Feature-wise, everyone knows Firefox is hopeless and far behind and still catching up with the rest of the browsers.
Maybe it's time to move to Brave then.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
* DNS leaks in VPN mode that were reported to them and fixed in nightly builds but not pushed to a public build until the issue attracted attention in social media
* inserting referral codes into numerous URLs (most of them cryptocurrency related). They've shifted to silently inserting headers when you hit partner websites that identify you as a Brave browser user
* removing ads from sites to put its own ads in place of them
* collecting "donations" on content creator's pages, without notice or consent...and pocketing the money if the creator doesn't "claim" the donations
* whitelisting Facebook, Twitter, and other tracking
* telemetry that cannot be disabled, that includes "non-personally-identifying" usage data
* collecting Brave Rewards program crypto-tokens requires providing extensive personal information to their crypto-wallet partners and "may" require fucking biometric verification and authorizing sharing that data with an facial-recognition-based ID verification service.
Just use one of the modified builds of Firefox, like Librefox, if you want greater privacy than what Firefox provides out of the box.
Dns leaks are bad but Brave never was a serious anonymity browser. Just as Firefox never was and Firefox had many real ip behind proxy leaks as well. Firefox also never intendedly prevented dns leaks because it just takes system settings or specific doh settings. Its a dishonest comparison. Still their tor mode is a joke.
The referral tags aren't a big thing. They are fixed strings that are the same for every user. They do not identify anyone other than as Brave user, which is trivial anyway due to user agent and fingerprinting. Do you remember that Firefox back in the day did the same when it was underdog? If it makes them money,thats a very privacy and intrusion inexpensive way of getting that.
Ad replacement is opt-in only and an actually interesting concept to try fix the spying third party to everything issue. If its not on ads are just blocked.
Pocketing money from the Ad-view rewards if not claimed. I can't tell if they are actually pocket or just wait for registration of $creator. How else would they do it? They can't magically find out their bank account.
You say they grab donations? Like they actually replace Donation buttons in sites by their own? I haven't heard of that.I only know that you can pay into a Brave Wallet and distribute it to signed up creators. But you have to explicitly pay into Brave and its likely to have read how it works on the way to that. Have a source?
Whitelisting Facebook/Twitter tracking? They had a setting for that in main settings. Is it gone? Else give a source or decrypted pcap please.
Last time I checked telemetry code (early 2020) there really wasn't anything interesting to correlate in there.
KYC for using Brave Wallet breaks the whole vision of the ad replacement thingy. Ack. I hate it.
Most modified Firefox builds are extra buggy or make an easy to match browser fingerprint change that makes you unique. Icecat is severely broken. Waterfox can't keep up with releases. More... I use my distros build with custom settings and disabled backchannels.
I dont use Brave because their release management is garbage and their team is kinda opaque.
They don't. There was some confusion about things initially, but no BAT leaves a user's machine unless the creator the BAT is assigned to signs up.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137if_/https://twitte...
Brave put a "donate to this person" button on creator content, took donations of cryptocurrency on that person's behalf, and then pocketed the crypto if the creator didn't register for Brave's program.
Are there others than Tom Scott claiming this?
Are there underhanded motivations propable on Tom Scott's side against BraveBrowser or the other way around?
My motivation? Wanting a browser that is actually pro-user.
If BraveBrowser (wont ever use brave as adjective there) used their platform to do underhanded tactics against people that didn't attack first than this would be interesting and a reason to toss any thought about using it. I don't see a trend there yet. More sources? I crave.
I'd love if Mozilla got their shit together but I am not seeing it coming.
Before making a claim like this, perhaps you could google Tom Scott, a well-known YouTuber who is frequently linked on HN.
The incident in question is covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
What features do other browsers have that Firefox doesn't? What's so compelling about these features? Does Brave still do that ad replacement thing?
I also cannot see what I should get technically that will be worth giving up tree style tabs and also inching closer to full Chrome monoculture.
Edge and Vivaldi have a ton of actually novel UI innovations built in. Microsoft's doing a lot of menus as floating panels that can be pinned, which turns the menu into a sidebar. Very normie-friendly but powerful. They also have vertical tabs and can hide the titlebar if they are in use. If they weren't a privacy disaster, they'd probably be just the best browser on the market.
Vivaldi goes more the tweaker way, their tab strip is an inhouse custom implementation and they have settings for just about everything. They have three different tab group setups alone, can slap tabs on any edge of the window you want or do away with them entirely, etc.
I think mobile is where the bigger differences are: Mobile Chromium browsers have tab groups, and tab groups are just as awesome on mobile. They're also clearly snappier than mobile Firefox IME. Stock Chrome falls behind because it doesn't have any adblocking ability on mobile and no extension support. Most forks do, with varying degrees of power.
> Does Brave still do that ad replacement thing?
Replacement is a bit of a wrong word, in that it implies putting their own ads in place of the normal, usually evil ones. Brave has, separately, a traditional ad blocker (built into the browser instead of being an extension, so it doesn't get nerfed by Manifest v3, and can do CNAME uncloaking like uBO on Firefox can) and an ad delivery system that shows ads from a local catalogue as the background in new tab pages and as toaster popups. Both can be toggled off (and the popups are off by default) and their frequency adjusted by the user.
If you turn the ad stuff off, it's close to being a stock Chromium with a bunch of tinfoil and a standalone sync infrastructure.
this is not a meaningful question. I don't know any major browser that still misses features. If people don't use firefox, it likely that they're not happy with factors such as snappiness, its UI, power usage or synchronization of extensions.
Also they are investing a lot into security and privacy (check out the Brave Blog for examples), which is a glimmer of hope for me.
I'm fortunate in that I have never bought into Gmail, maps or any other product of theirs. I did however sell my London flat without qualms to a Google employee who offered way more money than the asking price.
Firefox is losing market share and has no plan B from Google’s generosity. It’s looking inevitable that Google will turn off funding once FF declines a few more years market share. Then it’s Google, Microsoft, Apple as main browsers. SEC has already given the ok for three major players in a market a la T Mobile / Sprint merger.
Mozilla produces browser, email client, and calendaring apps (among other things.)
Mozilla's nonprofit arm engages in tech advocacy and betterment work, including sponsoring fellowships (looks to be about thirty this year) and innovation awards. The work they fund covers a mind-bogglingly vast range of topics in the humans-and-tech area: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/
Brave is a browser run by a guy who has done just about every slimy thing he can think of to make money, including donation scamming and affiliate-code insertion.
Re: Mozilla's "work". What is the point of being so protective of the "apple orchard" and having justification for all the money and resources that it spends, if the results are completely worthless?
What is the point of spending HALF A BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR, and get a web that is increasingly dominated by Big Tech and surveillance capitalism? Who cares about "innovation awards" if all the products they have still depend on the company that exploits consumers and consumer data?
I don't want to look at Mozilla and think "oh, but look at all the nice things they are doing". "Niceness" is overrated. We need something that can actually solve the problem.
Mozilla is not doing ANY of that, and its CEO is still taking $3M/year home. That is not just slimy, it is diabolical.
I have only ever recognized blog posts about interpersonal matters by them which are rather cringy and don't add anything to the preexisting matter. All about first world problems.
Do you happen to know what concrete and half effective activism they actually do?
I think Mitchell Baker would rather chair something like the SPLC than an organization merely devoted to the development and maintenance of open source software, and that's what she's turning Mozilla into.
My main criticism is that they "milk the cow dry" by extracting so much money from the browser (which is their single largest source of income) that it starves.