https://privacytests.org rate Brave as the best browser.

263 points

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.

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45 points

God this is the answer I wanted. I could never put it all into words like you did. This answer, I’m stealing it.

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0 points

Brave removed it shortly after Firefox

https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/1885

Next!

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201 points

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.

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51 points
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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

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11 points

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).

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8 points
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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

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2 points

I found this on my privacy journey. Don’t know how relevant it is today though

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1 point

Less “took over” more the founder left and the community picked up the pieces.

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4 points
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!privacyguides@lemmy.one

Please use universal links

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4 points

thanks, fixed!

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1 point
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Deleted by creator
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5 points

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.

https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=ygvhCa9-0L4

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25 points

The project technically being independent does not mean it isn’t biased towards one browser.

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4 points
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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

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-7 points

Okay? Where is the proof it’s biased towards one browser

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128 points

brave owns that domain, I believe. Of course they are going to rate their browser te best

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49 points

Not exactly, the guy who runs it became a brave employee shortly after starting it. but they claim to continue to run it independently.

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10 points

They were not rated that well in the beginning. Brave contacted the guy who runs the website and asked about the tests he was running, then patched their browser accordingly until it passed all the tests it does today.

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3 points

just the non private mode protection from brave vs librewolf…

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108 points

The product isn’t all that bad, but the company behind it have proven they’re not trustworthy many times over.

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-30 points
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Their search engine is great… Never used the browser though.

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2 points

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.

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106 points

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.

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7 points

I don’t care that you can disable it

It’s opt-in.

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-8 points

Mullvad and Signal support crypto

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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.

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5 points

Well then maybe don’t call anyone who “dabbles in crypto” sketchy

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-14 points

What makes it a “crypto scam” and what makes “dabbling” in crypto inherently “sketchy”?

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18 points

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.

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-6 points

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”.

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-16 points

I wouldn’t really call it a crypto scam if they aren’t demanding or asking you buy it, just giving you free crypto

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20 points
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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.

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3 points

They give it in return for showing ads

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Privacy

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