Just gonna leave this here.
Its a bad chromium fork with a crypto snowball scheme attached and some very scummy practices done.
The referral links weren’t. That should have been a thought that crossed a developers’ mind and immediately left it. It definitely shouldn’t have made it into a test build, and it super shouldn’t have made it into a public release. That it ever made it that far is enough reason to never use the browser again. The developers have proven that they cannot be trusted with your privacy.
Sure, you have to sign up for it but you can’t remove the hardcoded crypto wallet extension and therefore can’t actually opt-out of having it shoved in your face (at least, it was the time i tried their browser and found it to be inferior in every way to just using Firefox and uBlock Origin).
I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people,
Why exactly? The tricks like “optional things to click” are explicitly targeted on less tech savvy people and defeat the point of privacy focused browsers.
Those are choices, not requirements. Using Firefox is better than using Chrome. Doing the extra stuff is even better, but if doing that means someone gives up and goes back to Chrome, that doesn’t help, either.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I’m no privacy expert, but TechLore has covered Brave a lot and it’s one of his recommended daily drivers.
Go look up all the nasty stuff stallman’s said and firmly believes in. I don’t see people boycotting gnu which is a vital part of linux as a result of this
People are already aware of the shit Stallman does. Hell, you don’t need to read the shit he writes, dude’s a real-life creep.
And besides: GNU project’s tools have continued popularity despite him. Do I need to remind you of XEmacs? EGLIBC? EGCS? A whole lot of projects that reminded GNU equivalents to “oh yeah, maybe we should get gud instead of being an inferiour code base” (XEmacs) or “oh yeah, this fork is clearly superiour, we should merge and call it official” (EGLIBC, EGCS). And now people are like “Hey guys, I just found this compiler called Clang and-” and GNU is like “FFFFF-”
[Ad experiments and crypto] is opt in.
If you download an ad blocker, I’m pretty certain that you don’t want to “opt in” to any advertisements by default.
Hey, you thought that was easy to debunk? How about this: When Brave advertises that content creators are able to accept BAT crypto tokens as donations, should the content creators themselves first opt in? They most certainly didn’t. Brave specifically said that they would accept donations on behalf of all content creators and held the donations on their behalf until they would opt in.
If these content creators never would actually opt in, what then, I wonder? Did they just deceive the fans of those content creators?
This is dangerously close to the whole rhetoric NFT bros had during the peak. “Why, someone made illegitimate NFTs of your creations? Well you SHOULD have minted those NFTs while you had the chance. Oh, you prefer to NOT participate in this whole NFT ecosystem on principle? Have fun staying poor!”
why do the author’s politics make a difference?
In this case it makes a difference because there has been an alarming increase in harmful lies made by the far right. This is a purposeful spread of misinformation that many people hesitate to get involved with in any way, and for good reason.
I do not trust the creator of Brave to be aligned with the far right and to still be guided by ethical conduct that I can trust. If you align yourself with people who lie and put others in danger for profit and control, you’re condoning such behavior and may be capable of it yourself.
Quite the opposite, brave’s defaults are very good. An alternative to brave on the firefox side would be librewolf, which gives firefox great defaults, but the issue with that is that they disabled auto updates, and there’s still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager (even though many exist).
bullshit integrated into it.
And again, there’s no “bullshit” if you don’t explicitly opt into the crypto.
and there’s still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager
I think “lots of people” here can just be simplified to “nearly everyone”. Anyone that is ware of a package manager and why it’s useful and thinks to look for an equivalent for Windows is not going to be bothered by a few extra configuration steps.
If these people really want to ban technology based on the views of the author then they might as well live in the stone age. And even then the tools they used was probably invented by some nasty people. The US space program was built by literal Nazi scientist. Most of the research on how humans survive in space was based on experiments done to Jews. The first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research are the HeLa cells taken from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks. She did not consent to have those cells taken nor was she or her family compensated. Are we gonna boycott cancer research because of this injustice? No? Only the things that make them feel uncomfortable?
You mentioned that politics should not be mentioned with software. Consider Hans Reiser, the author of reiserfs. He murdered his wife and was sent to prison. Would you be okay with running code written by a murderer on your computer? How about a vase made by a murderer in your house? Would you enjoy the voice of a murderer in music?
Be “Brave” use a better browser.
[winks in Firefox]
winks in librewolf with uBlock, LocalCDN and altered UserAgent and fixed resolution of 1920×1080
PS: I am paranoid
I would love to use librewolf but somehow it stops being able to resolve web pages where every other browser I have installed is still able to. It’s the only thing stopping me from making the jump full time.
Let’s see if the brave fanboys REEEEEEEE on Lemmy as hard as they do on reddit and try to brigade this post.
To be fair it goes both ways. I don’t understand the hate for it either. Is Brenden Eich an asshat? Maybe, but that doesn’t affect how good the browser is or isn’t. And the crypto/ad stuff is opt-in. You can leave it off and it is just chromium with a built-in ad blocker.
What else are you going to use if you don’t want to use Firefox? Vivaldi is the option suggested the most but that isn’t open source. And extensions and codecs are a pain point with Ungoogled Chromium. As far as I’m aware Brave is the best currently available open source chromium-based browsers.
I don’t even use it, I use librewolf for the record.
I never started in the first place.
It always seemed like snake oil to me.