A browser company that tries to monetize in ways that doesn't weaponize my info against me is much preferred.
That said, I can't personally separate his politics from his product, which is why I use Firefox.
Meanwhile Mozilla the organization boots people for politics, wants "more than deplatforming" and uses as one of their examples organizations deciding what I should see on the Internet - preferring outlets that Mozilla themselves like, naturally. They publish stuff with the gist of "did you encounter other politics on YouTube, how scary".
Meanwhile the organization spends money on getting a sneaker designer to make time-limited color themes for their browser and writes a pile of copy about how cool it is that a sneaker designer painted the browser blue.
Meanwhile, Brave releases a user-customizable filtering function for their search engine so you, not someone else, can decide from what POV you see the Internet and added native vertical tabs to the browser.
One organization is blatantly political, the other just makes a good browser.
But if you want people you like to decide what I see (at least easily) on the 'net, that's good, I guess.
/rant
Not to mention that they're based on chromium.
Which is why they were silently filling in affiliate links without user consent right? Or why they were collecting tips for users with no affiliation to the company that runs brave.
Or that using a single wallet built into your web browser for crypto stuff nicely ties all your transactions to that one wallet in a way that completely removes all "privacy" aspects
I would be fine with it if it were opt-in for users who want to support the browser in that way, but silently injecting them across the board is just a scummy thing to do and also likely a violation of any sane affiliate program's terms. A company that's willing to do that loses an unrecoverable amount of credibility and trust in my eyes.
I think society has largely adopted a victim mentality with abusive software these days. We are so used to being betrayed and hurt that we now accept it as normal. It started off innocuously enough, but now we are effectively being hurt on the regular. We have learned helplessness, and that will not end well.
That's not what a victim mentality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_mentality) is. What you're describing is closer to learned helplessness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness), which is different.
> Their past actions irreversibly tainted their reputation, and they are no longer worthy of our trust.
This is closer to something you might hear from someone with a victim mentality. I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is evidence of such, but certainly this rigidity of thought around being a victim to another's actions contributes to such.
So now we've given a hostile ad agency control of the internet to save 100ms on certain web site loads. Good job everyone.