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 and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
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 making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
What should I use on android?
use brave & mull, these guys goofin brave is open source - not spyware, dont have Web enviroment Integrity, you can turn the crypto stuff off and never worry about it. brave + has good ad block + youtube play in background + chrome web store
I think how you set up your browser would make a much bigger difference in privacy rather than using a firefox fork over brave.
download brave from github if your gonna get it tho google play is lame.
If you’re looking for a chromium based browser, I like Cromite (successor to Bromite). Otherwise, Iceraven and Mull are two Firefox forks for Android that work well in my experience.
Duckduckgo uses an Android WebView, which is, depending on your OS, either Chrome or Chromium
I always find myself coming back to Vivaldi. Extremely customizable browser. Yes, it’s chromium-based like so many others, but I like it a lot and it’s always gaining fun new features. I keep Firefox as a backup, but often have (relatively minor) performance issues with Firefox, particularly on Android.
Vivaldi is closed source though, so I personally distrust it more than I distrust Brave.
If Vivaldi was FOSS then that might change things, but it isn’t.
ETA: I felt I should mention I am a bit of a hypocrite here as my preferred Lemmy client (Boost) isn’t FOSS, but I am too used to Boost when I still used Reddit, so any other client just doesn’t feel right.
Vivaldi is closed source but still source available, so it can still be examined.
