this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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[–] xaxl 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just because something is open source doesn't mean the people behind it have the best intentions in mind.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I think one of the biggest issues with FOSS-minded people is that they automatically consider open source software private, safe and having good intentions in mind, but they never actually go beyond the surface to check if it actually is.

[–] themeatbridge 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Most people who use FOSS are not qualified to check source code for ill-intent (like me) and rely on people smarter than them (and me) to review the code and find any problems. FOSS isn't automatically private, safe, and having good intentions, but if it isn't, at least the code is transparent and the review process is open for all. Commercial software has no review, and zero transparency.

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[–] hal_5700X 30 points 1 year ago (24 children)

I use Brave as a backup browser. My main one is Firefox.

You can turn off the crypto stuff. You don't have to use Brave Shields (in browser ad blocker). It can be turned off. Now you can use uBlock Origin or another ad blocker.

About the CEO, I can't see nothing about his beliefs reflecting in his work. Looks like he kept them separated. I'm not for said beliefs.

[–] InfiniteFlow 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

That you can is beside the point. You shouldn’t need to. If the first thing I need to think about after installing it is “well, let’s see what garbage is in here that I need to turn off”, then any trust I would have for it has already gone out the window. Especially important for a browser where that is kind of the main differentiating aspect.

Edit: correcting autocorrect…

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

Besides this I cannot find another good reason not to use brave. Nobody point to a specific line of code that ruins privacy, not enough reasons.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Good enough for this gay Californian.

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[–] pozbo 20 points 1 year ago

Their carrot-on-a-stick routine with the BAT they fail to pay is enough for me to have switched.

False advertising is false.

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[–] zerbey 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I stopped using Brave over the whole BAT thing, it just felt shady and weird. This article just validated my decision even more. Happy to be back with Firefox, even though Mozilla has its own issues.

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

I agree that you shouldn't use Brave browser cause of things they've done in the past but, oh Jesus, that article is so stupid it reminds me the Hogwarts Legacy boycott.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Unfortunately, there are the ame stuff about Firefox too. Mozilla Foundation is such a corrupt organization with extreme shady finances.

Foundation's main income is royalties by google: 567M per year.

Donations: 7M (which almost goes to the CEO's bonuses)

the CEO gets 700K salary and 4.6M bonuses. Lmao.

I'd suggest, using Firefox but not donating to them.

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[–] CaptainStrider 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Firefox works well enough for me. Never given me any problems or grief. I don't really understand the fascination with chromium forks or the insistence on using them instead of Mozilla's engine.

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[–] CrayonRosary 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've been trying out the DuckDuckGo browser lately on mobile. It uses the Chromium backend, so some sites work better in it than in my normal Firefox.

The neatest feature of the browser is the ability to generate random email addresses in signup forms, and those emails all get forwarded to your real email address. As it forwards the emails, it removes trackers from them. You can click a link in one of the forwarded emails to disable that address from being forwarded any more if it gets spammy.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Well, fork, I hadn't looked at this team behind Brave. I use both Firefox and Brave. Bye bye Brave...

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (6 children)
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[–] MaxMouseOCX 20 points 1 year ago

I just read an article about a browser... That somehow included a court case about hulk hogan being gay or not... I had to stop right there lol.

[–] instamat 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just deleted it on my phone. All roads lead back to Firefox.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I think that the number 1 reason to not use brave is that is based on the chromium engine. The number 2 is that they use limited anti fingerprinting tools and support his self built tracking and ads. The others about ideology of the CEO i think are not so important.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

I hadn't read the details of their intended ad network. I just recall it sounded shady. Now that I read about it, it sounds very similar conceptually to Google's Privacy Sandbox. I'm not sure if this is a better or worse approach than the status quo but I surely don't trust Brave Inc, a startup with a questionable business model and investors, with gathering and processing this data.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This article did not present a compelling case for abandoning brave. Who cares what the founder thinks about various political issues. If the software is good, then that’s all that matters.

Don’t get me wrong, I support same sex marriage, but people have a right to oppose the concept as marriage is a government idea that is tied up in politics.

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[–] zeriah 18 points 1 year ago

I tried Brave for maybe 2 days before going back to literally anything else. The heavy push for Crypto made me wary, and it really didn't seem to be doing anything specific to increase my privacy online.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wtf is spacebar.news. where do you find sites like this?

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[–] nomadjoanne 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honestly I don't care who or what he personally donated to. But the ad model is the problem for me.

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[–] QuazarOmega 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Out of the box Firefox is definitely not very privacy conscious, better than Chrome no doubt, but worse than Brave. It can be configured to be better than both or one can use Librewolf/Mullvad browser

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