> I had some messing around to do up front, like hiding all the crypto and AI nonsense...
Switching to Brave from Firefox due to AI and ethical concerns seems like a lateral move at best if being generous.
Switching to Brave from Firefox due to AI and ethical concerns seems like a lateral move at best if being generous.
I've switched fully to Meta's Muse for all of my research going forward.
Mozilla has been distracted by a million shiny things around them. They've been mismanaged almost criminally and they have changed their terms of service to be much less privacy-oriented than they used to be.
In my humble opinion, Brave gets far too much hate on this site and is actually the best browser made today in terms of open source availability, a focus on privacy and empowerment of the end user, while maximizing site compatibility.
Isn't Brave's main source of revenue serving you ads based on information collected about you from while using their browser?
also this - like Brave being inundated with crypto shit and now AI shit isn't them hopping on every last fad as fast as possible?
it's also wild to me how many people default to citing FireFox when there are open-source, privacy-focused forks like LibreWolf, Tor Browser, and Mullvad Browser out there, all of which blow Brave out of the water for privacy by their own admission on that privacytests.org site (that one of their staff engs owns)
The hate for Brave is some combination of people dredging up issues from very early in their existence and mischaracterizing them as often as not, and folks that insist that it's jammed full of crypto shit when it's very straightforward to either disable or remove it entirely by just using Brave Origin.
I have used all three of the browsers that you happen to mention aside from Firefox, and while I keep them in my back pocket, Brave is my daily driver. I don't tend to visit a huge variety of websites. I usually have JavaScript disabled when I do so, and I have other privacy preserving mechanisms in place besides just the browser I picked.
I'm happy for folks to trudge on with the Firefox engine, but I no longer see Mozilla as a good custodian of it. I do think the privacy-focused forks of it are good, and worthy of significant attention. On Android, I would also recommend both IronFox and Cromite.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure who you'd prefer. If we're pushing Firefox here, I'd strongly recommend folks compare and contrast Brave's policies with Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#how-is-your-d...
Take special care to read through the section called "To serve relevant content and advertising on Firefox New Tab".
I think this is exactly backwards, they are a business first and all other messaging is marketing to support that end. I recognize there is likely nothing that can be said to change your opinion if you have faith Brave is putting your interests above their own.
If you do compare to the firefox privacy policy, the most notable difference is how specific Mozilla is about what data is collected and how it is used.
In contrast, try to find any detail about the specific information collected by the brave browser and how it is used to serve ads.
Google Chrome is a frog-boiling exercise where they slowly take away freedoms to run, for example, ad-blocking in the browser and they do so under the name of security. They've already tried to push the web integrity initiative. They'll try again.
Mozilla, as I've already pointed out, is criminally mismanaged in the sense of poor allocation of resources towards building a better browser. On top of this, they have brought in a number of executives from Meta that have made a number of changes that erode the privacy of Firefox users. They can't ship any features that are hostile to Google directly because Google is their primary source of funding.
Safari is written by a company that has no vested interest in seeing the web be good enough to replace native apps because that company makes gobs of money being a middleman selling native apps.
Vivaldi is closed source.
LibreWolf, IronFox, WaterFox, Icecat, Cromite, Ungoogled Chromium are all similar in that they are drafting the work of the multinational corporations, but ultimately are volunteer efforts that are sustainable only as long as the volunteers continue to donate their time.
Brave is essentially trying to create a business doing what those privacy-focused browsers are doing. The challenge is they somehow need to monetize without compromising privacy, which has been a continual challenge for every browser manufacturer.
Again, I'm going to say it for the third time in this thread: the version of Brave that I use doesn't collect telemetry or serve ads because I paid for it. I can verify its behavior because it's also open source. Not a single person has responded to this very simple fact.
Chrome and Safari can’t be trusted because the profit model of the parent company is at odds with building a user first browser.
Firefox cannot be trusted because they work on too many unrelated projects.
Open source alternatives cannot be trusted because they don’t try to profit off of users.
Brave is good though, despite having a profit model directly at odds with a privacy first browser and working on many unrelated projects (multiple browser versions, a search engine, and a VPN, a cryptocurrency) even though they are smaller than Mozilla.
The fact that you can pay for a version that doesn’t sell your habits to advertisers goes against the point you are trying to make. Other than Google, every other browser does that by default for free, and even Google offers chromium for free.
We disagree about the facts on this, and it's a waste of time to argue facts, but I do appreciate the discussion!
https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/360039248271-Gro...
Every time I see mention of "Brave" I'm reminded that Brendan left Mozilla because of his contributions to anti-gay rights causes, and then immediately founded a company called "Brave". In essence, to me, it felt like he was thumbing his nose and saying it was brave to be a homophobe.
So yeah, nah, comparing the moral high ground between Mozilla and quote Brave un-quote is not a compelling argument to me.
Suffering is so often self-induced.