- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
I can’t and won’t ever understand why people keep recommending Brave. This is not even the second or third shady shit they pull off.
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don’t understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
As I user, how does this impact me?
Websites become less profitable and need to show more ads to survive.
Didn’t they do some shady stuff before too? I was pretty confused why some people still recommended it
The browser is highly performant, contains (nearly) all necessary (usability and privacy) features and is suitable for beginners.
The search has a nice interface that is usable without javascript, has an onion site and should be low on telemetry. It also (in my opinion) has the best search results after Google. And these search results are Brave’s own results, not just resold Bing results; so they’re actually bringing real competition to the search engine market.
I know people advertise a lot of good things for Brave. But I’ve never seen them. It’s installed in my system, it’s what I spin up to enter shady websites (don’t ask), because it works well with ad based hidden link providers. But it’s not that performant, vanilla Brave is way slower than riced up Firefox on my system. It shows sponsored ads, it straight tells you that it might collect data, it’s bloated with buttons and crypto bullshit. I just don’t see what any of the shills are talking about, and it sells your activity on the browser to AI trainers because their search engine is just that, a meta search engine crawler, sorry but it’s just like any other browser.
I myself use Firefox on my PC on Mull on my phone.
Privacy Firefox Browsers like Mull or Librewolf tend to be very agressive when it comes to protecting privacy.
For example disabling WASI may remove some attack surface, but it also makes some useful sites (like photopea.com) completely unusable. (Also some sites like Instagram don’t work for reasons I don’t know.)
I don’t want to recommend a browser to non-powerusers which can’t open many popular sites. (There’s a reason people don’t recommend Tor.)
Using unmodified Firefox makes a lot (but not all) of these sites usable. But to make pure Firefox privacy respecting takes a lot of tweaking, which I do not expect a non-poweruser to do. Making Firefox less prone to fingerprinting is practically impossible without using a (usually overtly aggressive) preset like Librewolf.
I think that for non-powerusers Brave offers a near ideal balance between privacy and usability, meaning feature availability and websites working properly.
(Why am I focusing on non-powerusers? Because if you’re an actual poweruser you don’t need some random guy’s opinion on which browser you should use.)