- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Just use Firefox.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + arkenfox user.js gives you privacy, security and anti-tracking. The only way to fly IMO.
And a Pi Hole for good measure.
A dns blocker cannot do anything more than ublock. It is nice for other apps though.
A DNS blocker is great for other devices on your network!
White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It’s like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.
Librewolf
No android version = no buy
Mull for android
What does Arkenfox do? I’ll definitely add it if it’s beneficial.
It changes many default Firefox preferences in
about:configto be as private as possible. The main selling point is resist fingerprinting (RFP). I highly suggest reading the wiki. It can break some websites, but you can configure it to fit your needs.
I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
I bounced between the two for years, i guess i am going back to Firefox full time.
I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn’t handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up
The only reason I haven’t switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn’t have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it’s not a priority. 🤷
Firefox for Android removing the ability to open local html files killed it for me. Currently on Vivaldi.
Why did they remove it though? I was surprised too when I found out I needed to run local webserver to access local html files
It was because of ‘security’, which was never explained. And it doesn’t make much sense when other browsers can and do alow it. I’ll see if I can dig up some historical links if I remember tomorrow.
Last time I checked,there was still no acknowledgement of it and appeared to be no intention of ever addressing it. The fact that they’re now telling people to run a webserver suggests that nothing has changed ☹️
So use edge
Its chrome-based… but at least its not brave, and the adblocker(which is off by default…) is decent enough
If you think the things brave has done are bad, go read through the list of things microsoft has done. You really don’t want them to ever have a browser again, and certainly don’t want to personally use it.
With brave I never see any pc or YouTube ads. With Firefox even with ublock origin I can’t get rid of those damn ads. That’s what keeps me on brave
Doesn’t Firefox do telemetry and other shady shit out of the box? Ofc you can turn it off but I don’t get the fanaticism over this browser.
Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.
Some examples:
- Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
- Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
- Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared
And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.
Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.
Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.
You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.
But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.
Firefox and mozilla aren’t your friend.
They like to play the “user and privacy friendly” company. Meanwhile they are hemoraging users, and laying off staff needed to actually build a great browser.
Mozilla ceo pay increase + layoffs in 2020:
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated “I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That’s too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.”
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
They don’t need to be my friend to be better than the chromium browsers though, so I don’t know what this has to do with anything
The fact that their founder wants to ban gay marriage is enough reason for me to avoid it like the plague.
He fucking what?
He made a thousand dollar donation in support of proposition 8, a constitutional amendment in California that strips gay people of the right to marry. He then proceeded to argue that such a donation does not make him a bigot or an enemy of LGBTQ+ people, because he’s a delusional piece of filth.
This effectively prevented gay people from marrying in California from 2008 to 2013 until the fascists that supported it were finally done trying to argue how this doesn’t violate the US constitution.
So yeah, may he, his browser, and any pathethic excuse that pretends to be human being who supported this abomination rot in the deepest depths forever.
I dont know why anyone would leave chrome and land on something like brave.
If youre ditching chrome, which you should, go to an actual different browser and use Firefox.
Personal anecdote:
When I initially decided to drop Chrome, I moved to Brave because - as a chromium-based browser - it supported the same set of extensions I’d grown accustomed to.
That being said, the crypto stuff weirded me out enough that, once I’d weaned myself off the extensions, I switched to Firefox.
What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?
My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world
Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seems to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don’t buy the argument that it’s easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It’s not as complicated as people make it out to be. It’s not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they’ll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine’s direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! 😄
The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.
Streaming services seem to lower bitrate when I’m using Firefox vs Brave, so Brave is my go to for streaming.
I use Firefox for everything else.
The ceo is a bigoted asshole, Brave is chromium, it was initially funded by Peter Thiel and they’re literally just trying to make their own adsense network.
The self-proclaimed privacy focused browser is tracking your browsing and want to serve you personalized ads, and I think they want to use that tracking data for AI training as well, meaning other people can potentially access it.
And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. Which they seemingly unironically called it “Basic Attent Tokens”…
TL;DR: The company is basically a sham company trying to usher in a dystopia. Where you’ll get paid for staring at ads, while having all your data stolen and sold back to you.
I see no reason to use any other browser than Firefox and maybe Librewolf.
Firefox on desktop is awesome. Firefox on mobile is painful.
I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
So Mull browser, right?
Yeah top 4 browser are Firefox, librewolf, tor, and mullvad for sure.
mull and mullvad are at least two different things
Autocorrect so strong it turns your browser into a VPN
Damn didnt know it was that bad.
They also lack any documentation about how to use their policies on Linux (where you can disable all the bloat). But it should be doable, I will give it another try.
Is the browser even FOSS? Can you compile a working version yourself?
I do that with Firefox and it is really cool.
I have absolutely no idea how Brave got the reputation it has. It’s business model is disgusting and extortionate, it’s like paying for warez. Been clear as day since day one.
it’s got crypto.
It’s got electrolytes!
It has what plants crave!
It’s what plants crave!
A big reason to avoid it!
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Besides this I cannot find another good reason not to use brave. Nobody point to a specific line of code that ruins privacy, not enough reasons.
Good enough for this gay Californian.
Gay Nuyorican
I don’t know what you’re saying, but I infer it’s not meant kindly.
They block the website’s own ads, but inject their own instead. So the user still gets ads, but the profits go to Brave. I know that if the site’s owner is aware of that and goes through the process of registering with Brave they get a share of the profits, but this should really be opt-in. As it is, the whole scheme is shady as fuck.
Brave is a marching band of red flags. It claims privacy while injecting ads, affiliate codes and crypto into the browser. It’s kind of sad to see someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side and pretend this is all fine. It isn’t.
Best advice I could give for anyone who wants privacy is use Firefox or a branch of it. Firefox is out of the box the most privacy conscious mainstream browser and add-ons make it more so. If you want absolute privacy you could even use a derivative like Tor Browser.
Louis Rossmann also recommended Brave in one of his videos. Quite sad.
I like a fair amount of his videos but he has a big ole bag of bad takes
Love everything he criticizes (corporate greed, drm, wasteful planned obsolescence, unrepairable disposable device design) are all incentivized and rewarded under Capitalism … but since he’s a small business owner he still supports the idea of Capitalism.
He gets so close.
Exactly my thoughts. He’s like right on the edge but to me it seems he has some cognitive dissonance re capitalism
These people talking as if not all the crypto bloat would be opt in lol. It just take 30 seconds or even less to turn off everything of that.
Brave is more secure than Firefox out of the box.
This is bulshit, didnt have to say aything in tehnical aspect of the browser so he continyed to tras some people that work on that project, probably false…
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
That has nothing to do with the software. And that’s a tiny donation. I’m not going to stop using an excellent tool because one of the guys in charge is a bigot. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to eat, drink, breathe, make a phone call, or do anything really. There’s a lot of people out there. Some of them are bigots. We should work to reduce their influence but we can’t boycott literally everything. Every alternative to Brave has at least one bigot involved in it, I guarantee it.
Brave’s replacement for ads doesn’t reward users in a meaningful amount
Not enough > 0, which is what you get without adblock. And I’m fine with occasional non-targeted and unobtrusive ads to help fund a service I use.
Brave’s BAT was built around the cryptocurrency ecosystem
Who gives a shit except crypto bros? And who gives a shit about crypto bros anyway?
Brave was also caught up in a privacy scandal in 2020, when it was revealed that the browser was adding affiliate codes to some URLs typed into the address bar.
Are these affiliate codes tracking you? No? Who gives a shit? It’s more money for Brave, same webpage for you.
That should have been enough to swear off Brave as a privacy-centric browser forever, considering the entire point of affiliate links is to collect data about the user and traffic source. For example, when you click an Amazon affiliate link in a web article, the publisher can see the exact products you purchase in the timeframe the tracking cookie remains active
Brave blocks cookies by default. Unless they specifically made an exception in their own browser for these codes, then this carefully-worded paragraph is just bullshit.
Much like the rest of this article. Bunch of poo-flinging. “Brave is involved in crypto, here’s all the bad things crypto has done, that’s why you shouldn’t use Brave”. Stupid guilt by association and a lot of hot air. Bringing a smoke machine to make people think there’s fire.
There’s a lot of effort going into making Brave seem like a bad browser and I don’t know why.
I agree that you shouldn’t use Brave browser cause of things they’ve done in the past but, oh Jesus, that article is so stupid it reminds me the Hogwarts Legacy boycott.
If you put aside the crypto crap, Brave is an okay browser. Sometimes I use it for web development. But I don’t like the direction the company is heading towards.
Most of the time I use Firefox with Extensions and Librewolf for everything. Firefox has been my go-to for years and I sure hope it stays that way.
the hateful browser
Holy shit man imagine if we judged every huge project by one asshole at the top. There wouldn’t be a single thing to enjoy in this world.
Edit:
I am going to add more perspective to this, because holy shit people are so into eating nothing burgers.
Reddit/Twitter was a database and API that everyone was centralized onto, there was no choice. Brave you can literally fork because its open source. Aside from that this was literally the CEO’s personal donation of $1000…in like 2014. Almost 10 yrs ago.
Elon, as CEO and on the X/Twitter brand:
- “brainwashed” https://www.news18.com/buzz/elon-musk-causes-uproar-with-anti-lgbtq-anti-vax-meme-insults-random-twitter-user-6714733.html
- https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-twitter-makes-millions-off-anti-lgbt-groomer-tweets-report
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitter-pronoun-rule-invites-bullying-lgbtq-groups-say-rcna87336
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-triples-down-on-making-twitter-terrible-for-trans-people/
Meanwhile Brendan:
- Literally stepped down as CEO https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-resigns-as-mozilla-corporation-ceo/
- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/
- made personal blog post about inclusivity shortly after https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
- invented and worked on/for javascript, brave, firefox
Gnubyte
Underrated comment - the top is filled with toxic scum. Like if one really looked into it, everything would have to be boycotted (not that it isn’t a worthy thing to do, but it gets exhausting and scumbags seem to own everything)
Underrated comment - the top is filled with toxic scum. True regardless of what side of the political spectrum you fall on.
That’s why life is hard for grownups. You have to decide what you think is important and not.
With your way of seeing things it looks like no one should be criticised since no one is without sin?
Sin is a fictional construct of control. I believe you meant “fault”, but felt it worth noting that the difference in terminology is immense.
English isn’t my first language. It was a play on “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her".
Yes, I presumed as much. My point stands, and “fault” would’ve fit more easily.
Also, downvotes on Lemmy are not the petty things they are on Reddit, so let’s keep the disagreement civil and rational, instead. 🤗
The article isn’t judging by the one asshole, it breaks down specific flaws in the core of the product itself. Also when the “one person” is the CEO who guides the decisions the become the spirit of the product, one bad person can be enough. Twitter is now irredeemable because of the cancer of elon musk at the top, for example.
Also, a little tone deaf to make a statement like yours on Lemmy; a place basically populated entirely by people leaving Reddit because of the toxic, user-hostile decisions of spez on Reddit.
Ok but like that asshole is using his money and power to donate to horrible stuff. Even if we take the stance that you shouldn’t let someone’s opinion ruin what they make, you’re still helping him support his causes financially through using his platform.
Or wow, it’s almost like people care about that sort of thing on the platform were most people came from Reddit or twitter because of the awful actions of their respective CEOs or something
This article did not present a compelling case for abandoning brave. Who cares what the founder thinks about various political issues. If the software is good, then that’s all that matters.
Don’t get me wrong, I support same sex marriage, but people have a right to oppose the concept as marriage is a government idea that is tied up in politics.
