Just a reminder that the guy behind @bravebrowser @brave was kicked from Mozilla for being a bigoted piece of shit, and that he continues to be a piece of shit attacking the health care workers who saved millions of lives during the pandemic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html
@Engywuck Cool story bro.
Also, there are other browsers besides Brave that are not run by shitvipers who fund anti-LGBTQIA organizations.
@pax @Engywuck Nah, I draw the line at people who dehumanize others. I don't need to respect that.
Also I wasn't defending Mozilla, that's the weird thing dropped in here to distract from my point. I'm simply pointing out who the founder of Brave is. That's all. He's a terrible person who uses his money to oppress and dehumanize others. People like that should never, ever be supported.
@pax @Engywuck So to your first point, I think you are confusing Chrome with Chromium. Chromium is an engine and open source browser project many corporations and individuals contribute to, including Google. Chrome is Google's fork of the Chromium project, and I advise against Chrome for likely similar reasons as you.
Chromium itself is a independent and safe project and most modern browsers, including Brave, are based on it. All Google code in Chromium is also in Brave.
@pax @Engywuck As for Brave, I've mentioned the ethical issues related to the founder and his backers. I'd also add that it's not actually good as a privacy/security browser and has had years of unethical and deceptive practices around it. I'm not going to do a giant deep dive, but for a simple to understand example here is one article that documents how untrustworthy they are.
@pax @Engywuck The link I sent wasn't about crypto stuff, you may wish to read it. It was about deceptive and privacy breaking practices by the company. Here's another one:
I could list these all day, it's been one of the least secure and private browsers on the market for a while.
As to your other point, every concern you have about Chromium applies to Brave. Brave starts with the Chromium code, just like Chrome does, and has all the Google bits.
@pax @Engywuck I'm not sure what you mean by connections to Google. It's open source, Google contributes as does Microsoft, Vivaldi and thousands of contributors. It's also the basis for tons of browsers, including Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, etc. The code is right there to examine and everyone does.
If you want only code untouched by Google you need a Mozilla based browser, almost all others are based on Chromium which includes Google as one of many contributors.
@pax @Engywuck I mean, all this is true of Brave and all other Chromium based browsers. If you want purely no Google you are stuck with Mozilla. I use Librewolf myself, a fork of Mozilla that removes all of their services and stuff. I have Chromium installed only for PWA compatbility.
The best configuration and more secure than any of this is Chromium + uBlock Origin, which will do all of that for you much more reliably than Brave. Personally I block at my router.
@pax @Engywuck I don't really think having telemetry that is defaulted to off is a privacy breach since, well, it's often necessary to debug. If they don't have it it would cause them a lot of problems tracking down issues in the field.
The other thing about Chromium is that whatever telemetry they have may not even be switched on, I can find no information on it and don't have the time to code dive. Most of these open source projects don't enable by default.
David Fleetwood - RG Admin
Engywook
pax