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Comment by mynameyeff | Hacker News Reader

What are your qualms with Brave Browser?

At the very least, I do not trust a browser that was putting affiliate links to unsuspecting users' urls [0]. Plus I tbh I am really sick of everything tending to be chromium-derivatives nowadays and I think it is good to have greater diversity, to exactly avoid situation susch as the one here.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10134

If you research all the controversies around Brave, I think they pretty much amount to nothing. Just some people holding grudges.

But the complaint that it's a reskinned Chrome and will be forced to eventually adopt most of Chrome's user-hostile changes is a real concern.

I'm not convinced that it's much more than a Chrome skin with an integrated crypto scam.

You don't have to use the crypto features.

when the defense of a project is that you can turn off the bad features, you aren't really making a chase better than say chrome or anything else.

A product built on trust, shouldn't involve having to go turn off untrustworthy elements.

The crypto part isn’t something you turn off. It’s buried in a menu somewhere. For all intents and purposes, it’s a pretty elegant UX.

You don't need to "turn off the bad features" because they are opt-in to begin with.

I shouldn't need to opt into or out of features that shouldn't exist in the first place, much less in a browser.

You're scraping the paint off with how far you're dragging the goalposts.

Brave has a weird crypto thing, it's on not by default, it's not pushed on you, I don't even know how to turn it on.

Firefox right now today has ads in the URL bar. I'm using Waterfox to avoid all Mozilla's garbage but Brave is up near the top of least shitty.

Up near the top? It literally had a controversies section on Wikipedia due to all these shady things it did, with cryptocurrency and others, I am not sure how worse it can get [0]. I'll take URL ads any day of the week compared to the kinds of things Brave pulled over the years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brave_(web_browse...

The list for Firefox over the years would warrant a whole page on Wikipedia. Browser choices are a who's who of who's debased themselves the fewest number of times trying to squeeze money out of a free product. The current state of Brave is better than the current state of Firefox right now.

I simply don't understand how you could think that about Brave yet in the same breath say that Firefox is worse, what exactly is worse about Firefox than hiding a literally cryptocurrency scam token in the browser itself?

Brave today: Here's a free browser with no ads, built-in adblock and user-respecting defaults. If you want there's also this crypto thing you can try. No pressure, most people don't. We also have an ad supported search engine as our default.

Firefox today: Here's a free browser with ads on the new tab page, ads in the url bar, ads in Pocket, ads for our VPN service, and we let advertisers collect your data same as Chrome with "privacy preservation ad measurement" and you have to turn all of that off. We have an ad supported search engine by default. We also redirect your DNS queries to a third party "for your privacy."

I think people want Firefox to be better than it is in practice because of the historical good will they've built up over the years. I wish they were better too.

Personally I'd much rather have a non-Chromium browser with some unintrusive ads than one with cryptocurrency, perhaps that is where our differences lie. And anyway, with Chromium being upstream with Manifest v3, who knows how long Brave can keep up its adblocking capabilities?

You don't need to turn off "bad features". Just don't use them. Just like the rest of the browser features you don't use, which there are many of.

> when the defense of a project is that you can turn off the bad features, you aren't really making a chase better than say chrome or anything else.

> A product built on trust, shouldn't involve having to go turn off untrustworthy elements.

This is very misleading! You don't "turn off" bad features in Brave. You have to explicitly turn them on. By default it's off.

Just like how you don't have to visit dodgy sites in Chrome; you have to take action to visit dodgy sites.

Same with Brave - you don't have to do any crypto stuff; you have to put in extra work and effort to do the crypto stuff.

I've used Brave for years. Never used any of the crypto features. It is just a solid, privacy-based, chromium-based browser.

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