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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

Brave is crapware and always has been.

If you actually care about privacy rather than want to pay lip service to some marketing, then there are better options.

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> If you actually care about privacy rather than want to pay lip service to some marketing,

I disagree that it's lip service Brave has a ton of engine level privacy patches https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

To my understanding you can't match it with just js extensions.

Only firefox on the highest security mode comes close I think?

Or ungoogled chromium? (brave has most of their patches IIRC)

Are there other options that have this number of patches? I'm not saying I like the company but I think it's incorrect to say they don't do anything for privacy.

EDIT: better link - https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Fingerprinting-P...

Number of patches seems like a very bad metric. Especially since many of braves patches are not about security or privacy, but rather implementing their custom stuff on top of it. I clicked around that github folder and of around 15-ish patches I looked at it seemed like at least 13 were UI-customization and not privacy-focused.

Brave has also stolen lots of patches and merged them into their codebase against the respective license(s) of the developers who found and patched the gapping security issues.

I remember quite the slap fight in the Github issues section.

Wouldn't that open Brave to legal consequences if the author's chose to pursue them?

Also surprising to hear Eich playing fast and loose with licensing since Firefox benefited so much from Netscape's open sourcing itself.

Have any good examples?

From whom? Chromium is bsd-3 license.

Care to share the best options? I'm interested.

There's only one that isn't Chrome.

Links it is then :oP

you mean Lynx?

No, links is (was?) ab updated branch of lynx that optionally does images, media loading, and some simple JavaScript. I haven't used it for quite a while, at least a decade.

Honestly, Firefox with all the "privacy" addons I have (NoScript, CookieMaster, uBlock, Decentraleyes, behind a PiHole), the experience I have on the web is probably closer to Lynx than it is to stock Chrome in that it's heavily content-focused.

Firefox + uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger + not shit ISP.

> + not shit ISP

I dearly wish I had an option for a non-shit ISP. But my only option is Comcast.

My sincerest commiserations.

Not-shit-isp can be helped with not-shit-vpn (like mullvad)

That doesn't make it a non-shit ISP, though. And, honestly, there isn't a commercial VPN provider that I trust at all. Most of them are extremely questionable. I'm certain some aren't, and perhaps Mullvad is one of those, but it's impossible for me to know one way or another so I avoid them all.

For privacy I trust mullvad more than my ISP and I think they have the track record to back it up. If your ISP is shit in other ways then a VPN does not help of course.

All a VPN does is either move a bit of trust to the VPN or move your apparent IP to another ASN/location. The first of those can be helpful for dealing with some ISPs,

Honestly, though they are hyped a bit much to the general public, I have almost all my traffic on endpoints routed to ProtonVPN. Better than nothing and fuck ATT.

I split tunnel Fortnite, though.

get yourself DNSCrypt

On KDE, “Falkon”. On GNOME, “Web”.

On Macs, Safari.

On all platforms, Firefox. Firefox is a little disppointing in that it’s still bundled with stuff you probably don’t want, but it’s far far less objectionable than Chrome, Edge, Brave.

   On Macs, Safari

Could you inform me how to get uBlock Origin working on Safari? Or any other adblocker that isn’t a joke?

I'm fairly sure AdGuard works fine on Safari, though I have heard its performance is lacking -- shame, as Safari is a great little browser (despite my personal dislike for macOS).

You might wanna take a look at Orion browser by Kagi. Built on WebKit like Safari, but not open-source (yet, as they say). The interesting part is that it supports addons from both Chrome and FF.

AdGuard for Safari is free and well respected. (And GPL3, if that floats your boat.) https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari

1Blocker is also well respected, but not free.

If uBlock Origin is a hard requirement, Firefox is available for the Mac.

Non-Chromium: Firefox

Chromium: Vivaldi

Vivaldi is pretty much closed source, no?

It seems to be half and half.

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-sou...

Yeah I really don’t know what to use anymore:

FF installs plugins without your consent. Brave installs software which can circumvent security controls without your consent.

Safari has no plugins and is Mac/iOS-only. Chrome is designed to be as privacy invasive as humanly possible. I think Edge is right behind it and has the added insult of looking like a Fischer-Price toy.

Arc, Vivaldi, Orion, and Opera are irrelevant jokes. I wouldn’t trust Pale Moon, Waterfox, Ungoogled Chromuim, etc. because I still remember Iron Browser.

I can’t use Google Meet on Lynx. Even if I could use Google Meet on Surf, I wouldn’t want to because the authors are Neo-Nazi trash.

And Ladybird isn’t anywhere near done yet!

What browser am I supposed to use??

Orion's just getting started. I trust in Kagi, for now. To cavil about "relevance" means you dismiss grassroots alternatives before they even have a chance.

Safari has plug-ins, Apple just calls them extensions.

I suppose that’s a fair point about Orion.

I know Safari has plug-ins, however the ones I use are not available for Safari and I would think most popular extensions aren’t.

> FF installs plugins without your consent. Brave installs software which can circumvent security Controls without your consent.

I've never heard about this, can you elaborate? Are you talking about the Pocket stuff that comes built-in?

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/retrospective-l...

TIL, thanks. What an odd thing to do. Seems well intentioned though at least

I wonder why you call Orion irrelevant joke?

I tried it and it didn’t seem to provide any features not present in other browsers outside of the significant extension support, which isn’t really relevant for me (I rely heavily on like three FF extensions, if you have those I don’t really need Chrome extensions on top). It didn’t seem noticeably faster or more performant. It has no market share, which almost always means worse support overall. I don’t know of any security audits performed and I have no experience with Kagi so I don’t know if they are trustworthy.

Another comment pointed out since the browser is in beta, this might be premature judgement. That’s a good point.

> Vivaldi is a joke

From my experience it's the only browser that tries to improve UX on desktop. And it seems they do care about privacy.

Why wouldn't you use say, Vivaldi? Sure, they're irrelevant in the market, but their product is good and likely what I'd be using if I wasn't using Brave.

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