- cross-posted to:
- technology
- tech@kbin.social
- informatica@feddit.it
- cross-posted to:
- technology
- tech@kbin.social
- informatica@feddit.it
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Brave Software, the company behind the browser of the same name, was founded by Brendan Eich. He’s best known as the creator of JavaScript from his days at Netscape Communications
Say no more fam.
TL;DR: The article claims that the Brave web browser is bad and should not be used.
The author points out that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, co-founder (and ex-CEO) of Mozilla, and founder of Brave, donated 1,000 USD in support of a proposition to ban same-sex marriage. Along with making the claim that Brave’s goal is not to act as an ad-blocker, but instead to build and grow their own advertisement network, and he also believes that the network has several flaws:
- Brave Ads paysout in a form of cryptocurrency, called BAT (🦇).
- As BAT is a cryptocurrency there is high volatility.
- BAT can not be redeemed for fiat (“actual”) money directly from within the Brave Wallet.
- The author also believes that “it [the network] has largely failed” but that it “has generated a lot of revenue for Brave,” via the ICO (Initial Coin Offering; IPO for crypto).
In addition to these key points the author also:
- Claims that Brave prompted FTX, before the scandal.
- Cites the The Brave Marketer Podcast where ex-CMO of Crypto.com Steven Kalifowitz shares an ambitious goal of being a “‘brand like Coke and Netflix.’” The author then mentions that:
- In 2023 there was a report from The Financial Times that Crypto.com traded against their customers.
- In 2022 the company try to hide the severity of its layoffs.
- Mentions Brave’s integration with Gemini, and how the crypto exchange is under investigation for lying about FDIC insurance.
- Mentions a partnership with the the 3XP Web3 Gaming Expo where they sponsored the Esports Arena and rewarded contestants with the BAT token.
- Claims that Brave added affiliate/referral codes to URLs, such as “binance.us.”
Finally, the author lists Firefox and Vivaldi as alternatives to Brave, and ends the article with “Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.”
I am human, please let me know if I’ve made a mistake.
Edit: Fixed bat emoji and typo.
As BAT is a cryptocurrency there is high volatilability (I don’t know if I spelled that right :/ ).
Volatility :-)
But Volatilability sounds cool
Very volatibable word
Agree :-D
Thank you, I fixed it!
@whou Don’t forget the time they made it possible to ‘donate’ to creators, but when creators weren’t signed up with their program #Brave would just keep the donation. So users would think they have donated for example to Tom Scott, but in reality he never received anything. Overall just a scummy company.
The fact is i don’t care about these things. All it matters is that Brave uses Chromium, therefore I’ll never touch it.
Yeah. But if I ever want or need a Chromium browser, it may be the one.
plus they have Google Advert ID Permission in Android. Tell me who is more creep. Crypto-things can be disabled within a few clicks, While mozilla’s trash can be disabled using a bunch of configuration in about:config
What a shitty fucking article.
Well reading this had the opposite effect than intended. Now i just hate the author
Yup, half of it is just “I don’t like this person, so no one should use anything they have anything to do with”.
The points about the browser itself are clearly just afterthoughts.
I mean, regardless of whether it sounds like afterthoughts, it kind of sounds like the ulterior motive for Brave is entirely counter to its purported intent. Why ignore it just because of something unrelated? Sounds like the exact same issue people complain about the author.
I’m not ignoring those things, there’s a reason why I use firefox. I’m just criticizing the article.
You were agreeing with someone that said it led them to the opposite conclusion of the point the author wanted to make. That would require you to ignore those points or at the very least admit privacy isn’t important.
When you said “yup” to a claim, it means you agree with the claim. You didn’t simply only say you disliked the author’s writing style and felt their focus wasn’t properly targeted on the correct points.
Touché, I can see how this leads to misunderstanding.
Please stop reposting this crap every fucking day. What’s up with you and this exact article in particular anyway? Are you getting paid or something?
well, I just came across the article on Mastodon and wanted to share it. I mean jeez, imagine sharing and wanting to discuss interesting topics just for fun?
and I posted the article on !technology@beehaw.org and then cross-posted it here, because I thought it was also an interesting community to discuss it. I saw a bunch of people cross-posting it elsewhere, so if you’re seeing it a bunch of times then it’s probably because those communities probably also have something in common with the article. I personally think every community have different people and different discussions to have, so I don’t see it as particularly bad.
I don’t get it either. It’s in the front in 5 different subs
I mean… I’ve been using Firefox since Google silo’d all log-ins together.
On the other hand, search.brave.com is freaking incredible. It’s so much better than Google, Bing or DDG at this point, it’s shocking. I switched a couple weeks ago and it’s surreal to see so many usable, useful results on the first page again.
Try Startpage And you can use addons to filter out bad results, if that helps. Brave search definitely is potent.
Cool! I didn’t think of that, but it would do the trick, you’re right.
(I was hoping for it to be in the popup list of search engines, I guess.)
Tried it for a couple of weeks and went back to DDG. It’s way better for programming and other geekie stuff imo.
You mean DDG is better for programming or Brave Search is? I’m finding a lot more useful stuff via Brave for whatever reason currently.
(I guess results may vary though if that’s not the case for you!)
I meant that DDG is better for programming.
Fine, but, like, don’t recommend Vivaldi. Also, if you disable the Brave ads, you’re not really supporting them, while still getting the benefits.
— Sent from Librewolf
why not vivaldi? i know it’s not open-source, but is there any other reason?
Vivaldi is chromium
oh right, of course! for some reason i was only thinking of which chromium-based alternatives we could recommend.
Stop using it with honey mustard sauce! Stop using it with tangy sweet and sour sauce! Stop eating the new fiesta Brave salad! Stop enjoying Brave on the patio, in the car, or on the boat… wherever good times are had!
🎵 Pop a poppler in your mouth
When you come to Fishy Joe’s
What they’re made of is a mystery
Where they come from no one knows 🎵
I made the switch last month from Brave for years, back to firefox. Brave is easy more effective at blocking tablets and ads, even with ublock/adblock. You can install it and just start using a cleaner web, and it’s really easy to customize gow much of an effect the sanitization is. I defended a lot of what Brave did in the early days, because what I was hearing from developers is that they were trying to monetize it in anyway possible that maintained the privacy of the user, and I understand that ethos.
It’s the years and years of missteps that finally got to me. I started to feel like I had to keep up on what they were doing to make sure nothing slipped through, and that’s not trust.
I still think they have the best ad blocking tech, it beats my pihole, it beats Firefox with extensions. It’s fast, and it displays websites reliably.
But, we do need to consider the roads we pave and the tools we use. Brenden Eich has not apologized for his donation, but at the time he did write a blog post about supporting LGBT initiatives at Mozilla and he had support from people that he worked with. He resigned because at the time there was nothing you could do to assuage an internet hate mob but resign. There is information around stating that three board members left because of his appointment, but only one actually said that,
All I read is cryptocurrency hating.
Do they do anything that’s bad for my privacy?
The affiliate links are enough to stop using brave tho
Affiliate links can be done ethically. Devs gotta eat
And they did it in the worst way possible LOL
Your idea of ethical is overwriting affiliate links from small journalism sites that clearly state they’re affiliate links and instead quietly replacing them with links that benefit a corporation that raised money off of crypto?
Brave is a better choice than Google Chrome / Opera / Edge by miles.
Still, the only ethical choice is Firefox.
As if people really using a browser with a built-in advertising network.
No, this article is pretty much idealistic rant aimed at hating the ceo. The product is fine.
Edit: the ads and crypto are opt in. I’d like to see if anyone ranting here about them has actually used Brave and went so far as to opt in to things they don’t want
The affiliate link hijacking was not opt-in. How could anything remotely like this be accepted in a privacy focused browser?
When Firefox had the mr robot extension incident everybody was (righfuly so) mad, but that was way less damaging than altering users’ intent.
Can someone explain how Brave siphoning some money from Amazon specifically impacts privacy? Does the affiliate get a list of accounts that bought something? Names? Addresses? Or does some money just show up in their account?
What information does Amazon get? That the person clicking is using Brave? They already know that from the user agent.
I, as the user, decide what affiliate link I want to use, not my browser!
Sure but that sounds like liberty and autonomy, not privacy.
I asked specifically how it infringes on privacy. Seems like the wrong word to use.
I asked specifically how it infringes on privacy.
You really think they don’t track you?
Who?
Some OSS developers, independent review/news sites get affiliate money to stay afloat. Amazon requires them to state this clearly. Brave didn’t declare it and probably stole (replace) innocent referrals. This is level 100 spyware/malware tactic.
I’m not saying it was ethical or good.
I’m asking how it specifically impacts privacy.
Every response I’ve gotten is a non privacy response, which leads me to suspect it’s a stealing from others issue not a privacy issue.
did not know about the founder’s past, cheers for this. whenever i’m forced to open a chromium browser for something from now on, i’ll be using vivaldi.
Is Vivaldi good? I’ve heard it’s like the old Opera, which I used to love (I used Opera from 2003 until around when they switched to Chromium, 2012ish)
I used to use it and I liked it quite a bit, I even replaced my gmail accounts with vivaldi.net accounts, though I may migrate to proton sometime. I use Firefox exclusively but if I needed to use a chromium-based browser, that’s the one I’d use. I’m not a power user by any stretch so my opinion probably has less weight than those of others on here, but that’s my two cents anyway.
i like vivaldi a lot :) mostly because of its UI and extremely easy in-depth customization. in my opinion it is the greatest-looking web browser (if you don’t factor in all the css fiddling you can do in a text editor with firefox, of course. but even then i don’t recall seeing any custom firefox user style that looked better than vivaldi to me).
the reason why i switched away from vivaldi and back to firefox after ~2 years of straight usage was that vivaldi had a weird performance bug for me where if i had too many tabs open for too many days in a row (laptop, no shutdown), it would randomly start freezing and i’d have to restart it. but when it was running on a fresh start, it was amazing. also the more ethical choice of using a non-chromium browser was part of the reason
it would randomly start freezing and i’d have to restart it. but when it was running on a fresh start, it was amazing
Weird, that’s the exact problem I had on my old desktop and have on my laptop with Firefox. Both were 8gigs of memory and I figured out that the freezing coincided with memory being depleted. My new desktop has, funnily enough, no problems with its 32gigs of memory. I need to purchase a new ram block for my laptop…
I use Brave as a second browser (mainly to separate different activities) and did not have any issues with it apart from dragging tabs between monitors (it creates an additional empty tab sometimes when doing this). Turned off all unnecessary stuff right when I first launched it and that’s it. No bloat, no issues, just works. Didn’t know about this CEO controversy but seeing as it was a long time ago, don’t think it’s a valid reason to not use Brave. And both logo and name are cool.
It’s a solid option which we don’t really have a lot of in open source spacemainly to separate different activities
Firefox has profiles AND container tabs for exactly this though.
I mean, there’s simply just Firefox. Which is apparently not the basis for Brave. It does sound like Brave collects data so it still seems shady.
Edit: could have sworn brave was built on Firefox. It’s not. It’s chromium. Which in my opinion counts against it as I’d rather avoid a monopoly considering how much control Google has over chromium and the inherent biases Google has.
Brave is based on Chromium, not Firefox.
My bad. Not sure why I thought that. Still. Firefox is still a better alternative in my opinion.
You might have been thinking of Mullvad Browser, which is based on Firefox and came out somewhat recently. Other privacy-focused browsers based on Firefox include Librewolf and Tor browser.
Same here.
I use it for streaming because the ad block works on spotify and YouTube. I could never get spotify working on Firefox consistently.