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I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can’t recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.
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How so? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything negative against the company, but I’d love to know if I missed something.
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You’re going to need to cite some sources for these fairly wild claims.
You can notice it as well, since the browser is very subpar when compared to Chromium
This is the most egregious lie of the bunch. Firefox is extremely close in terms of features, performance, usability, HTML/JS/CSS support, developer tools, etc. It’s privacy tools are, if anything, significantly better. And once Manifest v2 extensions stop being supported by Chrome (which is coming next year) it’ll have significantly better adblocker support.
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HUGE lie. Firefox is so freaking slow compared to basically anything else.
The latest controversy was about Mozilla working with Meta in a project about privacy in ads.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/Don’t really know if this is a good or bad thing
lmao still thinking moz corporation is your friend
Firefox. The slowest browser, the least compatible browser, the most annoying when it comes to bugs and issues (Firefox snap anyone?)
I just cannot disagree more. You seriously have to gaslight yourself into liking it.
Wow, that is quite a presumption there. Every couple years I try Chrome again and I am done with it in a few hours. The thing is archaic and its interface uncustomizable. And the only reason it could maybe have more compatibility is because of its market share and peoples’ bias towards it. There was once a time over ten years ago when it was good, but it’s not anymore. Not to mention the privacy issues.
Firefox has been my browser for 10 years or longer.
What a strange take. I switched from Opera to Firefox like 15+ years ago (whenever Firefox added extensions, so I could use Mouse Gestures (why I was on Opera in the first place))
I never have issues with compatibility or speed. I don’t use Google products so I don’t have Chrome to compare it to, but it’s certainly as fast as/faster an IE/Edge.
Firefox has been my browser for eons, but I admit I think Edge is faster. It doesn’t matter to me in the end though.
Edge feels like the same speed to me, but our household has monster computers!
the payouts
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they’d offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
no, you are right. there is a lot of talk about the brave browser in this thread, a chromium based ad blocking browser by the brave company that gives you their own crypto in return for unobtrusive ads on the start page, which can then be used to donate to content creators on the internet (i think) or be cashed in. you and the op are talking about brave search, a search engine created by the same company
I’ve been using brave browser for years and, while I vaguely know what you’re talking about, it’s not something I’ve ever even looked at.
The defining feature of Brave for me has always been the built-in ad blocking.
ah, that would explain it, thanks!
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I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.
It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.
My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.
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No, you can take your own BAT out and sell it. It’s been some time but I believe they have a function to sell directly on an exchange. Else, you’ll need to buy Ethereum and use it to transfer to any other exchange
I might be wrong, as I’ve never used Brave, but isn’t it the case that they remove ads from the actual content owners and replace them with their own ads, basically monetizing other people’s content? I block all ads in my browser, don’t get me wrong, but what Brave is doing seems a bit shady to me.
No. The ads from brave itself are only on new tabs and notifications.
They do that, but not in that way. The websites will appear without ads, but once in a while their ad will pop up in a new window/tab. This is optional though
On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?
I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.
I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.
The problem isn’t the ads, it’s the quantity. And they turn themselves into OS level alerts, that you train yourself to ignore
When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.
Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.
I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 5~10€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).
Now that crypto account is mandatory it’s just useless…
I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I’m too lazy to replace it by something else.
I thought it was supposed to be the best privacy browser but after reading these comments my view has changed completely and have switched all devices to Firefox.
I don’t think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.
Yeah can I get adblock on iPhone with Firefox?
There are adblockers extensions for iphone, like adGuard. It will remove ads on Safari (doesn’t work with other browsers unfortunately)
You can use pihole and route your traffic there with a vpn such as tailscale to block ads and more
You can with Firefox Focus! Though to be clear, safari with AdGuard is much better. Even better when used together NextDNS and the HaGaZi blocklist.
I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I’m switching to Firefox tomorrow.
Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you’re marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
I don’t understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
Brave had a thing where if you went to website.com, they would add /ref=brave to the URL so they get a kickback as if you clicked on their referral link.
Sneaky? Sure. A huge scandal? I don’t think so. No user data was being collected, no privacy was being violated. If I was the company doing the referral system I’d be mad, but as a user, it does not affect me at all.
Firefox fanatics just need something to point to and say “brave bad firefox good” and that is the worst thing they can find on Brave. It’s all browser wars to them, like iPhone vs Android or Xbox vs Playstation.
The article in this post also does not affect users in anyway, and has been updated after Brave responded, with most of the worst claims of the article now retracted.
Stealing referral URLs is lowest kind of spyware/malware tactics. Topmoxie which was another for of advanced java app coming with Limewire did it.
Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.
The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.
What does his political donations have to do with brave’s misconduct here?
It has nothing to do with it, but I was commenting on a parent level comment to add more info about the stunts they pull that reduce their credibility, making it relevant to the parent comment, but not the overall post.
Also, he invented JavaScript. He got on my shitlist permanently for that alone.
/
I’m not using their browser in part because of all the problems of the past, but the search engine is actually really good. In my case it’s better than DDG and bing.
i also use brave search a lot, switched after ddg downranked russian search results and the microsoft tracking scandal. but now i am reconsidering. besides searX, what are the best privacy focused search engines atm?
I just recently tried a few different ones because I want to get away from Brave Search. But they either had poor search results or some firm of censoring/altering search results. So I would also love to know if there’s some search engine or there that can produce good results without bias i.e. actually just give me the relevant results I am searching for.
If you’re willing to pay, Kagi seems to do a decent job.
So I just wrote out a whole big long thing about how I tested multiple searches and Kagi served up the best results out of them all. But apparently my comment didn’t stick :/
Anyway, I would love to use Kagi but it would be incredibly expensive for us. The family plan wouldn’t work because I use more than 2,000 searches in a month and with the exchange rate, the unlimited plan comes out at $40, plus whatever plan my spouse used or another $30 if the rest of the fam wanted to use it.
What I would love to see is if ISPs picked up Kagi. They make a deal for discounted plans from Kagi which they then offer to customers as an addon to their internet plan. Kagi gets more money coming in and regularly and people get to use Kagi at an affordable rate.
At the moment, Kagi is just another service providing privacy and usefulness only to those who can afford it. The poor (and ignorant) still have to content to be the product and give up privacy :(
I tried Kagi, but the results just seem like Google being re-sold, and there’s no way I could get away with anything other than the unlimited plan which is $25/month. Also I’m pretty sure it’s a company of one guy - I’m not sure if this is anything other than a pet project or how they would actually improve the results or become independent of google. Also not sure how I could trust their privacy claims as you literally need to be signed in to search. It’s frustrating though because I want to love their business model, and the presentation is very clean.
If you sign up with a masked address then they only have that. You can likely sign up for more than once if you’re needing a new pool of searches, though obviously paying for searches might out you.
I did a bit of comparison… they’re at LEAST using Google and Bing, probably a couple more. I tested with searches I’d already done outside of Kagi and it identified most of the relevant results I’d had to ID across multiple engines before. I do think the price is ah, pricey though, and I’d want more info before I used it for sensitive stuff.
I am trialling Qwant for a few weeks now after I had to restore a backup for my phone, it’s a European privacy oriented search engine. I like it a lot so far, seems to do better than Brave for me. I do miss the option of adding “!g” at the end of a search term to fall back to Google. That is really nice in Brave Search.
I did not like Duckduckgo at all even though I tried it for a few weeks.
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don’t understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
I still remember why: Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, the man who would go on to found Brave, for donating to Christian charities in the politically polarised climate of 2016. After Eich went, they also quietly purged any other employees that showed even a hint of conservative sympathies in their internet presence. They then went on to “experiment” with pushing browser ads on users, and while they eventually ended the experiment because of massive user backlash, they still made no apologies and didn’t abandon the idea. Just made a final public response dripping with PR bullshit with a patronising conclusion along the lines of “internet users just aren’t ready for this change yet”.
Brandon Eich was fired because he was constantly giving money to politicians and groups that were advocating for the banning of same sex marriage. Also funding the campaign of congressman Tom McClintock, a certified piece of shit, Who denies climate change, is against LGBTQ rights, and was among the republicans trying to overturn the 2020 election.
So he was fired for his political affiliation.
From an outside perspective, I find it astonishing that those ideas are considered acceptable political positions in the US. With that said, I believe in individuals having the right to support or promote their chosen cause, but also the right of others to choose whether or not they wish to associate with them.
Opposition to gay marriage was fairly common in the early and mid 2010s. It was only legalised 8 years ago in the US, and so, in 2016, it was still a live issue.
Yeah, it just feels so bizarre to me as someone who isn’t American.
In OK with that
Yes. That is political affiliation. You might not share it, but whether same-sex marriage should be legal is absolutely a political question, even if it is now outside the Overton window.
Personally, I’m not sure I support any form of state marriage, but if it exists, it should include same-sex marriage.
If your political affiliation implies creating second-class citizens that may be discriminated against due to innate characteristics or harmless behavior, don’t expect me to respect your political identity, to not to discriminate against it, or to give a damn when you find yourself kicked out of places because of it.
Iirc the debian of browsers is iceweasle.
IceWeasel EOL’d 6 years ago
I find console text only browsers more effective than iceweasel, when pages break with iw you get no text, at least with links/elinks/lynx you get the text.
Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
You might want to look into NewPipe then. Lets you do all those things with YT, plus you can also download the videos or their audio only
I’m on an iPhone, which I why I don’t use all the other things Android people suggest.
Brave has been about the only thing I’ve found that works and is easy for iPhone.
If you’re on apple I’d recommend giving Orion browser a try. It blocks all ads by default, including YouTube. It’s become my default browser on all my devices.
You could check out uYouPlus then, it doesn’t require jailbreaking or anything but instead works through “sideloading”. I’ve used it for years and it’s honestlygreat:
I’ll look at it further thanks.
Or they could keep using Brave? I use Brave on my phone and Firefox on my desktop for the same reasons mentioned, but in general Brave is a great browser on phones. I’m amazed it isn’t hugely popular if only for the YouTube features.
“No you MUST uninstall Brave, the company is too shady!” -someone using a phone made by a literal advertising company
Of course they can, I never said they couldn’t. I just personally prefer YouTube’s app UI and UX over the website on mobile.
That is unfortunate, newpipe is awesome, dare I say better than YouTube Premium.
I use Revanced, personally, but also have NewPipe installed.
Yeah, I mean Brave seems to give me all the features premium does, at least the ones I want. I have a Google account specifically for YouTube watching with which I’ve trained/brute-force-hidden-trash to the point the algorithm 99% of the time gives me what I’m interested in, so it’s pretty simple to pop open the browser and put something on to listen to on a drive.
Newpipe doesn’t use the algorithm (besides the feed for popular but you don’t really contribute to it though) which is actually one of the reasons I like it because it allows me to cut down on my watch time (though I also tend to listen much more than watch nowadays).
It does have downloads too, admittedly I never use this feature but it is neat because you can choose the format and quality which goes above even premium’s choices for quality.
3rd party solutions for these corporate run apps truly are amazing!
I do download on my desktop with an extension (I think it’s just called “YouTube downloader”) or something.
Downloading videos is a regular habit not just to bypass ads but because the videos can disappear for everything from corporate to personal to esoteric reasons.
On iPhone you are using WebKit no matter what browser you use. Unfortunately it is the same deal with Firefox too. In addition, Apple isn’t forgiving when it comes to their customers privacy and security. They actually “sell” this comfort in their adverts. So it would be crazy if they pulled their windows and Android tricks on Apple.
Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
I use Brave occasionally, but Firefox has been my #1 for the past 100 years or so. I stopped using Firefox as my only browser after they overhauled the interface. I really miss classic Firefox with my tabs on bottom, old search engine bar, and endless customizations.
Every single one of these Brave “scandals” are so irrelevant and meaningless. I was hoping the reddit hive mind wouldn’t be brought over to lemmy, but here we are.
This article, especially after the update from Brave, seems like a huge nothing-burger. Just another excuse for the Firefox Fanatics crowd to rag on Brave and circlejerk each other about how good Firefox is.
The article isn’t even about Brave Browser, and it has nothing to do with user data. The website owner is mad that Brave Search is crawling their site and using data in their “Summarizer” feature. I thought Firefox users were supposed to be against the Google internet monopoly, but apparently when it comes to one of the only companies with their own independent and actually decent search engine, they don’t seem to care anymore because of stupid “Firefox good brave bad” browser wars nonsense.
Did nobody read the article? The author is crying that Brave implemented a summary feature so users don’t have to read through entire paragraphs to get to the actual content. Of course, he goes on and on about copyright and OpenAI, nothing really about user data.
Brave is just too shady and I hate that it’s considered a “privacy” browser by people who don’t know better.
Vivaldi ftw. The only Chromium browser I trust and use.
Vivaldi is good, but it’s getting bloated as hell. Not to mention it’s going to be affected by manifest v3, which worries me.
It isn’t even open source. I don’t trust it, but it’s my primary browser because I love its customization stuff and because it’s Chromium (I have a potato laptop and Gecko is known for higher memory usage).
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I was ignoring the 92% percent part of it in my original comment when I said “not even open-source” because I think pretty much all privacy advocates know that it is built on top of Chromium.
I am not sure what your true source is, but mine is this from where I am quoting:
We don’t publish it under an open-source license and only release obfuscated versions of it. The obfuscation is partly there to improve performance, but it also very much is the first line of defense, to prevent other parties from taking the code and building an equivalent browser (essentially a fork) too easily.
While they release the source code of the UI elements, it seems that they only release a obfuscated version of the UI source code, which I am afraid won’t go well If I want to easily “audit and go through”. Though it’s possible they have now changed their minds and my news sources are outdated.
Oh man this is awesome thank you so much!!
Your post just links to its own icon. Did you have an article to link to instead?
I’m assuming it’s this article.
Gracias
De nada.
If this is accurate that’s troubling
/
I apologize. I included an image in the submission and it seems it hijacked the URL. I’ve edited the submission to include the link.
i have that issue too, sometimes. it’s either image or link. maybe you are not supposed to use both fields at the same time?
After their crypto crap, this doesn’t surprise me one bit.
And don’t give me that “You can disable the crypto” the fact is, you shouldn’t have to because it shouldn’t have ever been included in the first place.
Seriously, early on this company literally deployed a mass MITM attack against their entire userbase.
Any company that pulls some shit like that is just going to do it again whenever they think they can get away with it.
Breaking their users’ trust by appending attribution tags to their URLs should’ve been unforgivable but I still see people pushing their browser online
At least it wasnt an NFT? ive never used brave, this is all news to me
Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?
uBlock Origin for blocking advertisements everywhere, works with YouTube too. SponsorBlock for automatically skipping parts of YouTube videos with sponsored advertising.
Firefox with uBlock Origin has been working well for me, for ads at least. I haven’t looked too much into blocking trackers but I think Firefox has some ability to do that
Firefox with uBlock Origin ✔
What about a search engine though?
DuckDuckGo
I used to use it but switched to brave after reading that DDG lied about tracking.
Any others? (and not the one that requires a subscription, thanks)Startpage supposedly uses Google’s search engine without tracking your ip.
Not heard of them, will check it out, thanks!
E: a quick look tells me it doesn’t work with VPN, so that’s a no from me…
That’s strange, I use Mullvad VPN and Startpage is my main search engine and It’s only given me trouble once. They made me fill a captcha and wait a while in order to be able to use it again, but it was just an our at most.
DDG lied about tracking
FWIW though, I think that agreement no longer applies. I getchu though, on the principle of the matter, assuming they actually lied about it. E.g., if they said, “we don’t let any tracking through,” without mentioning their deal with Microsoft. If they just said, “we block most trackers,” and let people hype it up in their heads though, that’s kind of a gray area IMHO.
tbf I didn’t know about the agreement no longer being relevant, but yeah, like you say it’s a grey area and weakens the trust at least some.
If I don’t find any better alternative I guess its back to the duck I go…I guess its back to the duck I go…
That’s the reality of the situation unfortunately. No infallible heroes, just fifty shades of grey.
DDG also curates/censors/biases the results though.
And even if the company thinks it’s for a good reason, they’ve set themselves a precedent and now we don’t know what else they could be curating, censoring or biasing in their search results.
This is the golden combo in my opinion. uBlock Origin is an excellent adblocker and it works best with Firefox. The built-in privacy features of Firefox are also decent, even when left at the default settings.
Yeah it has some and if it doesnt work Extensions can help out. As it uses still the v2 manifest. It is just straight up better to use firefox ( or their “children” like librefox ( a bit hardend firefox browser ). It doesnt depending on chromium, its not a big Corporate that is super greedy.
I use Vivaldi + AdNauseam (though they have a built-in adblocker which I have disabled.)
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Libre Wolf with uBlock preinstalled could be what you need.
That’s why i use Firefox.
Buy brave token. It price should go up
I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products… :(
It’d be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I’d love an open and private search engine that isn’t just a meta search :(
Edit:
Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren’t just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you’re looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites
Yep doesn’t come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)
Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn’t seem have any kind of summary or answers function.
I think I’ll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I’m having a hard time finding something.
I switched to Duck Duck Go and Firefox and have never looked back.
Brave always seemed kinda scummy to me, like they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.
I don’t really wanna use a meta search engine that just pulls their results from bing or google though. That doesn’t seem like a sustainable way to build an actual alternative, since eventually google and Microsoft may just choose to change their api terms of service. I’d much prefer to support something independent if I can
Thats no reason for you to switch, just an explanation for why I went with brave. I switched to duckduckgo first and found the results weren’t great for me, so I changed to brave anf have found the results better, and they have their own index rather than taking other people’s search results, but instead they’re taking other people’s web content and selling rights to it 🙃. The company seems a little… Lacking :(
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with additional privacy these days. Effectively is is what Startpage is for Google.
Brave Search is one of the only independent search indexes available these days. Others include Mojeek and Qwant, but neither are as good as Brave Search.
didn’t ddg have it’s own problems a while ago?
They sold data to Microsoft, iirc, but that was the Android browser, not the search engine (something people forget to mention)
firefox is so laggy nowadays. the scrolling is also weird.
Firefox is now faster than Chrome as of the latest benchmarks.
Respectfully disagree, I have no complains about the browser itself. just that lazy web devs don’t test on ff, or actually, only on chrome.
Eh… I have absolutely NO PROBLEMS on Windows, Linux and MacOS. You should know that some extensions can cause problems. Try a new profile.
Oh shit turn on CNN, a plane just flew onto one of the twin towers!
… What? Wait, we’re not quoting old posts? I dunno man, I know this is a huge “works on my machine”, but I really haven’t seen Firefox be a problem on any machine in at least, hard minimum, half a decade.
What system are you on that Firefox is laggy? I’ve had no real issues on Windows, Mac, or Linux in the past few years.
Upgrade to a computer built in the 2010s maybe?
Core2duo with Nvidia 9400 does very smooth scrolling once you use Wayland. Yes, Linux of course.
i wish i could use linux on this pc.
Business issue or hardware? If it is hardware there is always help, e.g. high level kernel devs cared about my HP boot issue or NetBSD.
Damnit Brave.
I guess I gotta go figure out how to turn off ads in DDG for Android.
What’s wrong with Firefox + uBlock Origin?
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Firefox Focus?
TL;DR: Brave Software has their HQ in California and they are they’re stealing data and selling it and giving “rights” to other people. Lawsuits are probably already being filed by multiple companies come monday.
And it’s not in an “our AI ‘read’ the page and is making their own”, it’s straight up taking entire sentences and almost entire paragraphs from places like wikipedia and selling them as original data without attribution(which is required by the license used by wikimedia/pedia)
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without attribution
no…? on every bit of info theres a source button next to it which links you to the original article, similar to what bing chat does.
Brave Software
brave search, not the browser.
