https://privacytests.org rate Brave as the best browser.
What hasn’t been said as explicitly yet: It being Chromium-based means there’s tons of implementation details that are bad, which will not be listed in any such comparison table.
For example, the Battery Status web standard was being abused, so Mozilla removed their implementation: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/battery-status-api-being-removed-from-firefox-due-to-privacy-concerns/
Chromium-based browsers continue to be standards-compliant in this regard.
And this is still quite a high-level decision. As a software engineer, I can attest that we make tiny design decisions every single day. I’d much rather have those design decisions made under the helm of a non-profit, with privacy as one of their explicit goals, than under an ad corporation.
And Brave shipping that ad corp implementation with just a few superficial patches + privacy-extensions is what us experts call: Lipstick on a pig.
Looking into privacytests.org, the main developer behind it is someone who contributes to Brave source code. He may not be officially affiliated with the company, but it would be hard to ignore any sort of bias towards Brave.
I’ve been seeing a lot of techy “privacy” blog posts, even here on Lemmy. It’s a little annoying when they muddy up the waters like this. People new to privacy will come across them and head off in the wrong direction.
We need more comments calling them out and linking to proper resources. The site linked in this post even has a confusingly similar name to the actual recommended resource:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/
(And a quick sidenote: privacyguides is the same team from privacytools. There was a name change after the original owner for the domain came back and fought over the project. PrivacyTools is now a paid advertising site, and it is NOT recommended. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/about/privacytools/ )
Edit: while I’m at it, here’s the official community on Lemmy
Even Privacy Guides has its own set of controversy, where basically one group completely took over the community from its founder (who themselves wasn’t squeaky clean, either).
Isn’t that the same controversy, just worded in favor of privacytools?
I’m trying to judge based on what I’ve read from each party, and I’m still leaning towards the privacyguides account of what went down
The recommendations are probably the biggest factor for me. See the VPN pages on each site
I found this on my privacy journey. Don’t know how relevant it is today though
Please use universal links
PrivacyTests actually started prior to him joining Brave. Brave contacted him, and used that resource as a kind of checklist, to try and improve their browser. Despite the guy now working there, it remains an independent project.
The project technically being independent does not mean it isn’t biased towards one browser.
It’s still unfinished, but he’s working on a tool for you to test your own browser. You can do so here:
https://privacytests.org/me.html
It’s the exact same tests he runs, that are open source. Everything can be found, (if you don’t trust the guy) on his GitHub:
https://github.com/privacytests/privacytests.org/tree/master/scripts
brave owns that domain, I believe. Of course they are going to rate their browser te best
Not exactly, the guy who runs it became a brave employee shortly after starting it. but they claim to continue to run it independently.
The product isn’t all that bad, but the company behind it have proven they’re not trustworthy many times over.
I’ve been trying out the engine for a few weeks now. At first I was impressed, and Goggles are a neat feature. But somehow the more I use it the more I realise how much I am going back to Bing or Google because Brave couldn’t show me even one useful result for a niche error or question. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but even using Reddit or forum Goggles sometimes it will show me only shitty article sites, more than Google does.
I don’t run Brave because Brave runs a crypto scam right in the browser.
I don’t care that you can disable it, I don’t care that it might be the only way they found to make a buck out of free software: anyone who dabbles in crypto is instantly sketchy. And I don’t want to run a piece of software as critical as a browser made by someone who’s not 100% trustworthy.
Mullvad accepts crypto as payment; there aren’t many other options for anonymous online payment methods today. What Mullvad aren’t doing us creating and running their own cryptocoin in support of their advertising wing. The two are not equivalent.
What makes it a “crypto scam” and what makes “dabbling” in crypto inherently “sketchy”?
Come on mate, there’s no way you’d be aware of crypto in an online space like this without being well aware of why most people consider it a scam.
On the contrary, I’d expect people in these spaces to be more capable of separating the signal from the noise with crypto and not default to “crypto bad”.
I wouldn’t really call it a crypto scam if they aren’t demanding or asking you buy it, just giving you free crypto
just giving you free crypto
If being alive for 40-some years has taught my anything, it’s that companies “Just giving you free anything” should raise red flags.
Even if it is benevolently intended, I’d be suspicious and very cautious about using their products.
