cause most people just google a chrome alternative. they dont do research. brave gives them a surafce level adblocking, and they feel fine with it.
Doesn’t Firefox still have brand recognition though? I’d have thought even people who answer “google” to “what browser do you use” would have heard of firefox, and therefore looked it up rather than using the neurons to ask, “what alternative browsers are there?”
You’re assuming people know things about the tech field. Very few do. I mean, those of us that do recognize the name Firefox. But someone who heard from a friend that Google went on trial for bad monopoly practices and wants to deGooglefy has no idea what’s available or what any of it means.
Brave falls under “security theatre” and is absolutely useless
And run by a homophobic crypto bro.
Who also inflicted Javascript upon the world, the incompetent piece of shit.
I won’t say that’s worse than the homophobia because I don’t want to seem dismissive about oppression of queer folks, but it sure as Hell isn’t better, either!
Attacking his politics is valid, and that does make me uneasy about using Brave. I’m curious where the security theater accusation comes from. Brave strikes a nice balance imo. If I wanted true security I would use Tor, but honestly that would add so much friction I would probably quit the internet.
Attacking JavaScript is a stupid argument. So many people just pile on JavaScript. I bet a lot of the same people are into FOSS and self hosting. If you write your app in 100% JavaScript without a backend, it can run on almost every operating system. Think about that for a second. We have the ultimate cross platform language. Yes it’s grown out of something that was originally messy, but a lot of work has been done to make it better.
Don’t attack JavaScript, attack the bad parts of JavaScript like type coercion. Yes, you can probably blame Brendan Eich for that part. Attack the businesses that are enshitifying everything.
I’m curious where the security theater accusation comes from
Closed source ad-block that allows “unobtrusive” ads by default. They also ran a scheme a few years ago that replaced ads on web pages with their own and paid users tiny amounts of cryptocurrency for viewing them.
All this is marketed by them as browsing securely
We could have had Scheme or Python (both of which are also cross-platform, BTW) embedded in the browser instead. And yes, Netscape was seriously considering those two specific languages before Eich oozed into the situation and fucked it all up.
Javascript did not “need” to happen. The only reasons it exists are Not-Invented-Here and Dunning-Kruger Syndromes (specifically, Netscape wanting something new and vaguely Algol-like that they could name to glom onto the Java hype at the time, and Eich having the inexperience and hubris to think he could hack together a half-assed design in a week and it would somehow turn out okay).
Yes it’s grown out of something that was originally messy, but a lot of work has been done to make it better.
Yeah, no shit! Literally millions upon millions of man-hours, probably! Do you have any concept at all of how much better the Web could have been if all that effort had been put towards something actually useful instead of working around Eich’s mistakes?!
I can’t speak to Scheme as I haven’t spent more than a few days using it. Python has a lot of strengths but also a lot of weaknesses. JavaScript has had to evolve with 100% backwards compatibility. The python you enjoy today would have had to evolve differently if it was the language of the browser.
Look I’m kinda young. Not that young, but too young for Netscape. You clearly lived through more of the history than I did. But imo, the thing ruining the internet isn’t JavaScript, it’s late stage capitalism and greedy companies. You could have Python or Scheme or whatever and late stage capitalism would still have ruined it.
If you feel so strongly that JavaScript is the issue, why don’t you invest your time in helping Webassebly grow? Imo that’s more useful than complaining about JavaScript.
Source(s) for this?
Not my work, it is from a saved comment by @cannedtuna@lemmy.world in a now deleted post.
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:
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- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
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- 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”.
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- 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.
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2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
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- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
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- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
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- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
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- 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.
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2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
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- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
So you seem pretty well versed in the topic and I’ve been using Brave for a very long time. But what chromium alternative would you recommend that tries to accomplish what Brave clearly isn’t doing well? I’m open to switching but also not really interested in Firefox.
In the rare instance that I need a chromium browser, I use chromium. But there are very few websites for which I need it and I think I have found alternatives for them all.
Vivaldi has built in ad and tracking blocker and a much better UI.
Kind of. It’s still not nearly as effective as Firefox with uBlock and a few other extensions. The downside is that some sites are just broken on Firefox, and blocking ads, etc. makes a relative few sites unusable. Which, yeah, 99.999% of the time I’m fine with. Until it’s something I need to do for my day job.
I would not switch to a chromium-based browser at all. For lots of reasons, but if I had to pick one it would be to avoid creating a dominant browser and ceding control over web standards to a single entity the way MS used IE to do what they wanted and force everyone else to comply.
Those were dark times. I was still being forced to make sites IE5 compatible in 2015 — official support ended in 2005.
SCNR if they were able to make good decisions, they would never have switched to chrome anyway. /s
tbh, i don’t get all the mozilla/firefox hate. even “the linux project” missed the mark by a mile with his firefox critique.
whatever mozilla does, it’s not even half as evil as google
We learned that from politics in general. Vote for the lesser evil, not for the optimal choice, as there is none, sadly.
I have Firefox but gave Brave a shot too. Works fine for me. I’ll use anything that gets around YouTube ads.
Try vivaldi. Much less fuckery than Brave
I can’t answer that question but I’ve always wondered why anyone switches to Brave. I installed it a few years ago because I heard it was privacy focused and it immediately hit me with a bunch of shit about crypto and rewards or something. I uninstalled it immediately.
I tried to install Brave and it almost nuked my PC. Completely jammed up. I uninstalled it immediately.
Yeah so true!! I installed it, and it launched an attack to overheat and destroy my CPU. Thankfully I reacted quick enough, and unplugged my computer quickly. However when I turned it back on, all my files were gone. It was cryptomining without my consent. Absolutely crazy!
/s?
Lol yes
I installed it. Crypto stuff is off by default. Ad blocking built in. Multiple 3rd party testing shows it blocks virtually all tracking/fingerprinting.
Firefox/Chrome - you need all kinds of addons and pihole type setups to do the same thing. God forbid you want to use it off your own network, you need additional tools. All these tools break with updates, whether they are the browsers or addons/tools themselves. Brave has never once broken its adblock/privacy settings in the years I’ve used it.
Most of us on here are privacy focused, and want the average user to be that way too. Brave is a one click setup, nothing else needed solution. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is the owner a piece of shit? Hell yes. Does it allow the average user to take ownership of their privacy in an easy and non-technical way? Yes. Perfect is the enemy of good. I will gladly jump ship once another turnkey solution comes along that is as easy and privacy centric that Brave is.
Firefox/Chrome - you need all kinds of addons and pihole type setups to do the same thing.
bullshit
you need a single addon, ublock origin. enable additional builtin blocklists according to taste.
you can have additional addons for additional functionality. does brave have libredirect built in? does it block and redirect google AMP sites by default? does it have a feature to only delete cookies regularly for specific sites?and let’s not forget the elephant in the room: ublock is not working anymore in chrome! google made it so that you can only use the inferior lite version, that can only load much much fewer filtering rules into the browser.
I don’t know if brave kept supporting mv2 extensions, but if they do, I guarantee to you that it won’t be that way for long. it has been relatively easy sailing so far because google did not actually remove support, but it will be lots of work when finally google does remove it, and they’ll be needing to patch it in for every new versionpihole is not used for firefox, and that’s never been its use case. It’s for everything else that uses the internet, but cannot have something like ublock origin: various software, windows itself, android and apps there, smart home and iot garbage.
Honestly this statement of yours proves to me that you don’t know what you’re talking about.All these tools break with updates, whether they are the browsers or addons/tools themselves.
I have no idea what you are talking about. anyone else?
About the addons and stuff breaking, I constantly see posts about this adblock isn’t working because Chrome broke something, this addon is no longer updated, google broke this so that addon doesn’t work. That’s the issue with using 3rd party tools, you have to rely on the tool AND browser to work together, and not break with updates or changes. You also have to trust both the browser AND the tool to keep your info safe and private.
Brave hasn’t had even a hiccup in it’s adblocking/privacy features with all the changes Chrome is implementing, due to how Brave is built. I just want a browser with strong, baked in privacy and adblocking that works out of the box. Brave is that solution at this time.
By the way, you seem focused on Firefox, I’m not attacking Firefox, I’m calling out every browser that needs addons to create a more secure and private browsing experience.
About the addons and stuff breaking, I constantly see posts about this adblock isn’t working because Chrome broke something, this addon is no longer updated, google broke this so that addon doesn’t work.
well yeah, google has intentionally broken all effective content blockers. that’s the fault of chrome. firefox is fine.
firefox will never be able to add built in support for adblocking. reasons include that websites would not just happily drop support for firefox, but some would even put in work to block it entirely! a 3rd party fork can do that, but the main thing can’t because of what will follow.
By the way, you seem focused on Firefox, I’m not attacking Firefox,
I’m not focused on firefox, I’m against anything chrome. firefox is not good, its the least bad, but in my eyes there’s a large difference between it and chromium. we need more engines.
I’m calling out every browser that needs addons to create a more secure and private browsing experience.
I think having this built in is a very dangerous move for a browser that wants to become popular, and does not want to be blocked by sites.
if all you want is to not need to install anything manually, librewolf has ublock preinstalled.
but I’m not confident about the content blocking abilities of brave. I get that it hides ads, but is that’s all it does, or does it also block the resources from loading, tracking scripts from operating? because ublock origin is very effective with that, with its large toolset, if the blocklists utilize them
Like I stated earlier, 3rd party testing places Brave at the top of almost any fingerprinting/ad blocking/tracking/privacy metrics tested. It might not be the product you like, that’s fine, but you can’t deny the testing that proves it works.
I don’t hate on Firefox, far from it. I think it’s great for those who don’t mind extra layers of tinkering/having control on how the browser uses it’s privacy functions. Firefox, unfortunately, isn’t 100% web compatible, and almost every fox user has some form of Chromium as a backup. The discussion about web standards ignoring Chromiuim alternatives are valid, but I feel that’s an entirely different discussion.
I think it’s great for those who don’t mind extra layers of tinkering/having control on how the browser uses it’s privacy functions.
except that you don’t need to tinker. firefox is simply just not doing anything risky, anything that could easily break websites.
you want ublock? install that 1 addon. that’s not any more tinkering than setting a dark theme, or the language.Firefox, unfortunately, isn’t 100% web compatible,
that’s funny because that’s not how I know. as I know, firefox is more up to spec than chrome, but chrome often has its odd nonstandard behaviours which web devs take as standards simply because that’s the most popular browser, and developing for its quirks is easier than developing for standards and also supporting its quirk at the same time
Tinkering - I remember when the ad blocking addons stopped working due to a Google change. Everyone hopped on the webs to see what to do next. Edits and tricks to make Firefox look like Google to the web page, which was needed to make it work again. I was just over here with Brave carrying on like nothing happened.
Firefox compatibility- Even users in this post say they have a backup browser when Firefox doesn’t work.
Look, I’m not here evangelizing an imperfect browser. I’m also not sitting here arguing anyone’s choice in browsers. I use what works for me. I just wanted to clarify some statements made that weren’t correct. The Firefox vs anything else debate is as loaded as Linux vs anything else. Everyone argues and claims their software package is the end all be all when it just doesn’t fit 100% of use cases. I use what works for me. When a better alternative comes along, I will gladly look at it.
Because it is still Chromium based and it means it is fast on Android, plus it comes packed with an adblocker by default which works wonders in closed out systems like iOS, also as many browsers (not all of them) it supports account syncing which it is always a nice plus (I can use a good working version of Brave in all the systems and keep a good flow for example).
I main Firefox in pretty much all the systems, but the Android app is missing a lot of features like tab management, and the iOS client just sucks (Brave works better there despite being Safari based too).
It does respect your privacy but it comes with bloatware. You can actually remove them pretty easily
“Respect” for you as the user means you shouldn’t have to do stuff like that in the first place.
Eh, gotta make money somehow. I prefer this over selling out to google
it only makes money until people don’t actually remove the bloatware. so if it does make money, that’s telling something
Been using duckduck go for a while now, can recommend.
Don’t look at me, I’ve been an Opera fan for more years than I care to admit.
Opera, like Edge and Brave is just Chrome in a trenchcoat
RIP Presto :( I wish they had open-sourced it when they abandoned it
Even after it’s been sold to a Chinese company?
I saw recent versions of Opera and it’s looks like dogshit, how do you use it guys? (and why?)
It’s a combination of having used it forever and it has all the features I want. Part might also be that subversive little me likes using something not everyone knows exist.
I mean there is a lot of other browsers which offer even more features (and also better privacy & interface). Also I don’t think that people don’t know what opera is, in my country it’s was (and maybe is) very popular
I don’t need a lot of features others don’t have. I started using it before it used chromium as a base and kind of just stuck with it. I do like the built in ad blocking and VPN, even though I have a stand alone vpn.
deleted by creator
A good chunk of websites are just broken with Firefox and their not even broken in obvious ways. Some times they fail to load, sometimes they render weirdly, sometimes their just unresponsive. I use Firefox as my main browser but I always have something chromium based as my backup for when a website I wanna use just doesn’t work. A lot of the time I don’t even think to use it and assume the site would be broken on chromium as well but nope. Its almost always Firefox:/.
Can you give any examples where we can see these differences?
The royal mail tracking website for example brings up an obnoxious full page block on top of the actual content. Only happens on Firefox on android. Chrome worked fine.
Edit: also, just for reference, I’m amazed anyone actually needs examples of this. Its very well known that different browsers have different supported functionalities and unless the webdevs are properly customising styles and scripts for different platforms their gonna deviate. Thusly its not surprising most stuff only works as designed on Chrome since that’s the only Web browser that’s guaranteed to be tested on (it has the lions size of market share, to the point Firefox barely even registers).
Interesting! Thanks for the screenshots. I’m on iOS, so not familiar with Chrome vs FF on mobile.
I was curious for an example because it’s probably been a decade since I’ve had an issue with FF rendering something improperly (or even differently) compared with Chrome. A while back, we did have one internal webpage at work that had a very small difference in FF, but that went away after a few FF updates happened. I was the only one who ever noticed the difference.
Haven’t had trouble with Firefox for a long time. Sure, I also have chrome sitting somewhere on the hard drive as a backup but didn’t need to use it for months if not years. Started to use Waterfox on one pc and I’m happy with that one too.
Because vanilla Firefox has to be tinkered with to get the best out of it and the average user is not able to do it
As a user of Firefox from 1-3 and quantum to current… What exactly are you tinkering with? Install ublock and be done.
Dude I use firefox as main browser too, I’m not saying that brave is better, read my comment again.
What I’m saying is that you and I are not the average user. Our moms are the average user, our brother that got a DUI last friday is the average user, our anti-vax aunt is the average user…
Read their comment again.
They didn’t say that you said brave was better.
They said that folks barely need to tinker with anything, and was asking what you need to tinker with to make it suitable for you.and was asking what you need to tinker with to make it suitable for you.
For myself I like to add a couple addons, like u-Block origins with automatic cookie reject and containers for when I have to browse IG or Google stuff, plus some tweaks in the about:config for disabling telemetry and such.
My point is that many people either don’t feel like going through this process, even if it takes just a few minutes, or don’t care about privacy at all, they just fancy an ad blocker. So they may end up installing Brave.
I’ll give you one of many examples I have: I’ve taken guitar lessons for the last year and a half and every time my teacher put a background track on youtube we had to sit through 30 seconds of ads, while he complained about it every single time. For the first month I tried to persuade him to install FF + u-Block, but he kept saying things like “I’m not a computer guy”. Even after I offered to do it myself, he was afraid that “there may be some sort of virus” so at one point I just stopped suggesting it. A couple months ago he installed Brave because a frend of his told him to and that was it.And that’s because what me and you see as “barely tinkering”, as you put it, other people see it as this herculean labor they cannot even imagine to approach. Of course this is because of a lack of culture on the matter, but most of people don’t care about making a culture at all, they just want to be spoon fed with stuff that works, no matter what happens under the hood.
Does Firefox have an app (plug-in/extension) store where you get it from? Are they even able to use an iPhone?
If not, than installing any browser is probably gonna be too complicated for them. Otherwise it’s not a hurdal of technical expertise, but rather they just don’t care
Any more so than vanilla Chrome?
No, in fact the <u>average</u> user doesn’t tinker with Chrome either
In what way?
I switched recently to Librewolf, but as a long time Firefox user (of which Librewolf is a fork anyway) it didn’t seem unusable out of the box. There are some settings for privacy and studies etc you mght want to change, but they are all very obvious in the GUI preferences.
I did personally go into about:config to set a few things, like not allowing searches from the address bar because I’m weird, but what makes Firefox no good for the average user?
The typical conversation I have is:
- Hey, how don’t you have ads on Youtube?
- Well, its easy: you install Firefox and then…
and that’s where I loose most of the people, that extra step.
Me and you can go down on the
about:configall day long to dissect every aspect of privacy we care about. For the other 90% of people, even just going to Mozilla extensions manager and downloading u-Block Origin is too much.Bear-proof trash can theorem…
Don’t extra step
" how come you don’t have YouTube ads??"
“Firefox”
Later they come to you “but i still have ads!” THEN ya hit them with config
Config is just to add ublock. I’d hardly call that config.
I’ve always preferred to choose from the options offered by my Distro’s repository. I might not install that -exact- version (prefer to install where I can easily back things up).
Hmm, I thought I’d find Waterfox mentioned but I didn’t. That one gets my recommendation.
For me, it’s because I’m a web developer and most people use chrome. I have to run my code on a browser that is close to what people will really use. I have noticed a blind spot recently where I assumed another project I’m working on is similar, but that one I think has more Firefox users. Likely I’ll have to change my preference by project.
Also, hot take, Chromium is actually a very good browser aside from all google’s nonsense. I’ve had to turn to list virtualization to handle large lists of elements, but I noticed Chromium was much more forgiving of these lists compared to safari. Admittedly I need to do more Firefox testing.
I think people get too caught up on which browser is the best. Probably a good thing we have both brave and Firefox as options. I know brave has done its own share of nonsense, but it’s still miles better than chrome.
So why not use chromium then? Or Cromite. Both are more bare bones than brave and would give you a better view of what your audience will see.
Honestly, mostly cause I’m busy. I’ve been using brave for years. I work 9-5. When I’m not working, I’m spending that time either on a side project or with friends or family. And it hasn’t bothered me enough yet to make the switch. Generally I like tinkering, but for some reason this specific thing hasn’t interested me much recently. I’d rather spend time customizing neovim lol.
I also went down a browser fingerprinting rabbit whole a few years ago. It became pretty evident to me that the more I try to customize my browser experience, the more unique my fingerprint becomes. It’s impossible to avoid. Here a really interesting article on how you can be fingerprinted even without JavaScript.
So I’m just trying to live my life. I see zero ads since using brave. I don’t have to think about some complex combination of browser extensions, because the built in ad blocking just works. I turned off all the obnoxious crypto stuff on day 1, and I haven’t seen any of it since.
Don’t you normally test in Firefox as well?
promotion, especially as a ‘security focused’ browser with ‘uncommon’ features.
Because Brave is by default what Firefox is when you install Librewolf instead - and more. And you can refuse to see that and be wrong about it, I don’t care. I use Librewolf because I want to, I still think it’s not the better browser.
