Just gonna leave this here.
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.
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.
Its a bad chromium fork with a crypto snowball scheme attached and some very scummy practices done.
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).
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.
Okay, first and foremost: I do not use brave. I have used it years back (long before the URL-Rewrite-thing) and thought it felt weirdly bloated with stuff I didn’t use (a little like Opera). I would not recommend Brave to anyone at this point, because it’s… weird. I was out when they started to wave at you with their strange pseudo-currency-wallet that had to be set up and all. I would not recommend such a browser to someone who might then just ask me questions about the weird things the browser I told them to install does. No way, Jose!
Now for the but: The article is bad. Like… baaaad.
Let’s have a look, shall we?
“Some higher-up of the company did something that is not moral”
You do not become CEO of a company íf your moral compass is a high priority for you. Period. We still need to keep the perspective here: the donation shows views I really dislike, yes. But given how much many of those suited-up nutjobs in upper managements give to really shitty causes… these 1000 dollars were peanuts. Besides: How does a CEO with indefensible political views make the product bad?
The Peter Thiel bonus fact:
Can we stop to attribute any investments by large funds as a morally motivated thing? There was a guy at Peter Thiel’s fund who saw the project and went “Eyyy that’s gonna get us some Dollary-doos”. That’s it. That’s how business works. Those funds constantly shift tuckloads of money into truckloads of projects.
There was a super stupid idea in the initial plans for the browser
Yeah… thing is: They didn’t do it. You’d be surprised how many really “scummy” ideas get pitched in companies every day and how often some management-guy just kinda runs with them. That’s just business as usual really.
BAT
It is kinda weird, yes, but remember: At the time they started this, crypto was everywhere and it made the company money. I don’t see why the mere addition of this stuff is a reason that “Brave Browser is irredeemable”. It doesn’t interfere with the browser’s functionality, it just adds bloat. The article doesn’t distill that though. It just says “It has crypto in it”, goes on with something else and then concludes that “therefore bad” out of nowhere. What about the BAT thing makes the browser bad? Tell me, author!
Brave had FTX-Partnership-stuff and didn’t apologize
The apologize part is what baffles me.
They some (probably paid) partnership with a company that tricked lots and lots of people. Why do they need to apologize for (unknowingly, naively perhaps) working with a firm that turned out to be fraudulent? Does your ISP have to apologize for every scammer who did scams over their landlines?
Random listing of crypto stuff
What is bad about this? Tell me, author! They went into the booming crypto sphere and got some users that way. I dislike the crypto-bubble as much as the next guy but why does that make the browser bad? My bank sponsored a local motocross-event. I do not like motocross. Is my bank account now bad, too?
Please tell me why the product is bad if you want me to think that the product is bad.
Affiliate scandal
finally something of substance. Yeah, that one was a shitshow.
But as much as I try to resist, I have to be nerdy here:
This is not an argument now, I just could let this one slide.
I’m not aware of another browser ever rewriting what the user types in the address bar.
aren’t you now? So how does “does this browser rewrite stuff in the adress bar?” typed into my adress bar become
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=does+this+browser+rewrite+stuff+in+the+adress+bar%3F&atb=v388-6__&ia=web ? I didn’t type that.
Again, not part of the argument, the affiliate-thing was bonkers and justifies scolding, just that one phrase ground me gears, as they say.
Ultimately, Brave Browser is the apparatus of an advertising company
hey, another real reason to dislike the product, to the point. See, author? you can do it! No need to ramble on for pages over pages without any point or conclusion! Just a few words do the trick!
Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.
\ Tell me why!
No really, that’s my main issue with the article: It lists a bunch of stuff and leaves it to the reader to assume that the listed stuff is devaluing the product of this company, basically because the tone of the article is “Brave bad”, but the article never reasons why the things brought forth makes the browser bad. it never concludes any point, just rambles on to the next like a slightly tipsy Thomas the Tank Engine between stops.
Never started. What have they done now?
Nothing new. It’s just an overview of how shady and scammy the browser is. I still see a lot of people recommending it without knowing the backstory.
AI summary:
- Brave Browser has marketed itself as a privacy-preserving web browser and has gained attention from cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
- The company behind Brave, founded by Brendan Eich, faced backlash due to Eich’s previous donation in support of California’s Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage.
- Brave initially planned to replace ads with its own ad units and split revenue with publishers, but this idea was met with legal issues and criticism from both inside and outside the company.
- Brave introduced Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) as a way to reward users for viewing ads and content, but the rewards are minimal and the value of BAT is volatile.
- Brave has incorporated various cryptocurrency-related features, including a full crypto wallet, but many of its crypto partners have faced controversies and scandals.
- Brave was involved in a privacy scandal in which affiliate codes were added to URLs typed into the address bar, allowing the company to collect revenue from user signups or purchases.
- The article concludes that Brave is a flawed software project and should not be used, recommending Firefox or Vivaldi as privacy-focused alternatives.