this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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[–] brb 165 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.

[–] [email protected] 158 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.

(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)

[–] jeffw 84 points 1 year ago

I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)

Ig I’ve found my people now

[–] Onlytanner 36 points 1 year ago

Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can't recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.

[–] messem10 11 points 1 year ago

Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?

If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the payouts

wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they'd offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)

[–] binom 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

no, you are right. there is a lot of talk about the brave browser in this thread, a chromium based ad blocking browser by the brave company that gives you their own crypto in return for unobtrusive ads on the start page, which can then be used to donate to content creators on the internet (i think) or be cashed in. you and the op are talking about brave search, a search engine created by the same company

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

ah, that would explain it, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've been using brave browser for years and, while I vaguely know what you're talking about, it's not something I've ever even looked at.

The defining feature of Brave for me has always been the built-in ad blocking.

[–] snek 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.

[–] Sarcastik 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I'm switching to Firefox tomorrow.

[–] snek 2 points 1 year ago

Yep, exactly my thought too. I've made too many hops but none of these products truly offer privacy.

I moved from Telegram to Signal for security only to learn more and more about the holes in Signal. At least Proton Mail is fine.

[–] Swuden 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah can I get adblock on iPhone with Firefox?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

There are adblockers extensions for iphone, like adGuard. It will remove ads on Safari (doesn't work with other browsers unfortunately)

[–] di5ciple 1 points 1 year ago

You can use pihole and route your traffic there with a vpn such as tailscale to block ads and more

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can with Firefox Focus! Though to be clear, safari with AdGuard is much better. Even better when used together NextDNS and the HaGaZi blocklist.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.

I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 5~10€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).

Now that crypto account is mandatory it's just useless...

I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I'm too lazy to replace it by something else.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?

I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.

I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.

[–] kroy 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem isn’t the ads, it’s the quantity. And they turn themselves into OS level alerts, that you train yourself to ignore

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can literally choose the quantity that you want to see though. You're choosing to have them pop up, and how often, based on how much you want to earn. You can choose none, or every option between 1 and 10 per hour. I choose 10 because then I get paid the most and I literally just click "close" on the little popup that comes up in the bottom right of the screen, or I just ignore it.

Have you actually used it?

[–] kroy 2 points 1 year ago

Not since the last time they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology

So if my information is out of date, whoops. But they are still scumbags, particularly with that CEO

[–] BeardyGrumps 0 points 1 year ago

I thought it was supposed to be the best privacy browser but after reading these comments my view has changed completely and have switched all devices to Firefox.

[–] Divus -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.

It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.

My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I might be wrong, as I’ve never used Brave, but isn’t it the case that they remove ads from the actual content owners and replace them with their own ads, basically monetizing other people’s content? I block all ads in my browser, don’t get me wrong, but what Brave is doing seems a bit shady to me.

[–] Cr4yfish 6 points 1 year ago

No. The ads from brave itself are only on new tabs and notifications.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

They do that, but not in that way. The websites will appear without ads, but once in a while their ad will pop up in a new window/tab. This is optional though