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Comment by vovavili | Hacker News Reader

Thank God for the Brave browser. For those disliking their built-in adblocker, there is a Manifest v2 opt-out specifically for uBlock if you need it.

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Peter Theil was an angel investor in Brave. That alone is all the reason privacy-minded users need to avoid it.

Because Peter Thiel gave them some money, there's some secret backdoor code that's sending all your information to Palantir?

It's quite likely that Brave itself collects data on your usage and shares at least some of it with Palantir.

This isn't such an outrageous assumption to make here.

Firefox also collects and sells data to no one really knows who.

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/

I mean sure, but there's a bit of a difference between "sells data to no one really knows who" and "sells data to no one really knows who AND PALANTIR" which the original commenter seem to be flagging as a problem.

"no one really knows who" is probably also Palantir or someone who resells to Palantir.

From what I know personally, Firefox truly is responsible with user data. Though -- to steel man your point -- all the data Firefox sells is through their subsidiary Anonym, which goes through great lengths to anonymize all user data that can't be tied to any individual.

Example: selling market preferences of a town rather than the individual people in it.

Well Thiel investing in Brave once at the beginning doesn't necessarily mean that Palantir is getting any data now (even though it's presented as if it was a fact in other comments here). It's probable, but really it's just speculation, just like anyone can speculate about who's getting data from Firefox.

But at least with Brave, the initial funding information was made public, so there's already more information available to users in comparison with Mozilla. Mozilla just said: "there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners" - that could mean literally anyone.

Telemetry can be disabled in Brave. Any kind of history/bookmark syncing is opt-in.

You're just spreading FUD unless you have evidence that Brave funnels usage data in secret.

There's no need to make assumptions. The source code is out there. Please, show us the relevant commits which do what you said.

That is their MO

Sometimes you make decisions based on principle and future risk. Brave Software is a for-profit company that funded its start through Peter Thiel.

Even if fine in the present, you cannot guarantee me the future of a Thiel-funded, VC-owned firm.

Mozilla, in comparison, is a mature, non-profit with substantial goodwill and operational transparency.

Everything past these details are just noise.

Mozilla has also a for-profit corporation.

No, Mozilla is a non-profit -- you may just misunderstand charitable structure optimization. It has a for-profit public-benefit subsidiary called Mozilla Corporation (Firefox).

This is common in non-profits for a number of reasons: protects the foundations assets, allows for engaging in commercial operations (Mozilla VPN, Anonym), greater flexibility, etc.

It is not a true for-profit company. All "profit" flows up to the non-profit and the non-profit parent retains complete, absolute control while being tied to the Mozilla mission.

As someone who lives in a country bordering russia, I will certainly switch to Brave now.

Wasn't Brave also founded on the back of a bunch of Web3 nonsense? That's always what kept me away. I'm actually surprised how many fans it has.

There was something else they did that was shocking a couple years ago that made me glad I never used it. I went to wikipedia to jog my memory and found this...

> In 2020, the company was found to be appending affiliate referral codes to the end of certain cryptocurrency exchange URLs typed into the browser's address bar. The practice applied to exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase, and was later discovered to extend to suggested search queries for terms like "bitcoin" and "ethereum".

I'm not sure why anyone would trust a browser that does this kind of thing. Some could claim it's a harmless way to make some extra cash, but it's very similar to what Honey was caught doing.

Come on, it was 6 years ago, they have apologized since then. Firefox also had slip-ups like pop-up ads in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36073619 and ToS backlash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43251762. Give Brave another try!

At this point, I won’t use any Chromium based browser. I don’t want Google having full control of the future of the web. I don’t trust an advertising company with that power.

Everyone properly informed on the topic now understands the Mozilla ToS debacle was a complete nothing burger and simply a result of California law, miscommunication, and Mozilla being careful. Not one thing changed in actuality.

Brave is a Thiel-funded, VC-owned private company with far more egregious monetization efforts.

Ultimately I know everything at Mozilla is completely controlled by the mission-driven non-profit parent -- something they've recently double-downed on.

Brave does not have those same assurances and cannot be trusted.

It's on a time limit. Chromium deprecated MV2 but still keeps the webRequest API in the codebase. Google could at any time decide to strip it entirely. Or it could just stop working due to lack of maintenance as Chromium grows.

Brave is relying on a fork that takes advantage of the fact that the webRequest API is still technically there

That's why Brave probably built an in-built adblocker written in Rust. Works great on both desktop and mobile.

Brave's adblocker looks pretty good but it's not nearly as customizable or granular as uBlock Origin is. I don't use Brave but I think it'd be nice to be able to choose from a variety of adblockers instead of being forced to rely on the "official" one because of the MV2 stuff

It's certainly better than stock Chrome but Firefox becoming relevant again is still the ideal option.

I think it's necessary for the future of the web. Ever since Opera gave up on Presto and Edge gave up on Trident, we've seen a massive and sudden consolidation towards Chromium. It's sad how quickly we forgot the lessons we learned from the days of IE's dominance

Sad indeed. What trully pisses me off though is the fact Mozilla has like hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, possibly a billion dollars, and yet they continue to neglect Firefox.

I don't know why people say this. They've consistently improved firefox and done phenomenally on all of the WPT inter-ops for 5 years running

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021

This doesn't look like neglect to me at all. And in addition to all this, they've dramatically reduced their dependency on Google for funding.

It's good but I find they EOL devices/OS's earlier than Firefox.

Brave is great. Works across windows/mac/ios/android/linux.

Brave is malware, I don't understand how anyone on HN can use it, baffles me every time.

They've literally been caught MITMing web pages for their own financial gains.

In that case Firefox is also out. They have been caught auto installing random hidden extensions with full read/write access to all websites and blocking uBlock Origin from working on, for example, the Firefox extension site.

> have been caught auto installing random hidden extensions with full read/write access to all websites

Lol, they chose to ship parts of their browser as extensions, it's definitely now "random extensions".

> and blocking uBlock Origin from working on, for example, the Firefox extension site

Any other example? Bypassing an extension on their own website has absolutely no link to the browser itself being a malware, this is ridiculous.

I don't even use Firefox and I think Mozilla is a shit organization misusing its funds to pursue bad ventures lately, but even I think your claims are bullshit.

Isn’t Brave just another Chromium variant?

Chromium is detestable. In whatever form it takes.

What’s detestable is Firefox’s lack of security and Mozilla’s priorities surrounding it compared to Chromium

https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1unhtxu/initial...

Why use Brave rather than FF? Sincere question. Lots of tech minded people choose it, when FF seems like an ideal choice?

My reasoning for not using Brave: not only is it a wrapper around Chromium, but their crypto stuff and some dodgy affiliate injection in the past paints them as untrustworthy.

Come on, this was 6 years ago, they have apologized since. Firefox also had trips like pop-up ads in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36073619 and ToS rewriting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43251762.

Brave is faster, suspends tabs when getting short of RAM with hundreds of tabs, has a first-class built-in ad blocker and fingerprinting protection, is compatible with Chrome extensions, includes Tor support, provides anonymous Brave Search with Goggles out of the box, free and private AI assistant Leo.

I was just explaining my reasoning. Trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets. Affiliate fraud is far more serious and untrustworthy than a popup advertising their own product. But yes Mozilla have had their missteps too, no doubt.

In any case, thanks for explaining. There are some features there I was unaware of

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