Let's go through some of this thing:
> But Brave is more private than Firefox by default
> No, not at all. People who claim this have fallen for Brave’s marketing strategy which consists on telling lies and flawed arguments.
The first thing to note here: Firefox defaults to Google as the default search engine and has search suggestions turned on, so whatever you write in the address bar gets sent to Google. Doing worse than that is really, really fucking hard.
> Their adblocker is just a fork of uBlock Origin
How, when uBlock Origin is a browser extension and Brave's adblocker is written in Rust and integrated into the browser.
> Another problem with their built-in adblocker is that it’s better for extensions to be separated from the core of the browser, since they don’t follow each other’s update cycles. This means that you need to update the entire browser to fix a bug in the adblocker. Stupid, isn’t it?
Yeah, Manifest v3 would like a word. uBlock will be fucked, Brave Shields won't care.
> Another reason to avoid using Brave is that uBlock Origin works best on Firefox and there isn’t anything that Brave can do about it.
These are limitations of the extension system in Chromium. Brave Shields isn't an extension, and actually does do things like CNAME uncloaking, which extensions can do on Firefox and can't do on Chromium.
What was that about the blocker being integrated into the browser again?
> Rewards is their shitty program that will replace ads displayed on websites with their own.
The adblocking system and the ads from Brave Rewards are entirely separate.
You only need to identify to cash in the BAT. Yeah, some people are looking to make pennies from their cut of being an ad viewer (spoiler: single ad viewers arem't very valuable). The whole schtick of the system is to tip content creators, where a pileup of BAT can be a real sum of money and some compensation for adblocking tracking ads.
> Brave has been caught inserting affiliate codes
> In June 2020, a twitter user (@cryptonator1337) discovered that Brave was automatically injecting referral codes into URLs for cryptocurrency exchange sites.
>
> So if you typed “binance.us” into the URL bar and pressed enter, Brave would take you to “binance.us/?ref=35089877”.
>
> There was a huge scandal when this was noted. Later, Brave disabled this in the code, in a “sorry we got caught” style.
Yeah. You know this Firefox Suggest thing Mozilla recently released? Same deal. Type incomplete URL, it suggests an ad from a local catalog. Suggesting an ad when typing a full URL was a bug, was fixed.
And you know what else they did? They turned the whole feature off by default.
I have to give the hit piece credit for not insinuating they replaced urls within the page, as many others do.