MutantTailThingWhat's wrong with Brave browser?
erotador
nocturne@[email protected] is the author of entering that follows:
This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t want to however, here is a summary of the key points:
- Brendan Eich’s anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement
- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
- Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.
- Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
- Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.
2024 - So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
- Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
- The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
- Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.
Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.
Why I recommend against Brave
If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on
Thanks for the mention, but I just summarized the article.
Link to original article by Luca Bramè
Why I recommend against Brave
If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on
Thanks. The original post where I saved your comment has now been deleted, so I only have that comment for reference.
Oh no kidding? Wonder why the post was deleted
nymnympseudonymBeen pointing out Brave’s scammy behavior for years
Bookmarking this nice writeup TY
SkullgridYou forgot
- 1995 : Brendan Eich creates JavaScript over two weeks at netscape, ruining the internet forever.
Later, that same piece of shit language will be used as an easy and quick way to develop applications running in neutered Chromium instances, that lead to your mouse driver software needing 500+MB of RAM all the time. At least it’s portable, when the developers actually decide to export to Linux, and not just Windows and Mac (looking at you, Logitech!), and at worst have regular OS checks in the code just in case someone decides to take the code out of the Chromium instance.
Why use Brave when you can use Helium or Cromite?
Helium has full (not lite) ublock origin built in, and no junk. That’s the gold standard of Adblock.
Cromite has rather obsessive antifingerprinting, making it extremely difficult to track you compared to Brave.
Basically, people use Brave because it’s got SEO; it’s the first result when people type in “Adblock browser” unfortunately.
Earl TurletI used Cromite for a long time. Then one update the author added a 60 Hz refresh rate cap to help with avoiding fingerprinting with no way to turn it off. It now has an option, but for about a month it didn’t; the author fought it. The janky scrolling was annoying enough to make me stop using Cromite (and I moved to Brave, ironically). I’d switch back but I’m lazy.
Yeah, Cromite is definitely a “second browser” to keep around for shopping and such, not my primary one. Its opinionated development is exactly why is so good in that niche, but it also breaks a few sites and features.
In that spirit… why only use only one browser? You can keep Brave installed.
Also, in addition to what others said, Brave has been involved in some shady stuff like ad substitution/injection. See:
thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Similarly enough, Brendan Eich’s feed also contains some worrying content, in my opinion. Ranging from, again, retweeting right-wing activists, to weird Republican propaganda. He claims to be independent and not a Republican, but this does not make me any less worried about the type of ideas he follows.
But yeah, if you are a big fan of AI and crypto, and are okay with having advertisements in the user interface out of the box, are okay with past attempts to steal money from websites and collect donations towards people who wouldn’t necessarily even receive it, plus you can put up with occasional privacy mistakes… use Brave!
Why I recommend against Brave
If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on
In addition to what others have said, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund invested in Brave. You know, the Palantir guy who thinks Greta Thunberg is the antichrist? I’m not going within a country mile of anything his blood money touches when I can help it.
It’s chromium, which means Google is probably tracking you though it, like they have been caught doing before.
ShadowCan someone recommend an alternative browser for android?
I hate the Firefox ui layout on Android, I like brave for that.
Waterfox has worked for me so far. Does seem kind of similar to Firefox though.
True.
Can you elaborate more on what you don’t like about Firefox? All phone browsers feel very similar to me so I’m not sure what specific about it you don’t like. If the issue is muscle memory from using Brave, that will change once you use it for a few weeks.
The only browsers I would consider using on Android are Cromite, Firefox, IronFox, or DuckDuckGo. Tor if you’re paranoid. All the rest are just messy and crammed full of AI slop.
The biggest thing for me is that it’s two taps to open a new tab. There’s a useless home button next to the url bar that doesn’t do anything I want to do. I like how brave has the toolbar at the bottom.
I just took another look and saw you can turn on a tab bar at the top, which is kinda okish
Boy howdy do I have good news for you.
Firefox released a new bar design in October. It’s currently enabled by default in Nightly, but if you can find the “Secret Settings” menu on Stable, you may want to give the “Composable Toolbar” option a spin :)
Quick new tab button on mobile
It'd be helpful to have a new tab button next to the address bar on mobile for easy access. Currently, opening a new tab requires two clicks - one to open the tab window, and another on the "+" button to open the new tab. This also requires interaction with two different parts of the screen that are...
undefinedFor me it boils down to it pretending to be different from Chrome while using the same rendering engine, thus keeping more power at Google.
As someone who lived through the time when IE was dominant and seeing the web stagnate until Mozilla released Firefox and began competing with new features and better speed, I never want to go back to a world with just one main rending engine, we are sadly there again with Blink, but I am not going to support it.
nothing if you’re OK with companies collecting and monitizing with your data
Big BolilloPeople who don’t like Brave usually are resented because the CEO doesn’t support LGBT nonsense or because the crypto stuff is added into the browser.
If you have no problem with this stuff in general Brave is a good browser.
Not because a software is open source it means it’s free of malware be careful of what software you use.
Don’t forget the main objective of companies is making money otherwise there will be no money to pay people working on the company not everybody is able to work for free.
Well, I sure don't support people not punching you in the face, but hey, at least I'm not the one throwing the punch.
Which Eich is doing by donating money to anti-LGBT causes.
You've basically answered yourself.
People just want a browser that is privacy-focused, ad-blocking by nature and doesn't break anything that people try to use like services to pay bills through and even trying to view important stuff like through a health portal.
But people in Mozilla, Microsoft and Google have different ideas and ambitions that work against that. Whether it is AI-driven, catering to advertisers, breaking things when they decide to change something that nobody asked them to change and whatnot. That's why everyone is constantly looking for alternatives. They just want out of the bullshit.
VogiFYI: I know this is not “built in” but on Firefox it is super easy to install an AdBlocker, like its about 6 seconds with a decent internet connection and precise mouse movements. Have to opt out of AI shit as well though.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin
Waterfox is a fork of Firefox that isn’t playing with the AI shit.
xepBesides all the reasons everyone else has already provided in this thread, a browser containing as you so colourfully put it “crypto bullfuck and AI shit” isn’t something I want to use.
daggermoonJust use Firefox or Floorp with Ublock Origin. No crypto bullshit to be had.
I tried floorp a while ago, but it felt a bit too clumsy and unstable. Has it gotten any better?
I haven’t had any problems with it. If you’re on Linux, there’s a fork of it called Firedragon. It’s a bit more stripped down with additional patches for privacy and security.
Ahh yes. Brave the bloated browser with very dodgy behaviour. You get a chrome fork with crypto shit, leaky VPN, ridiculously bad search, and a full blown ad engine that hijacks your notifications and tracks you in an ‘anonymized’ way.
FUCK.THAT.SHIT.
Not to be antagonistic, but
- chrome fork - much of the browser world is this
- crypto shit - opt in not mandatory
- leaky VPN - opt in not mandatory
- bad search - opt in not mandatory
- ad engine - opt in not mandatory
So, basically, it’s a chrome fork, and some people prefer chrome based browsers, so it’s purely preference?
gwl [he/him]You know what’s better than that?
The browser world that’s not a chrome fork, and not full of crypto and AI SHIT
Waterfox, Librewolf, Ironfox, Fennec, Ladybird, etc
Is ladybird even out? I saw something about it but I thought looking it up got me to something about it being set for some release this next year?
Still in very early alpha
The point is, that’s a preference, not an innate ‘better,’ I generally use librewolf myself, but when the list of ‘problems’ with the browser is a set of optional things that you specifically have to turn on to experience, it’s kind of like saying pizza is bad because you don’t like pineapple, banana peppers, black olives, and chile flakes.
It’s more akin to saying Hitler Pizza is bad because it was called by Hitler, tbh
Bahnd RollardThe main issues a lot of the FF purists on this site take with Brave is-
its a chrome fork, which is a hard stop for them, and thats a good enough reason alone to avoid a product given how anti-corporate and anti-google the residents of this site are.
the systems in the opt-in list are still part of the application. There is an anxiety that the developer may decide at a future time that those features are not opt-in/enabled by default after an update.
So the natural response is to advocate for browsers that simply do not have those features and are open-source so that users can verify rather than trust the dev team to not put features like that in the product. Or rigoursly vet every update installed on your system, which is not viable for most people… (Run apt update/upgrade and manually approve every package change, we will see you in a few days).
Also the homophobic antivaxxer CEO, don’t forget that
AppoxoBecause crypto bro behaviour and I can install ublock in my firefox browser in both android and desktop.
What makes/does Brave better?
All those browser extensions you need to make Firefox private ends up fingerprinting you. Brave has all of that by default, so sites of sites can’t easily differentiate you from other Brave users.
Also, Firefox still doesn’t have tab groups on mobile. Chromium has had that feature for years and Firefox hasn’t bothered to keep up at all. That’s a non-starter for me
Then switch to a Firefox forum built in security rather than a Slop Browser built on data mining you (that’s all the built-in AI is) and that’s not supporting crypto shit