Did nobody read the article? The author is crying that Brave implemented a summary feature so users don’t have to read through entire paragraphs to get to the actual content. Of course, he goes on and on about copyright and OpenAI, nothing really about user data.
Every single one of these Brave “scandals” are so irrelevant and meaningless. I was hoping the reddit hive mind wouldn’t be brought over to lemmy, but here we are.
This article, especially after the update from Brave, seems like a huge nothing-burger. Just another excuse for the Firefox Fanatics crowd to rag on Brave and circlejerk each other about how good Firefox is.
The article isn’t even about Brave Browser, and it has nothing to do with user data. The website owner is mad that Brave Search is crawling their site and using data in their “Summarizer” feature. I thought Firefox users were supposed to be against the Google internet monopoly, but apparently when it comes to one of the only companies with their own independent and actually decent search engine, they don’t seem to care anymore because of stupid “Firefox good brave bad” browser wars nonsense.
complains about browser wars
types up multiple paragraphs crying about “Firefox Fanatics”
Microsoft and google like to shit all over Brave all the time. Brave is very privacy friendly, the data they collect from their users is way less invasive than the shit Edge and Chrome collect from you.
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don’t understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
You might want to look into NewPipe then. Lets you do all those things with YT, plus you can also download the videos or their audio only
I’m on an iPhone, which I why I don’t use all the other things Android people suggest.
Brave has been about the only thing I’ve found that works and is easy for iPhone.
If you’re on apple I’d recommend giving Orion browser a try. It blocks all ads by default, including YouTube. It’s become my default browser on all my devices.
I still remember why: Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, the man who would go on to found Brave, for donating to Christian charities in the politically polarised climate of 2016. After Eich went, they also quietly purged any other employees that showed even a hint of conservative sympathies in their internet presence. They then went on to “experiment” with pushing browser ads on users, and while they eventually ended the experiment because of massive user backlash, they still made no apologies and didn’t abandon the idea. Just made a final public response dripping with PR bullshit with a patronising conclusion along the lines of “internet users just aren’t ready for this change yet”.
Brandon Eich was fired because he was constantly giving money to politicians and groups that were advocating for the banning of same sex marriage. Also funding the campaign of congressman Tom McClintock, a certified piece of shit, Who denies climate change, is against LGBTQ rights, and was among the republicans trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Yes. That is political affiliation. You might not share it, but whether same-sex marriage should be legal is absolutely a political question, even if it is now outside the Overton window.
Personally, I’m not sure I support any form of state marriage, but if it exists, it should include same-sex marriage.
If your political affiliation implies creating second-class citizens that may be discriminated against due to innate characteristics or harmless behavior, don’t expect me to respect your political identity, to not to discriminate against it, or to give a damn when you find yourself kicked out of places because of it.
So he was fired for his political affiliation.
From an outside perspective, I find it astonishing that those ideas are considered acceptable political positions in the US. With that said, I believe in individuals having the right to support or promote their chosen cause, but also the right of others to choose whether or not they wish to associate with them.
Opposition to gay marriage was fairly common in the early and mid 2010s. It was only legalised 8 years ago in the US, and so, in 2016, it was still a live issue.
Yeah, it just feels so bizarre to me as someone who isn’t American.
I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
lmao still thinking moz corporation is your friend
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
Firefox. The slowest browser, the least compatible browser, the most annoying when it comes to bugs and issues (Firefox snap anyone?)
I just cannot disagree more. You seriously have to gaslight yourself into liking it.
What a strange take. I switched from Opera to Firefox like 15+ years ago (whenever Firefox added extensions, so I could use Mouse Gestures (why I was on Opera in the first place))
I never have issues with compatibility or speed. I don’t use Google products so I don’t have Chrome to compare it to, but it’s certainly as fast as/faster an IE/Edge.
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the payouts
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they’d offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
I don’t think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.
I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I’m switching to Firefox tomorrow.
I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.
It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.
My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.
Brave is just too shady and I hate that it’s considered a “privacy” browser by people who don’t know better.
Well, it doesn’t help that privacyguides.org lists both Brave browser and search as recommendations.
I found the juxtaposition of your comment to the one below yours to be pretty funny.
I love how you added yellow border for clarity
(I’ve screenshotted lemmy comments before and it looks utterly confusing without border lol)
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Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you’re marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.
The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.
Also, he invented JavaScript. He got on my shitlist permanently for that alone.
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What does his political donations have to do with brave’s misconduct here?
I don’t understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
Brave had a thing where if you went to website.com, they would add /ref=brave to the URL so they get a kickback as if you clicked on their referral link.
Sneaky? Sure. A huge scandal? I don’t think so. No user data was being collected, no privacy was being violated. If I was the company doing the referral system I’d be mad, but as a user, it does not affect me at all.
Firefox fanatics just need something to point to and say “brave bad firefox good” and that is the worst thing they can find on Brave. It’s all browser wars to them, like iPhone vs Android or Xbox vs Playstation.
The article in this post also does not affect users in anyway, and has been updated after Brave responded, with most of the worst claims of the article now retracted.
Stealing referral URLs is lowest kind of spyware/malware tactics. Topmoxie which was another for of advanced java app coming with Limewire did it.
I’ve been using Brave for over a year now and really like it. Nearly all the functionality of Chrome with none of the privacy issues.
You should consider switching to firefox. Brave will be affected by the elimination of Manifest V2, essentially killing privacy on chromium browsers (ubo doesnt work as well, privacy badger is useless, etc). An extremely easy way to switch to firefox without the hassle of configuring it be to private is to download the “Librewolf” fork - comes configured at stock with 99% of the privacy features firefox has.
I’m very concerned with this change. What incentive will app developers have to ensure their apps run in Firefox if they know Chrome will force users to see ads and be targeted for marketing?
How does one do this? What is a fork? Is it an extension or different app altogether? Sorry, new to the privacy game.
… Looks like it’s time to switch browsers again. Anyone got any suggestions? Preferably a Chromium-based privacy-focused browser without any crypto-related bells and whistles. And it has to be able to sync between Android and desktop.
Why the hell are you insisting on chromium? It’s such a bad idea to throw all our eggs in one basket.
not the OP, but I have had some webpages that didn’t work correctly in firefox. Firefox’s market share is lower than 5% and some web devs have opted out of optimizing for firefox. The crypto stuff is completely opt in, I disabled it, added the typical ublock, decentraleyes, badger and clearurl addons and it’s basically as secure as modded firefox with the same addons or the shitty firefox port called librewolf with the settings that takes 1 min to set up already done by default, and yeah it’s shitty because it takes longer to update than firefox because all they do is to merge from the main branch.
If they asked chromium, let them, why the hell are you chastising people for their preferences.
When the Addon version change rolls in things will be different, but it has been delayed due to the user pushback and I don’t think that it will get implemented. If it does, tons of users will migrate to firefox anyway.
some web devs have opted out of optimizing for firefox
Not if they want to pass QA. I’d not have a ‘dev’ like that near my team.
Why chromium based? I use Firefox and it’s very rare I come across a website that has an issue with it
It’s not that I’m afraid of compatibility issues. It’s more that I already had enough trouble bringing over all my settings the last time I switched browsers, and that was between two Chromium-based browsers. I’m willing to go through that same trouble again, but I’d rather not increase it if possible.
If it’s for the bookmarks, you can export that, possibly also for the password manager (although that’s riskier). As far as history etc, does that really matter? What other settings would you need to bring across
That’s why i use Firefox.
firefox is so laggy nowadays. the scrolling is also weird.
Upgrade to a computer built in the 2010s maybe?
Core2duo with Nvidia 9400 does very smooth scrolling once you use Wayland. Yes, Linux of course.
i wish i could use linux on this pc.
Business issue or hardware? If it is hardware there is always help, e.g. high level kernel devs cared about my HP boot issue or NetBSD.
I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products… :(
It’d be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I’d love an open and private search engine that isn’t just a meta search :(
Edit:
Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren’t just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you’re looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites
Yep doesn’t come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)
Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn’t seem have any kind of summary or answers function.
I think I’ll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I’m having a hard time finding something.
I switched to Duck Duck Go and Firefox and have never looked back.
Brave always seemed kinda scummy to me, like they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with additional privacy these days. Effectively is is what Startpage is for Google.
Brave Search is one of the only independent search indexes available these days. Others include Mojeek and Qwant, but neither are as good as Brave Search.
I hope people finally quit that shit of a browser.
As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
- Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
- Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
- Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
- Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
- Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
- DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
- Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
- Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
Check out ungoogled-chromium. It needs some extra work to get extensions (and probably drm stuff) to work, but has good defaults otherwise.
I like Brave. Should I stop? 😋 Guess I should look a Vivaldi again
I’d avoid Brave based on the founder/CEO’s bigotry alone. This is probably a good reason, too.
I don’t see what the CEO’s political views have to do with the quality of the product but you do you
Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?
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Been using brave for a few years on mobile and desktop.
They uses to give away BAT, but they have refined their system to not give any unless you spend hours jumping through hoops and linking shoddy Chinese financial apps and crypto wallets.
I still use it for the privacy, but after reading this I will likely switch back to firefox or another chrome based browser.
Are there are any mobile browsers that have ad blocking like brave?
You can use AdGuard on Android to block ads device wide. You can also install uBlock origin in Firefox Mobile.
I’m not sure for iOS
Firefox for Android lets you install ublock origin as an extension. I absolutely refuse to use any other mobile browser.
Thrown privacy badger and if you are really feeling rebel and don’t mind tinkering noscrypt
Kiwi Browser and Yandex Browser lets you use any Chromium extension, and Firefox Nightly, with some hacks, lets you use any Firefox addon available on the webstore.
Firefox’s stable version also comes with uBlock.
The hacky extension workaround also works for Firefox Beta now if you don’t want to deal with as many glitches that Nightly might have.
Fennec on F-Droid is the best for not having to resort to beta or nightly builds. However, none of the Firefox options let you sideload your own extensions like Kiwi.
Okay but I don’t want to use Chromium.
Fair enough! Definitely give Fennec a try. I switch between it and Kiwi myself (the latter for a few paywall extensions and PWA).
After their crypto crap, this doesn’t surprise me one bit.
And don’t give me that “You can disable the crypto” the fact is, you shouldn’t have to because it shouldn’t have ever been included in the first place.
Breaking their users’ trust by appending attribution tags to their URLs should’ve been unforgivable but I still see people pushing their browser online
