Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.
Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.
Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.
So you seem pretty well versed in the topic and I’ve been using Brave for a very long time. But what chromium alternative would you recommend that tries to accomplish what Brave clearly isn’t doing well? I’m open to switching but also not really interested in Firefox.
I would not switch to a chromium-based browser at all. For lots of reasons, but if I had to pick one it would be to avoid creating a dominant browser and ceding control over web standards to a single entity the way MS used IE to do what they wanted and force everyone else to comply.
Those were dark times. I was still being forced to make sites IE5 compatible in 2015 — official support ended in 2005.
In the rare instance that I need a chromium browser, I use chromium. But there are very few websites for which I need it and I think I have found alternatives for them all.
Kind of. It’s still not nearly as effective as Firefox with uBlock and a few other extensions. The downside is that some sites are just broken on Firefox, and blocking ads, etc. makes a relative few sites unusable. Which, yeah, 99.999% of the time I’m fine with. Until it’s something I need to do for my day job.
Not my work, it is from a saved comment by @[email protected] in a now deleted post.
This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t want to however, here is a summary of the key points:
Brendan Eich’s anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement
2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads
2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign
2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
2020 — Brave puts ads in user’s home screens
2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature
2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites
2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
And More!
Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.
So you seem pretty well versed in the topic and I’ve been using Brave for a very long time. But what chromium alternative would you recommend that tries to accomplish what Brave clearly isn’t doing well? I’m open to switching but also not really interested in Firefox.
I would not switch to a chromium-based browser at all. For lots of reasons, but if I had to pick one it would be to avoid creating a dominant browser and ceding control over web standards to a single entity the way MS used IE to do what they wanted and force everyone else to comply.
Those were dark times. I was still being forced to make sites IE5 compatible in 2015 — official support ended in 2005.
In the rare instance that I need a chromium browser, I use chromium. But there are very few websites for which I need it and I think I have found alternatives for them all.
Vivaldi has built in ad and tracking blocker and a much better UI.
Kind of. It’s still not nearly as effective as Firefox with uBlock and a few other extensions. The downside is that some sites are just broken on Firefox, and blocking ads, etc. makes a relative few sites unusable. Which, yeah, 99.999% of the time I’m fine with. Until it’s something I need to do for my day job.