Hacker News Reader

Comment by merlinscholz | Hacker News Reader

An example for the privacy focused argument is the EFF panopticlick (I think they renamed it recently) test, which shows that, while Firefox is definitely good, Brave seems to be a little bit better in some aspects. And again, I want to repeat that I do not think that Firefox is a bad browser in any way, I just disagree with some of Mozilla's business decisions. The browser itself is great.

Also, Brave doesn't phone home as much as Firefox: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...

View on HN

I initially responded to this thread with being legitimately "genuinely curious" as to why you think Brave > Firefox, as it seems a lot of people have that same thought. However, every time I get into a dialogue like this there isn't any proof in the pudding. I'm sure Brave is a decent browser, but there doesn't seem to be any real reason to switch. I've been using Firefox for more than a decade, it's open-source, from a non-profit, great community, frequently updated, on-par with Chrome in-terms of performance/speed.

Everything I hear is just hollow words- "I just disagree with some of Mozilla's business decisions" / "it's more privacy-focused than Mozilla Firefox" / "it's less politically focused than Mozilla Firefox" / "Brave seems to be a little bit better in some aspects"

Why don't you count these examples as arguments if I may ask?

Even small things being better in one or another browser are still arguments if both browsers are good.

Also, for me, the company behind the browser matters too, especially since donations to mozilla barely go to the Firefox dev team.

I get that those are not good arguments for everybody, but just dismissing them just because you do not care about them that much seems a little bit harsh.

Well so far you've given me a political article you misinterpreted based on a headline and I did try googling the EFF Panopticlick study on browsers- and there's an article from 2017 but no data or stats I can find? You haven't told me why you disagree with the company / business decisions so I have nothing to go off there...

I'm not being harsh, you just haven't presented anything beyond empty words.

As I said, in my opinion Mozilla does invest too much into side projects, upper-level managers and marketing and too little into the browser development and web development itself (for example the MDN layoffs). That's also why I stopped donating to them.

The panopticlick test (now renamed to coveryourtracks) is not a study, but a test you can actually do yourself with different browsers: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Also, I presented an article from zdnet (backed by a study), about the phoning home of the different browsers: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...

And at this point I don't think it is worth it for me to invest more time arguing anymore, since you seemingly did not read my comments. There are plenty of other comments addressing all the "issues" you were talking about.

You hadn't mentioned your first point, so not sure how I would have known that.

I will indeed test both browsers, if Brave is objectively better obviously I want to use it... However, I wish there was just stats on both browsers we could see side by side.

I did find this, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/brave...

Obviously biased because it's from Mozilla, however- I think this argument is moot. They're both better than what else is out there.

Brave beats Firefox on the EFF test because it randomises parts of its fingerprint, which the Tor project seems to reject as a strategy for anonymity [1].

I find the claim that Firefox is less privacy focused than Brave a bit questionable. Brave certainly seems to have good and probably better defaults in that regard, but remember that Firefox is basically developed in collaboration with the Tor project and as a result has various significant (mainly non-default) privacy features architected in such as first party isolation, containers, and Tor-project-approved fingerprint resistance. Easily-disabled telemetry seems like a small hassle compared to such concrete privacy features which do not exist elsewhere.

And for example with something like first party isolation, it is unclear whether Brave would even want or be able to to maintain such a patch set on top of Chromium when it requires quite deep integration with the browser engine.

There’s also the manifest v3 stuff which will presumably end up in Brave at some point.

[1] https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com