BuT bRaVE isN’t ThaT bAd 🤡
Yep, this news actually broke a couple days ago, I remember seeing a Brave fanboy having a meltdown over it and ranting about how Mozilla is the real shady company, blah, blah, blah.
Oh dear lord. What did they say in support of their “Mozilla is shady” argument?
Brave’s CEO was fired from Mozilla so Mozilla bad.
To be fair. Mozilla foundation is shady. They keep pushing things that don’t follow their core mission. That try to expand their brand.
You can use Mozilla to build solid privacy respecting systems, but Firefox out of the box not so much. They’re better than Google, but that’s a low fucking bar.
Mullvad browser, Tor browser, mull for Android - all use the core Firefox open source engine, to make privacy respecting programs that work out of the box with privacy respecting defaults.
So I would say Mozilla is a good guy in this conversation, but not a saint.
Though they are transparent with the fact that they are doing it. I’m not a fan of it either, but it’s not too shady when they’re open about it IMO.
Fair enough, they aren’t evil to be sure.
The Mozilla telemetry, pocket, Mozilla synchronization, experiments, the new tab page basically being an advertisement page. That leaves the sour taste in my mouth, so I don’t trust them because of that… Shady good guy vibes:)
They’re doing what they think they need to justify their existence, and although I personally believe being just a great browser would be enough I appreciate their communication around their ventures. It’s not great, but it’s not like they’re installing malware in the background.
And may I point out that just being a great browser hasn’t worked out so well for Firefox so far. Unfortunately in today’s day and age you have to promote yourself to stand out. Chrome is an abject piece of crap that actively spies on you and yet Google’s PR has managed to convince the vast majority to use it.
https://itsfoss.com/firefox-looking-glass-controversy/
They get pretty close sometimes. I respect their mojo, but I don’t install vanilla Firefox anymore. On anything. For any reason. I don’t trust them anymore.
I wish them the best, if I could donate directly to Firefox development I would, but it’s impossible with them. So I don’t. I donate to mullvad, I donate to the Tor project, and I donate to servo. That’s what I can do to make sure we maintain an open and free web
They keep trying to make money so they don’t go under if/when Google pulls the plug on their easy money.
Probably something about Google.
Yeah if it’s the comment chain that I think they’re referring to, I believe it came down to Mozilla “being in bed with Google” because Google is the default search engine.
I’ll take the default search engine being Google over things like affiliate links being hijacked, but maybe I’m crazy for taking that position.
In fairness
- Mozilla pays their CEO a whole lot
- The Fakespot acquisition:
- Dumping a whole bunch of money into a third party add-on with a really bad privacy policy
- The company modified their privacy policy right before the buyout, so Mozilla could own the data they had acquired. (old/new, see section 5C)
- Mozilla is now testing out a version of their browser with the add-on built-in, increasing bloat unnecessarily
I follow Ghacks, a tech site, as well and boy there is a Brave shill on there who attacks everyone there for daring to say anything against it. He knows stuff, judging from his comments, yet is so anti Mozilla and pro Brave that I can’t understand. Almost thinks anyone not using Brave is inferior.
It’s not good to stereotype people. But, I would bet money that they have any three of these: bought
NFCsNFTs unironically, supports OpenAI unconditionally, propose blockchain on everything, bought a pizza with bitcoin years ago that would be millions of dollars today and are still salty about it, have a Starlink receiver, drive a beaten down Tesla they can’t afford to repair because they spent their money paying for FSD early access, and would definitely be first in line to fly Starship to Mars if they were allowed to, they posts to imageai regularly.EDIT: autocorrect.
Yes, that pizza for Bitcoin story is quite popular, though it happened in very early days of the currency. Also, I assume you meant NFTs instead of NFCs :p. For a second, I was wondering what did near field communication had to do with this.
My favorite Brave cope was a guy saying “you can just go to the system tools and remove the services”
Which, while technically true, is also true of malware
The Mozilla foundation is super shady, and some Firefox devs does have it in them to change stuff to piss off people. It doesn’t excuse Brave though.
Please cite an actual source for that claim.
Their public reports were a fair share of the money goes to its administration, were the dev funds are lower each years, were some funded orgs does not seem to exist, with the addition of actual user contribution being a drop in the ocean of money influx, is the source for the “shady” part.
Me (and many other) having long debates on their bugzilla about changes they made that ignore user settings, against all common practices, with no chance of reverting them because they knew better, until some big service (say, gmail) is impacted at which point all their arguments are forgotten and the changes are reverted, for the pissing of people part.
I’ve actually been attacked on several occasions by brave fan boys when I casually mentioned that I switched to Firefox and loved it. Idk what their deal is but I find it hilarious that all this stuff is coming out about brave recently 🤣
Ok. Chrome sucks. Brave sucks. What’s good. Firefox?
Firefox is great.
Firefox with good plugins is even better!
Absolutely! Another really good fork of FF to check out is Floorp I’m thinking of making it my main and going steady :) https://floorp.app/en/
Your link points back to this post.
he uses this post as the sole way to access the internet. He is forever trapped here with no way out. He weeps for there are no memes to him but his condition, as he slowly falls into the pit of insanity. He is forever condemned to read about Brave browser quietly slippin VPN services, and the occasional comment. But eventually the activity will die, and he will be condemned to a lifetime of loneliness until bit-rot will consume the thread or death will free him of his pain.
It’s like his personal version of when the sun dies for an immortal.
😆 How did I manage to do that? LMFAO
😄
OMG fixed. Thank you :)
Unless browser fingerprinting is your concern, in which case the most generic, unmodified browser is best (e.g. Tor).
But that is a huge topic for another thread.
Overall you‘re right but in which world is tor generic and unmodified 😂
The Tor browser is a modified version of Firefox, but you are not meant to modify the Tor Browser, in order for everyone using the Tor Browser to look the same and blend in. This is done for maximum privacy and anonymity.
It’s not possible to identify you if you use the tor browser without changing the window size or any other settings, because the fingerprint is literally the same amongst everyone that uses it this way. So you kind of blend in with the masses, it’s neither generic nor unmodified, I give you that :D
This is the way
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And LibreWolf is better. It’s Firefox with all of the privacy settings preconfigured and uBlock Origin preinstalled. Also, crap like Sponsored sites and Pocket are removed.
Been very happy with Librewolf. Thought it would be another one of those softwares recommended by linux-losers but which never actually works, but it’s quite the opposite.
Good call
How is Librewolf different from Mullvad browser, which is supposed to be Tor browser (hardened FF) without the Tor?
The Mullvad Browser is based on the Tor browser, but it doesn’t use the Tor network, whereas LibreWolf is based on Firefox + arkenfox user.js. LibreWolf is better for normal day-to-day browsing, where as Mullvad is meant to be used for high privacy/security tasks. Mullvad is kinda hard to daily drive, because it can’t be configured to save cookies, you can’t really use extensions and it lacks some other things. These features were removed in the Tor browser, because as I said, it’s meant for high thread model usage. Edit: I like the Mullvad browser and I use it myself, but not as my daily driver.
Waterfox is similar, though it doesn’t install additional extensions but comes with a bit of look and feel customization options instead. It restores those non-floating tabs from quantum by default and is pretty speedy.
Waterfox is more for look and feel, whereas LibreWolf makes significant privacy improvements. You can choose for yourself. Btw: You can also customize the UI on LibreWolf, just enable userChrome.css customization under Settings -> LibreWolf -> ‘Allow userChrome.css customization’. Now, you can customize everything you want.
Well yes, Wolf is a lot more focused on privacy, but it’s also a secondary goal for Waterfox. In 6.0 they enabled DNS over Oblivious HTTP (no idea what that means but you probably do) by default and incorporated yokkoffing’s Betterfox preconfig of user.js. It’s for those who are concerned about privacy but not nearly as much as the privacy community. For me, I’d rather have cookies.
they enabled DNS over Oblivious HTTP (no idea what that means but you probably do)
It’s basically the standard DNS-over-HTTPS functionality that is already present in almost every browser but routed over a special proxy server. Unfortunately though, Firefox uses Cloudflare services for this.
For me, I’d rather have cookies.
I also have LibreWolf configured to store cookies. It blocks 3rd-party cookies though.
And the only thing greater than Firefox is Librewolf.
Or hardened Firefox, which is pretty much the same thing (I use Librewolf myself for convenience).
I’m team Firefox, very happy here. There’s a small amount of optional telemetry to disable to maximise your privacy, and it has the best plugins because there’s a lot of choice and they’re not purposely crippled.
I like Firefox because it allows, Atleast for now, customization via userchrome.css files. I once tried Edge and hated it’s bloated right click context menu. Meanwhile, in Firefox, I can trim down the context menu to only basic elements.
I do wish Firefox had proper PWA support, but otherwise I have been using it as the main browser on both PC and phone(since uBlock Origin is supported on it, the only Chromium browser to support it is Kiwi Browser on Android).
@kirk781 @Deebster I’m using this, I’m not satisfied with the solution but that’s what we’ve got https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/
Yes, this one I think I tried some time before. It is not perfect as you said but it is the closest Firefox has. I think I will give it another go to see how the extension has matured.
There’s probably an addon for Firefox that gives some PWA support
There does exists one. But when I last tried it, the experience was worse than what a native integration would give. It wasn’t streamlined as in other browsers. It doesn’t matter much since I only use YouTube Music as a PWA, which I have a relegated to another window in another browser.
Off topic, but screw you Google, for not giving a native app. Spotify meanwhile has command line third party clients even(looks at ncspot) for Premium users.
Check out this custom YouTube Music desktop client: https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music. It has neat features like an adblocker and a download feature and many more things built-in and it’s open source. It’s available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
It still uses electron though, but we live in this timeline after all.
Plus you can use pretty much any plugin on mobile. this is the biggest feature for me.
Firefox and Mull (a Firefox fork) have your privacy in mind. They work as good as Chrome and don’t fuck you without asking.
There is Fennec available on F Droid that is basically Firefox with some blobs removed. Not as hardened as Mull but still a worthy option. There is one more browser based on Firefox called Iceraven for Android but it is not available on F Droid even. Though it supports a much wider variety of extensions than mobile Firefox does as of now. The downside is that it gets security updates usually later than Firefox, being an independent project.
Firefox, or on mobile, Fennec. It’s a Firefox clone with some added functionality, maintained by the developers of the F-Droid app store themselves, so highly trusted & fully compatible to stay in sync with the desktop Firefox.
For those rare occasions where a website absolutely doesn’t work with FF, and you must use it for some reason, I’d suggest Chromium portable on Desktop, and Kiwi Browser on mobile.
I have Kiwi installed and like that desktop Chrome extensions can be installed on it for the odd occasion. However, IIRC, it is updated infrequently and isn’t recommended as a daily driver.
I’d never use it as a daily driver, really just for websites that absolutely don’t work with Firefox/Fennec. Happens very infrequent if at all though.
Check out Mull.
Last time I tried Mull, I could only use a handful extensions. I chose Fennec particularly because it supports all desktop extensions. Is that still the case?
Mull has the same limitation as Fennec in that you have a small curated list of available add-ons unless you sign in with a Mozilla account and make a collection or whatever.
Floorp is my favorite Firefox fork!
Cool, that kinda looks like vivaldi except based on firefox.
It’s like Vivaldi, if Vivaldi was actually open source
It’s the closest I’ve been able to find to vivaldi. Unfortunately no one does workspaces as good as vivaldi, but their implementation deleted all my workspaces one day, with no back up, and that was after several other total wipes of my windows/tabs.
It’s got its problem but it’s my preference
Firefox is the least sucky.
Vivaldi is a good Chrome replacement.
its not open source
It’s really great! Been using it for nearly a year now and love the influx of privacy friendly features.
Firefox?
Hell no. I lost all respect for them when they tricked users into uploading browser screenshots into their cloud and than took forever to fix it. And that’s just one of the many many missteps they had over the last years.
PS: Depressing how many of you seem to consider such a drastic violation of privacy acceptable.
That feature was originally meant to be an image sharing platform, but had an unfortunate name and the button being called “Save” (although it did have a cloud icon on it) didn’t help either. Long story short, people mistook it for a screenshotting tool.
It was definitely a blunder, don’t get me wrong, but it was dumb rather than malicious.
Tbf, when Mozilla realized their blunder they cut out the sharing part and left it just as a screenshot tool because that’s the part that people liked.
but had an unfortunate name
I have a hard time seeing how anybody can be stupid enough to make such a colossal mistake by accident. Let alone how it can slip through all the layers of QA that are in place and then take so f’n long to fix it once the bug reports come pouring in. This is not a small woopsy, but goes completely against decade long establish GUI nomenclature. This was straight up from the malware dark pattern cookbook.
And even ignoring that, an upload into the cloud should always come with a big fat warning anyway. The whole process made it incredible unclear where the data is going, who has access to it, how long it is staying, how to delete it and all that.
All that from a company that has made “privacy” their main marketing feature.
Long story short, people mistook it for a screenshotting tool.
It IS a screenshooting tool.
when Mozilla realized their blunder they cut out the sharing part
The sharing part was great. The problem was never the functionality, but the malicious and misleading integration of it. Them removing that part just felt like they were trying to hide the evidence of their misdoings instead of fixing the problem.
This was straight up from the malware dark pattern cookbook.
To what end? They didn’t do anything to exploit it and deleted the sharing platform as soon as the confusion became apparent. What was Mozilla’s nefarious goal, to dig through people’s screenshots? 🙂
It IS a screenshooting tool.
It is now. Originally it was just a tool to capture pages as images and share them online. If it had been called “Share” they could have avoided the whole debacle.
The sharing part was great.
This only goes to show how conflicted the whole thing was. You can’t find two people who liked the same two aspecte of it. 😅
Trust me, you can’t get such a confusing mess on purpose. Please also remember who you’re dealing with, this is Mozilla, the inheritor of Netscape, which previously gave the world such blunders as Netscape 6.
This was a Pilot program that mixed multiple goals together and ended up as feature gore. I also wish they could have salvaged the sharing platform too but rescuing the image capture as a screenshot tool was a pretty good outcome, all things considered.
Which browser do you recommend?
Brave. It ain’t perfect, but I actually like that it comes with Adblock, IPFS and Tor support out of the box. Gives you a fully functioning browser out of the box without having to mess with tons of plugins.
If you want something more minimalist, Librewolf might be worth a look.
PS: Depressing how many of you seem to consider such a drastic violation of privacy acceptable.
It’s more that I had hoped we left everyone who acts like any little thing Firefox does is the worst and most egregious privacy violation in the world back in r/Firefox where they let all the Brave astroturfing take over.
Sure, you’ve got one significant issue (that was already mitigated and addressed), but you’re ignoring how unique it was while also saying there is “many, many more” without any hint of what they would be. Is “The Megabar exists” one of them?
that was already mitigated and addressed
Yeah, after a year. Sorry, but I don’t take lightly to companies that are stealing screenshot of my browser and than act like it’s no big deal.
without any hint of what they would be.
Have you not been paying attention over the last few years? Mozilla’s numerous missteps ain’t exactly a secret. Here is a little list:
Just use Firefox. Or LibreWolf if you want a pre-hardened Firefox. Remember to install uBlock Origin.
Please Brave: cutout the bullshit defaults game. Everybody’s getting smarter and companies are getting stupider
Edit: said this b4, don’t fuck with your own competitive advantage where you haven’t had a joint and duly qualified computer science lawyer who explains how easy it is to lose trust and commercial viabillity for a sketchy, underhanded product (see LastPass). Also FUCK LastPass, may this Pass be their Last
- Download a browser with a built-in VPN
- Get browser and VPN services on your computer
Why is this news?
Yea i don’t get the hate boner for brave. I get it’s sketchy and don’t use it myself, but they aren’t sneakily installing some VPN to redirect all your web traffic without you knowing. They tell you about it right up front because it’s a service they want to sell.
If you don’t like the browser, don’t use it. There isn’t a need to go on some crusade to smear them with bullshit.
Because it’s Brave and people like to jump on bandwagons. This is like the 6th time I’ve seen this article posted in lemmybin also.
And since we have the reddit-minded folk here, no, I do not support Brave and never will and I would much rather they disappear from the internet, but using ragebait to complain about the browser installing the necessary files to have one of their advertised services working, like pretty much every other software does, is not the way to move forward.
Because these idiots don’t know how software works.
They’d shit their pants if they paid attention to the services on their computer.
It’s good users are now aware that Brave includes redundant features that you have to pay extra for to activate. Users browser will update everytime the browser or the VPN software needs an update.
For example Firefox VPN from Mozilla is separate software. They don’t force millions of users to download it even if they don’t want it.
This is yet another example why people should not be using Brave and should be skeptical of its intentions.
Brave is shit but calling this a reason to be skeptical is fucking stupid. Almost every piece of software includes features that some subset of users will never touch. That isn’t a reason not to include it.
“Oh no, Firefox includes a bookmark toolbar! I don’t use bookmarks so they need to get rid of this!”
brave is basically installing a future minefield with system-wide access waiting to be triggered by them, or an exploitable bug by others, on all brave users’ pcs and not just those who sub to their vpn service.
You may want to work on your literacy.
They don’t force millions of users to download it even if they don’t want it.
Mozilla has been forcing Pocket on Firefox users for years, as well as Mr Robot ads and numerous other things. They don’t exact have the moral high ground here.
Whats pocket? And why is it bad that its on the browser?
Pocket is Mozilla’s bookmark/sync pay-cloud-service. Comes with Firefox by default and can’t be easily removed. From a company that claims to care about privacy I would expect a self-hosted local-first approach for such problems, not a cloud service.
But its not active unless you turn it on right? Just preinstalled so if you decide to use it its already there?
Cause that does sound like a little bloatware but if thats the only bloat they have and thats its only issue Im not sure Im bothered by it.
Just imagine: using Windows and being concerned about privacy. Big lol.
Haha, you’re so fucking hilarious. Maybe if you’d spend as much time being big brain comedy boy and masturbating over the next Debian point release you’d know how to lock down a Windows system.
But you don’t. Because you don’t.
Why would someone who uses Debian care about Windows?
I use Debian. And somehow I still know how to use Windows and MacOS. Because I’m competent.
But you don’t. Because you don’t
Exactly, that’s the point he was trying to make.
You can’t harden windows to the point of an acceptable level of security. That is the inherent nature of proprietary software.
And yet there are people that do that every single day, and it’s pretty much trivial to do.
It’s fucking hilarious how many high horses Linux users ride on while knowing absolutely nothing about any other system. You just repeat shit that The Register or Slashdot told you was true.
How do you harden windows?
But you don’t. Because you don’t.
Nobody does. Windows is closed source and its inner working is a trade secret. This means you cannot know how to lock down windows. Of course there are best practices based on info from microsoft or people who know a thing or two about info sec but it’s all guess work and/or trusting the developer by its blue eyes.
There’s no fucking guesswork. Everything in and out of the system can be monitored. If you knew anything about Windows you’d know that, but your entire Windows knowledge comes from shit-tier memes and snarky stories from The Register.
Thats something Ive never understood about closed source.
The OS, in its entirety, is on your computer. Why are you not able to open it up and root around within it? Is it just encrypted to a degree it cant be cracked? Or is the legal ramifications of unraveling it just not worth unraveling it?
They have a point though.
Windows automatically means you don’t have privacy and you cannot have privacy.
On Linux you at least may or may not, depending on configuration.
You know nothing.
I do know.
You’re living in a fantasy world if you think Windows is private and that a proprietary OS can be considered secure.
You know nothing.
Imagine claiming to be technically competent and using Windows, being obliged to “lock it down” to made it a “non spyware”. Take your meds, dude.
Imagine being such a dink you know nothing yet you open your mouth.
Oh wait, you don’t need to imagine.
You have to be very brave to download that browser
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Opera does this too and nobody bats an eye (anymore).
For some reason people like to clown on Brave specifically.
Probably because nobody cares about Opera doing that since the ones pointing this out are at least privacy aware people that won’t use Opera. It is also a problem when Brave does it because it is a “privacy focused” browser. They sure have the balls to do this.
In privacy communities, for some reason the following two things are taken as gospel truth:
- Brave: the privacy browser with good defaults
- DuckDuckGo: the browser that once sent all your data to Microsoft
DDG’s biggest sin was failing to atone for their one mistake by not making a bunch more, so they would all run together and cancel each other out
Just a reminder, any time you see a “tech” youtuber with brave installed, they’re not going to be an excellent source of information
Why is installing a VPN considered bad? Is it because it is done without user consent? I don’t understand if there is any malicious intent.
Brave browser has been automatically installing VPN services on Windows computers without user consent, but it remains inactive unless the user subscribes.
They’re installing extra software that’s useless unless you give them money. Plus you really want to be aware of your VPN since all your traffic will be going through it.
It doesn’t auto enable and chromium also gives you a lot of unnecessary features. While I think Brave is bloat I don’t see how this is any more than the usual.
Because a vpn can monitor all the websites that you visit. Not directly what you’re looking at, but definitely where you’re looking. Just line your provider can, if you’re not using a vpn. But at least with your provider, you have a contract with them - you pay them to transport your data and nothing more. Some very scummy providers aside, that’s where it stops.
A free vpn, however, needs to pay for transporting your data somehow. And if you’re not paying for it with money, then who/what is?
See also Tom Scott’s explanation about vpns, why you probably don’t need one, and why he refused their advertisement money.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Tom Scott’s explanation about vpns
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It’s not even free, the service itself is a payed subscription. But it’s there and it could be working and funneling data without the user knowing it if they wanted to.
I agree with what other people said. And here’s a new twist.
Any software that messes with the networking stack, can cause really difficult to debug errors. And it may induce errors in other programs. The more complicated your computer’s networking, the more fragile it is.
So introducing, silently, unasked for, network drivers and VPN hooks into the operating system is harming the compute stability of their user base.
At the very least, it should be opt-in! There should be a dialogue asking hey we have this new awesome feature, click okay to install it, something like that. Informed consent
It’s “all your mail is now redirected to a third party that makes money by mining it for data without you knowing” level of nastiness. Absolutely deplorable and a reason to never touch anything made by the people behind Brave even with a ten foot pole. Brave is a scam and why people pretend its not is beyond me.
that’s what the new outlook ‘app’ (replacing win 10/11’s mail ‘app’) does with gmail accounts. routes all your mail from gmail through microsoft servers before delivering to the app on your pc.
huh? they install a windows process in case the user enables their vpn. is it good that they act prematurely there? no. is it like stealing all your emails? no?
They’re apprehending ALL of your browsing activity to their lucky vpn provider of choice.
a service has far more privs on the system than a browser should have or need (which can be installed on a per-user basis, no admin/root required).
Brave partnered with a Washington DC based company to offer this VPN service to its users.
I don’t always use a VPN, but when I do, it’s as close to the White House as possible
The ol’ bait and switch…classic. Opera used to be good too, then chinese people bought it, then emerged opera vpn. Shaddy af. Same as camscanner
At least Opera has the distinction of having been a very different company back in the 90s when they maintained their own rendering engine entirely separate from the ones used by Microsoft, Netscape, run. They started back in the day when you would spend money on a web browser, and they stuck around for a while before finally becoming a shell of their former selves… And, ironically, a shell around Google’s WebKit/Blink rendering engine.
I don’t like brave because Brandon Eich (CEO, formerly with Mozilla) doesn’t support gay marriage and was pushing anti-vax stuff on twitter. I don’t look for this shit to titillate my tits like some folks, but when it hits me in the face I can’t ignore it.
When fact checking myself I found even more controversies, but I’m not wasting time reading articles that feed a confirmation bias.
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Independed browser from Google when?
Sick. Thanks brave.
Installing VPNs without telling the end user isn’t a good thing.
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Yes they did install services.
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-services-without-user-consent/
O.o did you even click the article? That’s exactly what they did.
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