Please, do not use Brave.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/5933715

Please, do not use Brave. - Divisions by zero

I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever. Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past [https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave] and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency [https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-seconds-brendan-eich/] which they then added to a rewards program [https://brave.com/brave-rewards/] that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave. After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes [https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-is-hijacking-links-and-inserting-affiliate-codes/] into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators [https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/]. Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no. One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program [https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8793], making (presumably) thousands of dollars off their users.

For the comments, can anyone give me an actual reason to use Brave over Firefox (and it’s forks)? I guess the cryptocurrency aspect is a reason, but I wouldn’t say it’s a very good one.

I don’t use brave, but I use Vivaldi.

The main reason for me is native mouse gestures. They are so much better than addon mouse gestures.

And speed dials. Addon ones are okayish, but I prefer the Vivaldi implementation.

If Firefox would ever ass native mouse gestures, I would swap in an instant. Until then, no can do :(

Personally I can’t say anything about Vivaldi, but it’s proprietary and owned by people who used to work for Opera.
  • Proprietary, yes, from a Foss pov it’s not good I guess

  • Owned by ex opera ppl: that’s a good thing tbh. Old opera was fantastic. New opera is more fishy after they were acquired by a Chinese group.

There is a lot of browser love in Vivaldi tbh. They are very open and transparent. Haven’t found a single red flag about Vivaldi (aside from not being FOSS, which for me isn’t a red flag per se)

They even run their own Mastodon servers for their community ;)

Proprietary software is generally frowned upon in this community, however I personally don’t mind that much.
I love the Vivaldi community. It might not be AS open as the Firefox community but the devs seem quite nice and are very responsive to feedback