Just gonna leave this here.
Okay, first and foremost: I do not use brave. I have used it years back (long before the URL-Rewrite-thing) and thought it felt weirdly bloated with stuff I didn’t use (a little like Opera). I would not recommend Brave to anyone at this point, because it’s… weird. I was out when they started to wave at you with their strange pseudo-currency-wallet that had to be set up and all. I would not recommend such a browser to someone who might then just ask me questions about the weird things the browser I told them to install does. No way, Jose!
Now for the but: The article is bad. Like… baaaad.
Let’s have a look, shall we?“Some higher-up of the company did something that is not moral”
You do not become CEO of a company íf your moral compass is a high priority for you. Period. We still need to keep the perspective here: the donation shows views I really dislike, yes. But given how much many of those suited-up nutjobs in upper managements give to really shitty causes… these 1000 dollars were peanuts. Besides: How does a CEO with indefensible political views make the product bad?
The Peter Thiel bonus fact:
Can we stop to attribute any investments by large funds as a morally motivated thing? There was a guy at Peter Thiel’s fund who saw the project and went “Eyyy that’s gonna get us some Dollary-doos”. That’s it. That’s how business works. Those funds constantly shift tuckloads of money into truckloads of projects.
There was a super stupid idea in the initial plans for the browser
Yeah… thing is: They didn’t do it. You’d be surprised how many really “scummy” ideas get pitched in companies every day and how often some management-guy just kinda runs with them. That’s just business as usual really.
BAT
It is kinda weird, yes, but remember: At the time they started this, crypto was everywhere and it made the company money. I don’t see why the mere addition of this stuff is a reason that “Brave Browser is irredeemable”. It doesn’t interfere with the browser’s functionality, it just adds bloat. The article doesn’t distill that though. It just says “It has crypto in it”, goes on with something else and then concludes that “therefore bad” out of nowhere. What about the BAT thing makes the browser bad? Tell me, author!
Brave had FTX-Partnership-stuff and didn’t apologize
The apologize part is what baffles me.
They some (probably paid) partnership with a company that tricked lots and lots of people. Why do they need to apologize for (unknowingly, naively perhaps) working with a firm that turned out to be fraudulent? Does your ISP have to apologize for every scammer who did scams over their landlines?Random listing of crypto stuff
What is bad about this? Tell me, author! They went into the booming crypto sphere and got some users that way. I dislike the crypto-bubble as much as the next guy but why does that make the browser bad? My bank sponsored a local motocross-event. I do not like motocross. Is my bank account now bad, too?
Please tell me why the product is bad if you want me to think that the product is bad.
Affiliate scandal
finally something of substance. Yeah, that one was a shitshow.
But as much as I try to resist, I have to be nerdy here:
This is not an argument now, I just could let this one slide.I’m not aware of another browser ever rewriting what the user types in the address bar.
aren’t you now? So how does “does this browser rewrite stuff in the adress bar?” typed into my adress bar become
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=does+this+browser+rewrite+stuff+in+the+adress+bar%3F&atb=v388-6__&ia=web ? I didn’t type that.Again, not part of the argument, the affiliate-thing was bonkers and justifies scolding, just that one phrase ground me gears, as they say.
Ultimately, Brave Browser is the apparatus of an advertising company
hey, another real reason to dislike the product, to the point. See, author? you can do it! No need to ramble on for pages over pages without any point or conclusion! Just a few words do the trick!
Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.
\ Tell me why!
No really, that’s my main issue with the article: It lists a bunch of stuff and leaves it to the reader to assume that the listed stuff is devaluing the product of this company, basically because the tone of the article is “Brave bad”, but the article never reasons why the things brought forth makes the browser bad. it never concludes any point, just rambles on to the next like a slightly tipsy Thomas the Tank Engine between stops.Damn,
3 days0 days without anti-brave browser propaganda, so lets break down this article:brandon eich
Do you use linux? Go look up all the nasty stuff stallman’s said and firmly believes in. I don’t see people boycotting gnu which is a vital part of linux as a result of this, I myself still use it, because you should never mix politics with software. If the software works as it should, why do the author’s politics make a difference? A lot of praised artwork was made by artists who went mad. Similarly, I’ve heard the creator of lemmy has some questionable views, I don’t see people spreading anti-lemmy propaganda.
The same also applies with microsoft, if you use windows. Or apple, with macos. They’re no saint either.
The Ad Experiments
is Opt in… Come on at least try out something before you write a whole article on it.
Some ranting about the opt in crypto
Mentioned above.
adding affiliate codes to some URLs typed into the address bar
Again shows that they never actually tried the browser, they’re just jumping on the hate bandwagon. It never “rewrote” url’s, or “hijacked” anything, it suggested them, which the user could optionally click on, this is a very significant difference to “hijacked”, or “rewrote” as that’d be malicious, whereas with this approach the user chooses. This was later removed.
use vivaldi
Vivaldi is not comparable brave in terms of all the hardening they’ve done. Firefox is a great alternative, and that’s what I myself use, but I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people, especially if they’re coming from something like chrome.
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Quite the opposite, brave’s defaults are very good. An alternative to brave on the firefox side would be librewolf, which gives firefox great defaults, but the issue with that is that they disabled auto updates, and there’s still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager (even though many exist).
bullshit integrated into it.
And again, there’s no “bullshit” if you don’t explicitly opt into the crypto.
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They are constantly bugging you to sign up for it
No, the browser asks you once.
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I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people,Why exactly? The tricks like “optional things to click” are explicitly targeted on less tech savvy people and defeat the point of privacy focused browsers.
Why exactly?
Because with firefox, they’d have to install arkenfox’s userjs, change some defaults like the search engine from being google out of the box & add ublock origin, for it to be an alternative. Which for some people is overly complicated, in which case brave comes in handy where you just install it and don’t need to change any settings. It doesn’t use google for search, sync & google safe browsing are implemented in a privacy respecting way, it has an adblock & some resistance to fingerprinting ootb.
Now librewolf does exist as a firefox based browser with good defaults, but on windows unless you’re using a package manager, it won’t auto update.
Just getting somebody on Firefox with ublock origin is enough IMO. I’m not going to also remove their ability to use Google search. Especially if they’re older. I am very privacy oriented but you have to make some compromises for people lol.
Those are choices, not requirements. Using Firefox is better than using Chrome. Doing the extra stuff is even better, but if doing that means someone gives up and goes back to Chrome, that doesn’t help, either.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Never started. What have they done now?
Nothing new. It’s just an overview of how shady and scammy the browser is. I still see a lot of people recommending it without knowing the backstory.
The article states nothing but misinformation, the first heading is literally about the author’s politics, unrelated to the browser. And the 2nd & 3rd indicate that he’s never installed brave in his life, he’s simply regurgitating other people’s hate.
