Brave is essentially just Chrome with an adblocker, a bunch of bloatware, and a bunch of controversies.
Brave took BAT donations in YouTuber’s names without their consent, with them keeping the money if the YouTubers didn’t claim it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/
Brave’s search engine crawler hides itself from websites by pretending to be Googlebot, and Meta (Facebook) buys API access from them to train their AI. https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
The business model of Brave rewards as a whole is to block all other ad networks to replace them with their own, which is unfair as only YouTubers and websites that have joined can make money from most Brave users.
If Brave actually cared, they would create an acceptable ads style feature which was free for everyone and allowed simple contextual banners while blocking ads which track you, take up most of the page, or have NSFW content.
Their approach is monopolistic as they have full control and can strangle YouTubers and websites by dropping pay at any time.
And Brenden Eich has said on Twitter that he plans to release “Brave Origin”, which is a paid version of Brave without the bloatware. That name is ironic as he is admitting that his browser is commercialised and bloated, which is similar to when gorhill gave uBlock way to Chris Aljoudi who commercialised it, which led him to create uBlock Origin.
If you use Brave, ditch it and look at using Librewolf or Helium instead, which both include no ads nor tracking and don’t have Brave News, Rewards, Wallet, Talk etc bloatware.
Name a solution for a mobile phone webbrowser without ads including youtube ads that allows playing youtube while the screen is turned off and I am ready to switch.
Dude, just use NewPipe or PipePipe from Fdroid. They are much better than using the Youtube mobile website.
Do they work for you?
Yes, watched a few videos yesterday with PipePipe
Just use Gflghtdhh instead.
Have you tried Squootle? Just use Squootle with a pLib plugin, bro. All you have to do is load the community block list made by asianasspounder72 into your Squootle’s cld/000x24b3/v folder and update the file in notepad to edit line 124 to call pLib v2.4 instead of v1.6. Make sure you’re using the beta release of pLib, but not the latest one.
Why aren’t you using Squootle?
I really do not understand what you want to say with your comment. The user here asked for a better alternative than Brave for watching YouTube and PipePipe/NewPipe is exactly what they asked for. They are also not that complicated to install as you seem to suggest, you can simply install them with one touch from an App Store. So what do you want to say here?
That any time someone suggests a workaround, it always involves like 2-3 different obscure apps and plug-ins, and often people will recommend several variations that all do the same thing. All of these apps are also fairly new, with only a single developer or a small team with no proven track record, that are doomed to lose support or stop working at any moment. And yea, most of them are FOSS, but that only means that when they go under, a dozen differently named clones will pop up. All with their own weird flavor of drama.
“Noooo! You can’t use Fweeb, that’s just an offshoot of Squootle that was made after the Fweeb developer was kicked off the Squootle team for making some vaguely problematic Slack comments!”
“Yea, but Squootle is set to stop working within the next 18 months because of the upcoming YouTube ‘Screw Our Users’ update and the remaining Squootle team members have all fucked off to Hungary to raise free-range alpacas and aren’t pushing updates anymore.”
“Oh fuck, man, you’re using Squootle? Squootle is just spyware. You want to make sure you’re using Squootle Origin. That’s a completely different program with different developers”
Anyways, have you tried QwiDer? It’s really the only one you should be using, bro. Anyone not using QwiDer is behind in the times. Just get QwiDer and run it using a PLST script.
That’s kind of the way the whole category works. People are playing cat and mouse with a billion dollar company and are fighting a uphill battle against Googles countermeasures, app store policies and lawsuits. So there is really no perfect app that will work for all time.
Or Grayjay, I found NewPipe / other frontends had their fair share of issues while I was using them. Their desktop app however I’ve not used as it was failing to build on my NixOS machines.
or libretube
Firefox… I mean, regular old from the app store Firefox… Not even Waterfox or anything, just Firefox.
How did you end up at Brave without knowing Firefox could do all that?
Morphe takes the official YouTube app and modifies it to remove ads and add background play morphe.software
I’m quite happy with the Mullvad browser.
mullvad also has encrypted dns that anyone (don’t need to be a vpn subscriber) can plug-in to their browser or (compatible) operating system–including optional domain-level blocking (adult, social, gambling, and ads). yes, you can use a basic ‘pihole-like’ dns without needing to actually set one up.
Doesn’t natively work under Wayland, unfortunately.
As-is, it’s not suitable for a touchscreen device.And with
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1the window buttons are broken.? I’m running it on Wayland fine
It works fine with a mouse. I often use my 2-in-1 as a tablet. Instead of scrolling, it just does text selection, and neither does pinch to zoom work. After all, it’s just controlling a mouse pointer under X11.
What about Android? What’s alternative?
Brave for android alternative?
Firefox for android lets you download extensions, so you can easily get uBlock Origin and be set.
Fennec is a good hardened firefox fork you can try.
I don’t like it, but I just recently switched to Brave on Android coming from Firefox.
I’ve been using Firefox on Android for years, but the same problems kept bugging me. Tabs would instantly close after putting the browser in the background, effectively making it impossible to e.g. get the 2FA out of my Authenticator without restarting the login flow. Also sometimes the browser would right out refuse opening websites on fresh tabs.
This were likely problems with my OEM, but I could never get it fixed. There are some threads online claiming battery optimization, but I disabled everything possible.
So on Android, I’m stuck with Brave for now.
No, those are known issues with Firefox for Android. They’ve been around for years now, but are not common enough for Mozilla to actually address them. The blank tab thing is what forced me to switch. Sometimes an existing tab would break permanently, had to close and undo close, lose all the page state.
And it’s slower, and it doesn’t have a tablet UI… sucks but it’s not an option for me.
If Brave is the only thing working, that sucks, but If its chromium and not specific to Brave, there are other chromium forks for android.
Cromite is popular: https://github.com/uazo/cromite
I posted this a year or two ago and got hit by a huge wave of furious Brave users lol. Occasionally to this day someone will stumble on it and post some tirade
it’s a shame because there’s legitimately good technology for blocking advertising in Brave, there’s just so much else that is questionable/indefensible
Ah yes let me use Helium
Whoop it uses google’s browser monopoly
Firefox then
Whoo it is chained by googles search engine deal
Firefox then
Whoo it is chained by googles search engine deal
This is some serious self eating idealist talk here.
In life you must realize there are many situations where you think about the context and consequences of your choices, and you choose the closest to viable option.
Firefox is that.
It sucks that there is that google deal, but ultimately the world effects of firefox dying are wide reaching despite its diminishing numbers and so much greater than so many casually Mozilla doomer takes realize.
IMO, we should all move back to Lynx and phpBB forums.
Fast, secure, lightweight, search & archivable. I’m only half joking.
Ehh perhaps Gopher
Use LibreWolf, it’s probably the best option these days.
There’s literally a million forks of Firefox, use one of them
Librewolf or iceraven
It sounds like Pale Moon is your best option.
Brave is the browser version of Honey. It blocks 3rd party ads and inserts its own, taking the money. Either block the ads or don’t but this is shitty.
it did not take long for the Brave browser to go from hero to villain-status.
It was born as a villain from the very beginning.
Yeah. I never knew why anyone started using it. Brendan Eich was a well-known shithead when he left Mozilla.
Forced out of Mozilla more like
It’s been a villain for years. You just hear more from the “stop using Firefox because it isn’t perfect” paid accounts around here.
I mean…Firefox has gone from open source to source available. Other alternatives exist for Firefox that still hold the user as the customer and not as the product.
I personally use Waterfox.
It has?
Yes, they are using a similar model to Microsoft and open sourcing Firefox code under the MPL while distributing the executable under a new Terms of Service.
Firefox (the executable) is no longer considered FOSS since they can revoke your license at anytime. I posted a comment that details my personal view of this change.
TL;DR: they would have only done this if they planned on farming user data. And last month announced that they intend to do just that.
Ah
Vivaldi is the best alternative for someone who wants Chromium, at least on Android it complies, except for its adblocker, it is basic compared to UBlock, in that case I would go for Librewolf and IronFox on Android
They are a bit untransparent to me with how direct match (inserts affiliate links) and whitelisting of “partner sites” are enabled by default without consent.
I agree! It might not be the most open one out there, but it’s still a damn fine piece of software. Basically Opera if Opera hadn’t gone the wrong way.
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Orion is great.
So is DuckDuckGo.
I use Ecosia’s browser
Firefox
Desktop = Librewolf, Mullvad and hardened firefox browsers. Strictly separating uses. Mobile (Android) = Cromite, Brave, Firefox and Tor. Again, separating uses.
I am pretty set with Firefox in Android and desktop to be honest.
I cringe a little when users praise Brave as being the best ad-less YouTube solution (especially android users since we have revanced here!), no bro, there is no way using the web version of YT is better than revanced, or any other apps on mobile.
And now Morphe too, continuation of the revanced project, and it’s acually really good i have to say
… This is how I found out about the Revanced situation… Oh boy I swear the open source community is one of the biggest ones that carries some drama 😂 (not saying this is bad, the switch is something totally justified).
I just saw a random post about it here and i switched since revanced isn’t really getting updated, although i still use the revanced reddit bc it blocks ads, bit buggy but it works and i also have their pirated lightroom xd.
I see, I still main Sync for Reddit thanks to revanced do you know if Morphe has parches for it? As far as I can tell it only has parches for YT stuff…
Only yt so far sadly…
Firefox is becoming a shitty ai browser now. Consider waterfox or librewolf
Or even Firedragon which is a fork of both librewolf and floorp, best browser i have ever used! I recommend trying it out.
For my needs I’m currently fine with it, also my mindset is… All those are FF forks, the enshitification of FF will eventually splash them, not to the same degree, but yeah, it can happen.
I am too lazy to switch my CSS theme in ALL the OS I use too, for some reason this crap isn’t synced automatically with FF Sync (just as some add-ons settings) I hate starting over, that is why I always bash on current backup/restore solution Android has (compared to iCloud) every time I get the chance lol.
Their shields AdBlock is very good though, it’s done in ram in a memory safe way, arguably doing it through an extension like ublock is not great. I can’t wait until a project facelifts shields and puts it on top of an unbloated security focused chromium (or Firefox grows some balls and builds it in). Vanadium pls 🥺
On iOS it might be though, because there’s no revanced and browsers can’t have plugins so the only way to adblock is to use a browser that bakes it in.
This means (afaik) Brave, DuckDuckGo or Opera. IME adblocking for youtube specifically is patchy with Opera, can’t speak for DuckDuckGo.
Or just don’t use iOS. I don’t much but we have an iPad for occasional use
When I used iOS setting FF to strict navigation or whatever its name is it did wonders, compared to the closed environment I was ofc.
Orion on iOS has support for both Chrome and Firefox extensions. So you can use uBlock Origins directly. It’s made by the same developers as the search engine Kagi.
Only downside is that it doesn’t sync with Firefox, if you use that on your desktop.
I didn’t know that about Orion…
Only downside is that it doesn’t sync with Firefox, if you use that on your desktop.
Man that’s rough.
I am pretty set with Firefox in Android and desktop to be honest.
been using firefox since before it was called firefox, and netscape before that. while i do use ‘other’ browsers, too, their use is limited to testing and a few select sites or purposes only (for instance, i use a ‘portable’ opera for mail, and only mail).
I use Vivaldi and Zen
Mullvad Browser is great as well.
Agree except that having your web crawler hiding itself by pretending to be Googlebot is bad. Preferable to Google search monopoly. For search, Brave is not actually a terrible option (but I won’t touch the browser with a 3 metre pole)
