I’ve seen a lot of people on the community say that brave is bad and has made quite a lot of questionable decisions. But Firefox itself also has made equally bad decisions. Mozilla has faced ongoing criticism regarding their default settings, their approach toward users, the high compensation of their CEO at over $3 million USD annually, and their investments in various companies that may not align directly with their core mission. Additionally, there have been instances where Firefox has implemented a temporary, one-time tracker that transmits certain data to Google during the initial installation on Windows or Mac systems. Brave has also undoubtedly made such decisions as well but the point here is that Both Firefox AND Brave have made questionable decisions and to specifically dunk on brave just because it’s chromium is unfair in my opinion. That’s all, thanks for reading my post :)
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Both Firefox AND Brave have made questionable decisions>
Yes, but is incredibly disingenuous to equate those mistakes as the same. Firefox has never installed shit on a users computer without consent from the user. Brave has - you know, the same way malware would.
Even though I don’t use chromium-based web browsers because of its monopoly, it would be nice if we could integrate brave shields into ungoogled chromium so people wouldn’t have to deal with all bloat and surprises from Brave
Brave is such a pain, always adding features nobody wants, trying everything they can to get a penny out of their users.
Firefox- yeah Mozilla is making questionable decisions. But it’s the best we have.
No, after Brave installed a service level running VPN without my consent, and continued to reinstall it silently every background update even after removal, it’s a bad browser. That’s what malware does.
Comparing two companies with poor track records doesn’t make them good companies when compared to each other.
Just pasting more info for those that were concerned, like me:
Issue. This was rolled back and only seemed to affect Windows.
(I don’t use Brave as a daily driver, but it’s my Chromium browser of choice when I need assess if a website is really broken, or if it’s just misbehaving on Firefox.)
The issue with this is that it’s a part of an overall picture - that Brave sees nothing wrong with violating users’ boundaries. Brave 100% needs forks that would disable or remove weird non-consensual things added silently in updates, like what Librewolf is to Firefox, except Brave imo pushes the boundaries even more.
There was a fork, from students which got silenced with legal letters because they named the fork Braver-Browser and its a copyright to copy the name.
If you are using Windows, double-check your services.msc to ensure that the VPN was disabled/removed. After I got tired of fighting, I uninstalled Brave and the uninstaller did not remove the VPN service. So I have my doubts the patch would remove it.
What’s the name of the program I’m looking for?
I don’t think I’ve had their VPN installed (I use FF, Librewolf and Mullvad 99.99% of the time), but I do have Brave installed as a 4th option and have only used it a few times, so I’d like to make sure their VPN wasn’t installed at some point.
In Services, I only see three Brave entries. Two are for keeping it up to date, and the other provides elevated privileges.
Thanks
It was a few years back that I dumped Brave and had to perform the surgery to remove the service manually. I can’t remember the name exactly, but this article says “Brave VPN Service” and “Brave VPN Wireguard Service”. You sound like you don’t have it installed.
No.
Brave is factually bad. It’s a failed attempt at monetization of users seeking some form of privacy in browsing. From the entire crypto integration with BAT tokens to the weird VPN stuff and more; it’s clear that the company who makes the browser is pivoting rapidly and iterating the software to make money from somewhere, somehow.
Brave does treat it’s users like a product, and the company has made privacy-impacting decisions. They are very clearly a for-profit company with a well known CEO who operates on a for-profit basis only and never on a non-profit basis. You cannot say that Brave is operated on a non-profit basis. The entire concept of the Brave browser itself is to enable monetization methods that users and privacy advocates clearly want to see depreciated.
Mozilla on the other hand; has only recently begun to take some weird steps. Given that their exclusive contract with Google is likely to be dissolved in courts; they are simply stuck in a financially challenging situation. At no point has Mozilla or Firefox actually done anything actively hostile to privacy or users. While Mozilla does make mistakes; nothing notably wrong that they’ve done has actively been anything but a simple mistake. They have not yet crossed the threshold into malicious profit motive as of yet. Although many privacy enthusiasts are watching Mozilla very closely for any sign of them crossing that line right now.
It has done some hostile things, such as having quite a bit of telemetry in it before hardening, or silently adding an ad attribution system. That’s why I would rather use a fork for a primary browser. What Brave has done is still more intrusive, though.
False.
The ad attribution system was proposed but never implemented due to user outcry.
Some telemetry has been a part of Firefox for quite some time now; but it has always been privacy respecting and they self-host all of it. In general you can easily turn most, if not all of it off. The telemetry thing has been around since before they even started seriously fast-cadence releases. Some of my memories of this date back to the Firefox 34 days even. None of the telemetry collected is mandatory, and it can be shut off in preferences as well as through advanced config; which is what most forks do if they don’t specifically rip the code out. You should read their source code sometime; it’s quite interesting.
I will however agree that Brave is way more intrusive than any misstep made by Mozilla in developing Firefox.
Yeah, absolutely agree that the two browsers’ actions don’t even compare. But I wouldn’t be defending FF either - for example, to my understanding, the PPA did make it into an actual update, and telemetry is not even all turned off by the basic toggles in the settings, with more being in about:config (part of the reason why hardening user.js exist).
but librewolf is king
librewolf & tor browser combo is solid
Can’t argue with that.
It’s pretty fair to dunk on Brave because it’s Chromium. I don’t want the biggest ad company in the world having the monopoly on how we see the Internet, and Brave perpetuates that.
Right? Why doesn’t everybody see how obviously powerful it is to be THE main browser engine and thus how every single Chromium installation and further usage solidify the position of dominance, and thus to dictate the future of the Web (no less!) that it gives to a gigantic corporation? A corporation so big it is at risk of being split in pieces as it was ruled just literally weeks ago that Google had formed an illegal monopoly in its ad business?
Come on people, don’t be fucking naive of course it’s bad! Of course we SHOULD dunk on Brave and every other browsers doing the same!
Did Firefox add affiliate link redirects for crypto bullshit?
firefox at minimum clears the very low bar of not exposing casual user to crypto
People miss the fact that we can tell when one of them make a questionable decision which is what matters the most.
Just remember that Mozilla is a seperate entity to Firefox.
Yes it is a maxi pad absorbing all that Google money to ensure that firefox developers don’t do anything Google doesn’t like
Classic parasite Behavior
and nor
warning syntax errorGod, the tribalism here about browsers is absolutely fucking ridiculous. These communities are such a fucking joke.
Bye Felicia.
