It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
I use Firefox. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s not that bad.
And if I didn’t, I’d use Vivaldi. Only reason I don’t is I do prefer open source whenever possible and, well, Firefox isn’t Chromium.
Why not just use Firefox or it’s forks?
FWIW I remember a former colleague who recommended it to me and his argument was about the cryptocurrency you “earn” from it.
I asked him if he could withdraw it. I asked him if he tried. He said not yet but he would. He came back to me few days later saying something along the line that “it’s not straightforward” which was a polite way to say he didn’t manage yet. He worked in IT.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s a scam or that one can’t use the crypto “earned” from it but at least back then, few years ago, some people were just riding on the hope, or even faith, that it would amount to something yet it seemed made in such a way to just hold.
So… not a scam but not exactly empowering users IMHO.
Yeah it kinda mystifies me that anyone is still recommending that shitty bigotware.
In the emulation scene, RetroArch is in a similar boat if I’m understanding things correctly. Awful maintainers, but people keep recommending it and supporting it. Sucks too, because there are even fewer alternatives there.
i honestly fidnt know all that. do vivaldi?
They added referrals to links you clicked. If there is one thing a browser should do its go to the link you click without modification.
I don’t think an average person would listen to me if I instructed them to get rid of chrome and get Firefox and install couple extensions for privacy.
So, I just ask them to download brave and tell them it’s just chrome but better, It blocks all the annoying stuff on the internet and atleast they will stop using the hell of a pacifier that chrome is and move on.
Yes, it’s just Chrome but better - it also funds bigots!
Plonk.
Yeah exactly, Brave is for people who are scared of installing extensions but clicking a big install button on a site that runs an executable is perfectly fine
Well I’d argue that with the changes to Manifest, Brave is actually one of your stronger options if chrome is a must have.
If you don’t need chrome, Firefox (or a fork) with ublock is enough for most.
What extensions would you recommend for Firefox?
Ublock Origin is the only mandatory extension i can think of.
Some other extensions I personally use are:
Gesturefy is useful if you want to control things with mouse gestures (holding right-click and then drawing a shape to activate commands)
NoScript for a little added security, with the cost of having to manually enable javascript on websites that literally can’t function without it.
Any extension that runs userscripts.
Dark Reader for websites that don’t offer a dark mode.
Just Ublock origin is more than enough, it’s pretty customisable too, Brave is for people who just wanna install and do nothing
Except when I install Brave I have to debloat it, holy bloat so is Firefox bloated - I usually get forks (Librewolf, Zen etc)
I just wish librewolf would release a mobile version 🤞🤞
I doubt they’ll ever release a mobile version, they’ll just recommend IronFox
Ublock origin
Brave is just a shitty browser. Did not know they were anti-freedom kind of people. Makes browser no-no.
It’s laggy as shit on my iPad
It depends on what you are comparing it against
They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
a for-profit company partially funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, of Palantir fame. the same Palantir spying on Americans in order to allow nazis to round up immigrants and throw them into concentration camps. the same Peter Thiel that said democracy is not compatible with freedom.
The same one who wants to create the apocalypse and believes the anti-Christ is anyone who isn’t fascistic
I did not know Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla and launched Brave because he was a homophobe who funded anti-LGBT+ campaigns 😬
He also created JavaScript, but I don’t see people getting upset and telling others to not use JavaScript.
Well, JavaScript has a lot of horrible features, but it’s ubiquitous and we’re stuck with it for the time being. Certainly it’s another thing to blame Eich for, rather than something that mitigates his other shitty behavior.
Didnt know JS can collect data and transmit it to their creator.
Neither does Brave unless you specifically opt in to those services. It’s open source, you can check for yourself.
I have been using Brave for its out of the box ad and tracker blocking. I’d been uncomfortable with the new AI features and had always been skeptical of the crypto integration, but it wasn’t until this post that I realized it was appreciably worse than Firefox on those counts, nor how bad the people running it are.
Obviously, I’m now looking for other options. I’ve seen some good recs for desktop browsers elsewhere on this post, but what I’m not seeing is a lot of good mobile browser suggestions that will have the desired features. What would the folks here suggest for an e/OS browsing experience with similar or better privacy and ad blocking options? I know there’s Firefox, but A. With all the AI it keeps pushing, I’m sure there has to be better and B. I do also have mobile Firefox but have found it substantially less usable for my habit of browsing with a zillion tabs both non-incognito and incognito, so I mostly had only been it when I couldn’t get a video to play in Brave.
I am, obviously, willing to run de-Googled Chromium, but if something else is going to actually support 100+ tabs in a performant fashion I’d be happy to totally de-Chromium too.
I also use the shit out of profiles on Brave desktop, though mobile doesn’t support it. Do the Firefox forks like Waterfox have a similar option on desktop? Does another browser? I know it’s a feature Chrome has because I do sadly have to use Chrome for work, so I would expect at least the de-Googled Chromium-based ones would?
I have the habit of running Firefox on Android with thousands of tabs (before unloading them into a list on the desktop and cleaning them up). It does slow down somewhat, but not much.
I use Vivaldi as a secondary browser, it’s not been too bad. Firefox is my primary, but I might go to a fork soon.
I’ve been using Vivaldi (chromium-based) for about three years now. It’s customizable and has been generally solid. Also has a couple of unique tab management features. Doesn’t have builtin ad blocking afaik. But for that I use adguard desktop and route all my traffic through it, which filters out ads regardless of which browser I’m in. On iOS I can recommend Orion by kagi. It’s the only other webkit browser besides Safari, runs light, and has decent builtin ad blocking
Vivaldi does have a built in adblocker but it’s not the best yet.
But it does come with a free tier of proton vpn. Great if you don’t need to use a vpn too often but need one in a pinch.
Firefox (and its forks) have an integrated profile manager, though it’s not always intuitive to figure out how to get to it. LibreWolf is the fork I seem to always go back to, and it has zero slop.
I use containers. Right-click on the new tab button and pick a container to open the tab in. There’s also an add-on that will do this automatically for you when you visit a specific website, so if you want every site to live in its own container, you can do that too.
Personally I just use its built-in cross-site cookie blocking, but multiple ways to do the same thing.
LibreWolf looks promising. No mobile app, but they recommend IronFox for that, so I just downloaded that to play with. Thanks!
Edit: mobile IronFox is looking pretty good so far. Made configuring privacy settings an option just out of the box, which I appreciate. Biggest problem right now is that I can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave.
LibreWolf is great once you get yourself onboarded. The onboarding royally sucks. You need to remember that by default LibreWolf is really locked down and it’s on the user to unlock the bits of it they can’t live without. For instance, by default LibreWolf clears its cookies every time you quit, which is great for privacy, but everything’s a tradeoff and that’s too much for me.
LibreWolf
I had soooo many issues with LibreWolf, finally switched to waterfox. If this doesnt pan out, I quit the interweebs
I hope WaterFox pans out for you! Do you mind sharing the issues you had with LibreWolf?
Currently trying mobile IronFox. I’m liking the privacy options and how stuff like unlock origin is literally included in the setup process. Their dark mode is nice and they offer a lot of compatibility options.
Biggest downsides I’m seeing so far (I’ll see about keeping this updated as I go):
- Can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave, and I have looked extensively.
- No tab groups (not the end of the world, but it was a nice feature). EDIT: Looks like Collections does that! EDIT TWO: Not really good for Incognito mode though.
- Clears your browser history by default on close, which may be undesired behavior. (I personally tend to use incognito for most things and then transfer sites over to tabs in non-incognito (cognito?) modes if I want them available regularly, so for me this was undesired, but it was easy to turn off.)
- Brave had a built-in experimental dark mode to dark modify websites that I am not seeing in IronFox. I’m sure there are extensions that will do it for me, so I’ll go looking, but I just discovered so many sites I did not realize were light mode all along. Reading mode also does the trick for most articles.
Also 1. in Brave: Bookmarks and lists, Bookmark manager, three dot menu, Export Bookmarks, save the HTML file on your computer. Then in LibreWolf/IronFox/whatever: Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks, Import and Backup, Import Bookmarks from HTML, select that file.
There’s an add-on called Dark Reader which may help with number 4. I don’t know if IronFox supports extensions, but that’s the one you probably want.
It’s a for profit ad company making a “privacy first browser”.
Thinking for literaly a second about that sentence should tell you all you need to know.
it’s the best browser out there right now. did you know it has the TOR net and ad blocking built in? great huh?
where does firefox make its money
IS IT FROM GOOGLE SEARCHES?
so what have the owners done to the lgbtq+ community in the last 5 years?
You should probably add /s to that, hah.
you can do privacy friendly ads, it’s not because the entire industry has evolved to an horrible point that the good way of doing it can’t exist
This is true. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics used to run and maintain a good sort of ad service called Project Wonderful, that catered to webcomics and blogs and didn’t track users. Sadly he shut it down in 2018.
Currently I know of Comicad Network that’s trying a similar kind of thing.
- it’s fucking Chromium
Go use some Firefox-derivative like Librewolf or Fennec, like a sane person.
Yeah, this is important. Fuck Google. I will only ever use a chromium browser if I have to for work or for a misbehaving website.
I don’t know enough about browsers to really know anything about chromium. But I did see a statement from Google which I believe stated that they were removing support for adblockers from chromium based browsers. It was at that point that I decided I did want to continue having a usable browsing experience, and immediately swapped.
I will reject the misbehaving website rather than resort to using Chromium.
Occasionally though, life requires using a shit website. I do avoid it if possible though
Your attitude is very reasonable. I strive to be as unreasonable as I can.
reference
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
This is hilarious for me if only because at some point ages ago I tagged you with, simply, “seems reasonable”.
Fortunately, I also agree with your reasoning for being unreasonable, thus returning you back to the realm of reasonability while striving to be unreasonable.
Self awareness is good haha
Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features
Never used librewolf.
But it sounds like the conveniences you want are a compromise for fingerprinting.Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good.
The internet has been significantly ruined by large companies.
There is a loop where companies with the resources to create and maintain frameworks/tooling/whatever are large enough to help define “features” for browsers.
Browsers don’t make money, not really. To even be considered, they have to be able to run what the big companies are pushing.
All of this makes it very easy for smaller companies to deliver better websites. Or abuse the features big companies are pushing.It’s like: email was awesome, then spam emails happened. Websites were accessible, then SPAs happened. Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.
I don’t know what I am trying to say.
Other than browsers do not get the support they deserve to actually be decent unless they are backed by a company that wants to loss-lead them… Which has resulted in the web being pretty fucked
No, go use Google Chrome like everyone else.
Just mentioned how I didn’t like people recommending this like last week and got “ok” as a response lol. Some people are just ignorant and don’t care.
ok
ok
Honesty your arguments against Brave are pretty weak
Brave > Chrome
Brave isn’t great for those who want a lot of private and control. However, it is way better for people to choose Brave over Chrome or Edge.
Sure it’s better, if you want to directly fund anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
May as well give money to the fucking Salvation Army.
It’s free and open source, you don’t have to fund anything. Just don’t enable adds/rewards and don’t pay for their VPN, AI, talk.
brave is chrome with a homophobic skin slapped onto it
Brave > Chrome
That’s not saying much.
Literally any mainstream browser is better than Chrome. Chrome is the worst browser in use today.
