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Comment by hsuduebc2 | Hacker News Reader

What about Brave? I eas avoiding it for a long time for no reason while chrome was getting continually worse.

Maybe it's time

I would really like people to stop recommending Brave :(

It may be an okay-ish browser, but the company behind it _repeatedly_ does shady things (installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc), I am honestly not sure why people are OK with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

It’s so frustrating to me that the Brave boosters can’t seem to fathom that I don’t want a “better ad experience.” I want a /”no-ad experience.”/

It's equally frustrating to me that some people don't seem to realize that you can opt-out (once, at initial setup) and have a completely ad-free experience.

It's the same kind of iterative creep of compromises on privacy that initially raised alarms with Mozilla, which culminated in Mozilla's "don't be evil" moment (or, their, erm, not-"don't be evil" moment).

You can opt out now while they are trying to gain market share. Honestly everyone on here should know this game by now. There is no such thing as "free" product made by a for-profit corporation.

That's what a lot of us have. Brave's own ad systems are opt-in, and a majority of users don't opt-in. It's a minority that are interested in the crypto features. I just left the crypto stuff off, hid the icons and have a degoogled Chromium with strong adblock and some nice quality of life extras.

Brave is still the best browser on the market. Trying creative things for monetization (and failing loudly) is a million times better than anything else that any other browser is doing -- including Firefox.

If you don't want the Web3 crap you can turn it off -- as I have done for years now. But someone please help me understand how a browser that takes in half a billion dollars from Google annually to function as controlled opposition in case of an antitrust case is somehow OK to recommend, but a browser that is independent is somehow bad because of bad business decisions made years ago.

Brave is organizationally independent, sure. But it also relies on Chromium, and so isn't independent from the Chromium code base.

Firefox is at least any kind of opposition.

I would also add the dead simple point that Brave is yet another Chromium-derived browser. If someone likes Brave just because they like it then, sure, whatever.

But it doesn't belong in a conversation about browser diversification away from Chromium. I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads

> I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads

At the end of the day, it’s not Google Chrome. I’ve mentioned in other comments that Brave isn’t my top 1, 2 or 3 choice, so I won’t rehash that here, but I think it absolutely belongs in a conversation as an alternative for people that want to get away from Google Chrome. The basic skeleton that composes Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers mostly isn’t the issue, because Chrome is and always has been technically excellent. It’s all the other crap Google started grafting on top of it that is, on top of their stance (backed up by many many web developers here) that the standards and web technologies that Google supports should be the standards and web technologies that all browsers support and prioritize.

Brave is better than Chromium in the same way that a sore throat is better than strep throat, when what everyone really wants is a vaccine.

All the arguments in favor of Brave over Chrome are going to apply tenfold to browsers fully independent of Chromium, and it's a perilous place to be, a boat on the edge of the Chromium whirlpool forever rowing (Brave repeatedly branching and forking the parts of Chromium it doesn't want and reconciling them to new updates) to not get sucked in.

I wouldn’t put it in as strong a terms but directionally, I think we agree that Brave isn’t the strongest possible alternative to Google Chrome. I don’t think it is invalid to include it in a conversation about alternative browsers to Google Chrome that aren’t Firefox, nor is the use of Chromium sufficient criteria to disqualify alternatives.

That said, I do have a general preference for browsers that aren’t Chromium-based as well.

I stopped using Brave a couple of years ago when I switched to Arc and I have since switched from Arc to Orion. I didn’t have any issues with at the time even though it was not my default; it made a nice enough fallback Chromium-based browser for the very few times that mattered. I just turned off all the crypto-crap, and regular reviews of the settings didn’t reveal them to be turning on anything I already disabled.

If Brave works for you, go for it.

It's time. People can complain that "oh it's based on Chromium" but I don't think that's the hill to die on right now.

What makes Brave a better choice than Firefox? While it claims to be privacy-focused, it's developed by a VC-funded company, not a non-profit foundation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

Mozilla now sells data, while Brave does not?

Does Mozilla sell your data, or did they remove language saying they won't?

Do you really think Brave won't, when it comes time to pay the piper?

Brave sells ads and discloses aggregate-level data to advertisers, and has a history of trust-undermining transgressions mentioned upthread:

>installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc

For the simple reason of not using Gecko

What's wrong with Gecko?

I would think the logic runs exactly the opposite way. Browser diversification would make not using chromium the good thing, rather than not using gecko.

Site isolation is one: Firefox doesn't sandbox websites from each other on non-Windows platforms, and even on Windows its sandboxing solution is just worse than Chromium's. They're doing work on implementing sandboxing more widely, mind, but still have a long road ahead of them to get to parity.

Firefox has had site isolation since 2021: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/05/18/introducing-sit...

Yes, on desktop. Mobile Firefox still has none, though that should change within this year or the next.

I think many people's issue with Brave is that it's a cryptocurrency grift, not that it's a Chromium reskin.

Don't most Brave users have all the crypto functionality turned off or opted out?

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