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Comment by rashkov | Hacker News Reader

I was pleasantly surprised to find Tor mode in Brave browser. I was looking for private browsing mode and it was right there. It was pretty darn fast and usable too. I honestly hope this feature and browser get more uptake

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There are two issues with this:

- Part of the protection Tor provides is due to having the single browser made specifically for Tor. Nearly everyone uses it; this gives you a sufficiently large crowd to blend into. There are fingerprintable clusters inside this crowd, but at least they are still large enough. By using any other browser, you make yourself stand out and even diminish the anonymity of the whole network a tiny bit. This can become a problem if enough people are using custom browsers. Brave in particular is also not restricted enough by default (no JS etc). Default settings for everyone matter.

- Brave's Tor feature wasn't thoroughly tested in real situations. AFAIK they had issues with it, and also warned users not to rely on it as it's not complete.

> Brave in particular is also not restricted enough by default

While I'm in agreeance with everything you've said it should be pointed out that Tor Browser doesn't ship with JS disabled either, it simply breaks so much of the web that they've concluded it's not reasonable for a browser to do by default if they want to attract new users.

> Brave's Tor feature wasn't thoroughly tested in real situations

Meanwhile, we know for certain that Firefox has played a role in multiple deanonymizations.

If you mean Tor Browser then of course, as it's the only widely used browser in the Tor network. It's still the most tested option, and is paired with reference Tor implementation, which is more complete than Brave's.

Brave even tells you not to use Tor if it's a life/death matter, but for general "poor-man's VPN" it's just fine.

Brave has loads of good features Chrome doesn't but people are put off by it because "muh crypto integration", which can be disabled permanently in settings.

The crypto integration is an indication of a compromised vision and a lack of judgment. If the dev is willing to shove that in, what else is in there that I’m not aware of?

Brave's completely open source. [1] I'm not using this as a 'go look at their source code' type meme, because obviously you won't. It's absolutely massive and one man auditing the code alone, just to see if he might want to use the browser, is absurd. But at the same time Brave attracts higher information users that are going to be disproportionately more interested in security, privacy, and so on. And there are a lot of people regularly poking through the source code, as well as contributing to improvements in it.

So I think the answer to question is - absolutely nothing. The very few missteps Brave has made get broadcast from the ends of the world. The fact the biggest thing people can find to complain about it is some crypto stuff, which is opt-in and easily completely disabled, or an autocomplete tagging a referrer - that was patched out in less than 24 hours, is strongly indicative of the quality and integrity of the browser.

[1] - https://github.com/brave/

> or an autocomplete tagging a referrer - that was patched out in less than 24 hours

That functionality (which would modify some literal URLs typed in by users, not just make autocomplete suggestions!) was present in the source repository for roughly a month and a half until it was disabled by default, and remained present as an option for over a year after that.

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/component...

You may mean that it was modified less than 24 hours after users noticed it and raised an outcry, but that still doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

If you can agree that moving away from a purely ad-supported internet is a good thing, then micro-payments are a strong alternative, and internet-native money at the protocol level is a technically appropriate solution.

Can you imagine google chrome bringing Tor integration into their browser? Why not?

Great points.

Which crypto judgment are you seeing that’s so damning?

Their operating budget, probably.

This is misleading. Brave had added items such as cryptocoin affiliate "cards" on the new tab page even for users who have had every cryptocoin aspect disabled.

Further, there is no way to pre-emptively disable the cryptocoin elements on new profiles on the same Brave installation.

They also started selling people's copyrighted website data to ai companies via a new api recently, explicitly "granting" a license to use it for ai training, without the copyright owners (ie, independent bloggers) permission

Yeah, to me it seems like a skeevy browser for people without the IQ to use Firefox with good add-ons like uBlock Origin and not be put off by crypto integration.

FF is pretty crap these days (as a lifelong FF fanboy). I'd hesitate to use it except for HN where its low speed and security are part of the experience.

Firefox outperforms Chrome on web benchmarks, and it leaks less of your personal info to Google.

[citation needed]

Chrome feels a lot faster than Firefox to me (Especially on Facebook!), yet I still use Firefox to resist Google's stranglehold on the web.

I recently installed it because of this news to give it a try and reality != benchmarks, also deals much worse with large amount of tabs open

> leaks less of your personal info to Google.

Hope you trust Mozilla with that same level of info (in twenty years)!

I don't understand comments like this. Chromium grinds to a crawl and even locks up with more than a handful of tabs, and its developers are deliberately adding new security vulnerabilities.

> deliberately adding new security vulnerabilities

Misleading way to say more APIs, I presume?

The review process for new web APIs in general is pretty shoddy and not terribly concerned with security (eg Canvas). However I was specifically referencing this of the past few days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910978

At least use Chromium.

Agree, my IQ is too low to catch up with amount of changes to omnibar look, addition of cool color schemes or preinstalled extensions to advertise a TV show

Brave is fantastic for this. Also it sips power while on battery.

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