommend waterfox. I use it on windows, it doesn’t run great on Linux so far so on my Linux machines I use Firefox.
Never used it, I saw some twitter comments from it’s CEO and this guy isn’t trustable.
I go with Firefox and sometimes epiphany. Last one tries to accomplish the level of the well known ones but is mostly years behind. That’s sad, because I really like it.
Even if they were amazing, it would still be worth using Firefox instead to suppport an alternative to chromium.
Even worse for privacy, it uses the Chrome engine.
Brave always marketed itself as hardened privacy browser and the second I saw their shitcoin immediately bells went off.
Either way, I use Librewolf on PC and Mac and lately been giving Arc a try on Mac and I like it.
Brave was also made by a guy who got kicked out of Mozilla for being homophobic. The cryptocurrency stuff is brave also a major scam, it’s a crypto that must first be converted into another crypto before it can be converted into real money. How is that a “currency”?
Brave is not spyware. That website you linked is horrible and full of misinformation. They also claim that Firefox, and even Tor Browser, are spyware. They act as if any and all connections a browser makes are automatically bad and used for spying/tracking.
I won’t disagree with the other criticisms of Brave that you made, but just wanted to point that out. That website is just highly unreliable and makes verifiably false claims about the browsers it reviews.
Brave is not spyware
It is officially spyware now: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-services-without-user-consent/
Just commenting to let you know I’ve clarified a bit in the post. Also, stock Firefox is spyware so.
Stock as in out-of-the-box.
Edit: If you want to downvote this go ahead, but at least know that it’s true. Without changing ANY settings, Firefox is spyware.
How about the Opera Browser?
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.
Don’t touch opera, avoid it like the plague
I have installed it on all my devices. Firefox is standard from now, becouse of its open source culture etc.
Proprietary, controlled by the Chinese Government, spyware, Chromium.
Vivaldi
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.
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.
Firefox + Startpage is really cool. I like how their searched don’t include the search parameters in the url + the built in proxy
I’ll keep using and promoting it. I consider it better than Mozilla/FF anyway. Deal with it and stop telling people what they should and shouldn’t do.
Newsflash: everything that isn’t free and entirely open source is generally spyware these days.
It’s amazing how we pilloried RealPlayer and burned its parent company to the fucking ground over two decades ago for far less egregious transgressions than what we now let Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc get away with.
