Comment by kunglao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kunglao | Hacker News Reader

What saddens me about the threads here is that it seems that some paint a very deliberate picture of Brave as a bad actor worse than other browser vendors.

I was using Firefox and then I switched to Brave. None of their featyres/business model is shoved down my throat. I just use it to browse the Web, I do not see ads, I do not participate in their crypto currency program. Heck I don't even see their icon for crypto currency on my browser UI.

I found Brave to be faster and more user friendly than Firefox which is why I switched. What I meant by user friendly is not just the UI components but also requires a minimal setup effort. I would like to hear more about technical and privacy related merits/demerits of Brave as I feel that's more pertinent at the moment when it comes to browser. However, the hate I hear about their business model/crypto currency somehow is baffling and ironically it seems to come from Firefox users. Can anyone point out some interesting technical and privacy related drawbacks of Brave? That'd be useful for a lot of us.

>> a very deliberate picture of Brave as a bad actor worse than other browser vendors.

They have been at times.

Particularly in the period during which they solicited funds to "help support" blogs and pages by people who had not signed up (and did not want to sign up when they found out about Brave and BAT).

I'm not saying they're all bad, but they've overstepped the bounds of good behaviour at times.

> Particularly in the period during which they solicited funds to "help support" blogs and pages by people who had not signed up

IANAL but this sounds like straight up fraud, not just "overstepping the line a little bit".

I agree, they seemed to be scraping author images from blogs, and putting messages up saying "You can support the site by sending a tip!"

There's a screenshot here - https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...

Tom Scott was alerted to this when someone sent him a tweet asking if he'd got thte tip, and was annoyed because he had no intention of monetising anything.

It does indeed look fraudulent to me. They have changed the behaviour now IIRC.

And it only took legal fraud accusation and online media coverage to resolve that. Trustworthy :)

More info on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

Brave is basically chromium with and adblock build in there is nothing more or less to it for privacy.

A lot of the negative feedback comes from the fact that the company needed to have high community backslashes or potential for legal issues before they would act. They also did false advertisement.

I personally opt out if something appears sketchy. I still question the privacy or user focus and so should everyone with software that claims privacy first.

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