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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.
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
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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
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.
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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The problem isn’t the ads, it’s the quantity. And they turn themselves into OS level alerts, that you train yourself to ignore
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I’m switching to Firefox tomorrow.
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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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Read the article though. It’s bullshit
What are your setting os Firefox? What do you recomend?
The Containers extension is the only thing you really need IMO. Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
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Didn’t Firefox install adware on everyone’s instance in an overnight update? Like idk why people swoon over Firefox.
With First Party Isolation is place, containers now add up very little to your privacy to be honest. They are mostly helpful in convenient compartmentalization of your browsing activities without actually having two different browsers.
Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
Partially incorrect. There is unnecessary telemetry that you would prefer to get rid of, for an example there is a setting for extensions recommendation as you browse. Also, probably because of their deal with Google, Firefox defaults to Google’s location services even though Mozilla has its own. You may want to change that as well for better privacy. I am only citing a handful few examples, there is more for you to dig in. uBO is a must have with right set of filters enabled according to your own privacy threat vectors. There is a reason hardening is a common practice among Firefox users.
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@Compactor9679 @PrivateOnions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Multi-account Containers, Facebook Container, and Decentraleyes are the basic extensions you’d want. Then disable pocket and telemetry in settings. There’s more but that’s a pretty good starting configuration.
It’s a shame that there isn’t a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn’t have much by the way of good ad blockers.
I use it as my main browser and I honestly can’t go back to Firefox, but I really dislike some parts of it and of it’s community. The browser itself is fast, its default ad-blocker is awesome and there are a couple functionnalities that are nice to see, like Tor integration. But they block ads to show you their ads instead, that you cannot block even if you deactivate the “Brave Rewards”. The whole reward system in BAT is kind of shady; they need to authenticate you before you can withdraw anything and it’s worth peanuts anyway. When I complained about those issues on reddit, I got answers that looked like they were produced by sect members, and it wasn’t even on a related sub.
It’s the hype from Cryptobros pushing it because it has crypto functionally and its own shitcoin.
Personally, I never liked how it wants to monetize your browsing time constantly and pushes a lot of crypto shit in its advertising. Vivaldi is much better as an alternative imo.
I used Brave for a out 6 months, but I’m really turned off by the devs. I switch to FF and am loving it. It’s much improved from when I last used in decades ago.
Brendan Eich, the guy who co-founded Firefox and developed Javascript, is the CEO of Brave. His politics aside, I think he’s a pretty trustworthy guy.
Your post just links to its own icon. Did you have an article to link to instead?
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?
I’m assuming it’s this article.
Gracias
De nada.
If this is accurate that’s troubling
/
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.
At least it wasnt an NFT? ive never used brave, this is all news to me
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
Been using brave for a few years on mobile and desktop.
They uses to give away BAT, but they have refined their system to not give any unless you spend hours jumping through hoops and linking shoddy Chinese financial apps and crypto wallets.
I still use it for the privacy, but after reading this I will likely switch back to firefox or another chrome based browser.
Are there are any mobile browsers that have ad blocking like brave?
Yes
Firefox has extension support on android
edge has built in adblocker
samsung browser has built in adblocker
not sure about iphone…
mm yes samsung browser & edge definately gonna be way more trustworthy than brave.
Firefox for Android lets you install ublock origin as an extension. I absolutely refuse to use any other mobile browser.
Thrown privacy badger and if you are really feeling rebel and don’t mind tinkering noscrypt
Yeah, vivaldi. Vivaldi is pretty neat, it has ad/tracker blocker. It also allows you to create multiple tab groups so your can categorise tabs and they don’t get all clutterd. It’s also a chromium browser. It doesnt do anything on fingerprinting though, but i don’t know if brave does that.
You can use AdGuard on Android to block ads device wide. You can also install uBlock origin in Firefox Mobile.
I’m more sure for iOS
Kiwi Browser and Yandex Browser lets you use any Chromium extension, and Firefox Nightly, with some hacks, lets you use any Firefox addon available on the webstore.
Firefox’s stable version also comes with uBlock.
The hacky extension workaround also works for Firefox Beta now if you don’t want to deal with as many glitches that Nightly might have.
Fennec on F-Droid is the best for not having to resort to beta or nightly builds. However, none of the Firefox options let you sideload your own extensions like Kiwi.
Okay but I don’t want to use Chromium.
Fair enough! Definitely give Fennec a try. I switch between it and Kiwi myself (the latter for a few paywall extensions and PWA).
Do not use Kiwi Browser. It’s based on an extremely out of date version of chromium and therefore very vulnerable.
Firefox Focus as well. Built in ad blocker.
Soul Browser with ad block and super configurable.
A few, DDG was popular for a while but I recall reading they sold out recently?
decided to give the bat thing a go, had to sign up for this crypto thing. that is the only time I’ve ever been apart of a security breach
I’ve had nothing but issues, first things were good, then you had to make an Uphold account. Couldn’t do that from my country, then account limit issues. You can only link your wallet to 4 devices and if you reset your phone it counted as adding a device. Locked me out of my wallet after 1 phone upgrade and replacing the cpu on my desktop.
Currently you have to set some sort of account overseer to collect BAT. I still get the ads, but they haven’t sent a payout in months.
All in all I estimate about 450-550 BAT I “earned” watching their ads over the last 3 or 4 years was never paid out.
What privacy? You do realize the browser has access to all the data it renders right?
Mostly not sharing with ISPs, and blocking trackers, cookies and some ads natively is nice too.
Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?
I use Vivaldi + AdNauseam (though they have a built-in adblocker which I have disabled.)
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)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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Libre Wolf with uBlock preinstalled could be what you need.
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uBlock Origin for blocking advertisements everywhere, works with YouTube too. SponsorBlock for automatically skipping parts of YouTube videos with sponsored advertising.
That’s why i use Firefox.
Buy brave token. It price should go up
firefox is so laggy nowadays. the scrolling is also weird.
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.
Firefox is now faster than Chrome as of the latest benchmarks.
Eh… I have absolutely NO PROBLEMS on Windows, Linux and MacOS. You should know that some extensions can cause problems. Try a new profile.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 :(
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.
I can’t and won’t ever understand why people keep recommending Brave. This is not even the second or third shady shit they pull off.
I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives…
Librewolf is king, it’s baeicalky Firefox with a little hardening and good defaults!
