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There is nothing wrong with Brave. It’s a great browser. I like the cryptocurrency aspect of it.
There is plenty wrong with Brave, the business.
Brave, the browser, is very useful in a practical sense. It has some nice features out of the box, and if you disable the naughty out of the box features it’s pretty decent. However, you have to trust that each update from the developer is good, and past experience raises very serious questions with this particular business.
Maybe you might be seeing some returns from the cryptocurrency. My undestanding is that users have lost far more than they’ve gained - and that’s before you actually look into the true value of what users are sacrificing in exchange for their tokens. Meanwhile, Brave are pulling a steady revenue making money from their users, milking them just so.
Crypto is a scam and you’re being duped.
“Crytpto” is not a scam. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the future of money.
There are a lot of shitcoins out there, but don’t let them fool you into staying poor. Fiat money is dying.
Crypto is a dead end at best, a scam at worst. I mined for years and can’t believe I drank the koolaid tbh
All money is fiat money. It has an agreed upon value outside of its intrinsic worth. If you want to get away from fiat money you have to go back to barter.
That’s not true. Fiat money is money created and managed by a government. We need separation of State and Money.
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun Legal tender, especially paper currency, authorized by a government but not based on or convertible into gold or silver.from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun economics Money that is given legal value or made legal tender for money debts by government fiat.from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun money that the government declares to be legal tender although it cannot be converted into standard speciyou should read “what is money” by mitchel innes. he shows very well that pretty much any money ever has been fiat money
So you prefer your currency to backed by the full faith and credit of… nobody? And you think you’re not being duped. Hilarious.
It’s backed by math. There is a fixed amount of Bitcoin. We have never had the concept of “digital scarcity” before. There are thousands of computers running independently that are following a consensus algorithm. it’s an open, permisionless, trustless system that anyone on the planet can be part of.
You would rather have money controlled by corrupt governments? Hilarious.
There is a fixed amount of Bitcoin.
That is part of the problem. As long as the economy grows, then Bitcoin is deflationary. This encourages people who have it to hoard it, rather than to move it around and drive the economy. It is almost perfectly designed to be used as a speculative investment rather than an actual day-to-day currency.
Having a fixed pool of money to represent your economy only makes sense if the total value of the economy will never change. This doesn’t happen in the real world. Populations grow, new technologies add value, and poverty generally goes down. This is all fairly simple math.
I think crypto could have its place as the cash of the internet. No one can watch your transaction, but if the other person takes your money and runs you are shit outta luck. No way to revert transactions, perfect for money laundering, but also anonymous, which can be a plus.
But all this makes it completely unsuitable in everyday use.
Also: yes, there is a fixed amount of Bitcoin. But you know what governments all over the world did when Inflation was sky high? Change the interest rates to change the amount of money that goes into the economy to make everyday items affordable again.
And for Bitcoin in particular, if everyone actually uses it as intended the artificial limit of the transaction rate would only allow you to perform one transaction every two yearsor something like that.
It’s backed by math.
No, it’s backed by the power grid. Shut off the power, and you have nothing.
Also trying to create scarcity in a realm where none actually exists shows how greedy and scammy it is.
It’s worse than any other fiat currency. There’s literally nothing behind it.
digital scarcity
ipv4 addresses. Also bitcoin is the worst example here, as it’s just an asset. It’s not bearable as real money, you can’t trust its always changing value. It’s also a victim of constant market manipulation. XMR on the other hand is a relatively stable currency.
Bitcoin is also a privacy and ecological nightmare.
In general it’s also really fun that you can lose all your money without doing anything wrong.Ah, I see, you think that because you can mint Schmecklebux or whatever and use it as a medium of exchange, you’re somehow exempt from the laws of whatever country you’re in when the trade goes down? Tell me, does your flag have a fringe on it?
Fiat money via WIkipedia:
Fiat money can be: * Any money that is not backed by a commodity. * Money declared by a person, institution or government to be legal tender,[5] meaning that it must be accepted in payment of a debt in specific circumstances.[6] * State-issued money which is neither convertible through a central bank to anything else nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[7] * Money used because of government decree.[2] * An otherwise non-valuable object that serves as a medium of exchange[8] (also known as fiduciary money).[9]Doesn’t have to come from a government. Crypto is three of these. The article even starts with “Fiat money is a type of currency that is not backed by a commodity, such as gold or silver.” Nothing about government there either.
at this point we are just arguing over semantics.
The differences and implications are important, and it’s hard to make a convincing argument if your base premise is incorrect.
Pwrsonally I don’t use Brave due to it being chromium, outside of that itis a good browser. If they were a firefox fork I would absolutely use them.
I love firefox. It’s my main browser for everything. When I need a chrome based browser for testing things, Brave is my go to browser.
Yepp, I started just using vanilla chromium though instead, as that offers a barebones option to guarantee I don’t need to mess around to test something works.
Brave has built in ad-blocking that is good to test against. One of our tools wasn’t able to submit new issues to jira because atlassian.net was being blocked by the browser.
“What if Chromium had its own fake money?”
Money is a social construct that only has value because people agree it has value. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the best forms of money humans have ever invented. Once we have privacy at the base layer, fiat money is dead.
Ha. Hu ha ha. Ha. Hahaha.
Money has value because it is an efficient medium to facilitate trade. Specific forms of money have value because of what backs it and it acts as a medium for trade. And yeah I’m sure what society really values will at some point be a money that limits the ability to deal with economic crises. Or that slowly disappears, because privacy Bob didn’t believe in banks but his SSD failed, or because Crypto Karen forgot her password. Or a hacker loots an exchange.
I mean, it’s not like those are fundamental problems that could bring an economy to it’s knees right? But hey, at least the money has privacy (it won’t) and we don’t have to worry about inflation (deflation on the other hand…).
Cryptocurrency is the most efficient money we have. It doesn’t require any middle man bankers. Sure, hackers can hack and loot exchanges, but right now we have the government looting us with inflation.
The problems you mentioned are being worked on. There are ways to backup and restore your wallet that will become easy.
The global economy doesn’t need to only rely on Bitcoin, so the argument that we have to worry about deflation is just wrong.
Cryptocurrency is the most efficient money we have
You are either misinformed or brainwashed.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitcoin-carbon-footprint-electricity.html
This is the wild west of innovation. Scammers like money, so of course they will be attracted to cyrptocurrency. They are also very attracted to fiat currency.
All of the references on that page have to do with random NFT projects and shitcoins.
You should try to separate the concept of “Crypto” from the concept of base layer blockchain protocols that actually have value.
you like baked in ads, crypto, falsely using people to promote your browser… oof
The browser works well. I am very much into crytpocurrency. I think Bitcoin and Ethereum are the future of money.
You don’t need to turn on ads in Brave. It blocks ads really well.
I’m personally like to stop using Brave, and I will, however while LibreWolf will be what I’ll switch to on desktop, I’m not sure what I would want to switch to on my Android phone. I see that LibreWolf doesn’t have an Android version (and potentially never will; fine, developers will do whatever they want). I’ve heard about IceRaven, however, I’m not sure how good it is. Also would like an actually privacy focused search engine, but I think LibreWolf might have a good list on that front.
(Note: please do suggest in replies, not sure I made that apparent)
What do you think about Torch Browser? Falkon? Dot browser?
I don’t use Brave, won’t use Brave, and have my reasons for it.
- Brave is Chromium based; a project which is slave to the whim of Google.
- Brave integrates an unnecessary cryptocurrency.
I hate shitcoins
I don’t trust small crypto projects, and I doubly do not want this to be integrated into my browser. It’s a good way to lose your stable crypto-holdings if you have them. (I don’t; but I’ve seen lots of anecdotes about catching malware that subsequently stole their crypto wallets, including any BAT tokens they owned)
- Brave does not block ads! It does not ‘enhance’ your privacy. It just absorbs some ads, replaces some, and blatantly lets first-party advertisements through the filter. That’s not ad-blocking
- Brave does not protect your privacy. As per my previous point; it does not block ads, it injects it’s own right into browser chrome! That’s worse than plain Chrome! Your privacy is automatically violated when you watch/view even a single ad.
- Brave does not have many benefits above “Ungoogled Chromium” or other competing projects. It just doesn’t. Unless you like marketing fluff.
- Brave is NOT BETTER THAN Firefox. It’s worse; because it’s Chromium; which is enslaved to Google whims. Don’t believe me? Try to contribute something to Chromium that goes contrary to Google’s stated goals and watch how fast you get shot down.
But sometimes...
Yes, Sometimes a programmer does succeed. But only sometimes; and this is usually because they have the clout, coding skills, chops and public reach to embarrass the fuck out of the Google PMs. This will never be you, unless you put an extraordinary amount of effort into becoming a very well known and respected contributor in the OSS space. If you already are a respected contributor in the OSS space, Congrats! You’re still likely to be forced to fight a long and protracted battle against the Google nerds to get “Google-Hostile” code changes approved.
Your last point is laughable.
Yes Brave cannot make commits to Chromium, but it makes changes to their own repos (well, obviously) and can also accept/reject changes Google makes to Chromium.
In my opinion, Firefox is more of a slave to Google than Brave will ever be because they rely entirely on Google giving them money for the default search engine.
Is Brave’s revenue model scammy? Maybe. But at least they aren’t Google little bitch.
mullvad browser is a great choice
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This is madness. How does this keep getting upvoted when the article has nothing to do with the actual code integrity and functionality of this browser.
At least it’s open source, if there is something shady point it out in the code.
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STOP USING JAVACRIPT
I don’t care what his political affiliations are, if the product works I’ll use it. What an absolute set of incompetent garbage.
I don’t care what rights they want to curtail, if they say they’ll lower my taxes by a nickel I’ll vote for them!
Some of us do care.
A product directly bankrolled by Peter Thiel? A project, not concerned about blocking ads but rather making sure that it’s their ads that you see?
If you’re on iOS. Maybe the EU will bail you out and force Apple to allow other web engines.
If you’re on Android, Firefox works perfectly well and Fennec is a fine fork.
If you’re on anything else, Librewolf is fork of Firefox without all of the Pocket and other privacy hostile default settings.
A project, not concerned about blocking ads but rather making sure that it’s their ads that you see?
Do you understand that it is completely opt-in and people get paid for those ads?
Someone’s been trying to push this agenda against brave, because I’ve seen this same post a few weeks ago.
It’s quite annoying, especially since most of these people complaining are keyboard activists and don’t do literally anything IRL
I currently use brave on iOS to block YouTube ads. Is there any other option right now? I’d be willing to switch.
The best solution on iOS is Yattee. You can add Piped or Invidious instances as locations and stream ad-free YouTube from there. Another solution that doesn’t involve Piped and Invidious is AdGuard. Open a YouTube link in Safari, hit actions, then hit Block YouTube Ads (by AdGuard).
Hey, thanks for the link/suggestion for Yattee! Never knew something like this existed for iOS.
If you don’t mind sideloading and refreshing the app from your PC every 7 days, I recommend (and use) uYou+ as a sideloaded app. It has PiP capabilities w/o needing premium, along with a built-in video downloader, sponsorblock, and adblock.
Firefox + ublock origin.
I just clicked through a few long youtube videos without hitting any ads.edit: my apologies, I missed your iOS problem.
They said iOS. There’s no extension support in iOS Firefox.
To anyone reading this article, only the first quarter of it is about the beliefs and political stance of the developers. The rest of the article after that goes into more technical reasons.
All I needed to read was in the first paragraph.
Brave Software, the company behind the browser of the same name, was founded by Brendan Eich. He’s best known as the creator of JavaScript from his days at Netscape Communications
I mean, JS is his baby that’s all there needs to be said about the person’s motivations.
“JS is his baby that’s all there needs to be said about the person’s motivations.”
“During these formative years of the Web, web pages could only be static, lacking the capability for dynamic behavior after the page was loaded in the browser. There was a desire in the flourishing web development scene to remove this limitation, so in 1995, Netscape decided to add a scripting language to Navigator. They pursued two routes to achieve this: collaborating with Sun Microsystems to embed the Java programming language, while also hiring Brendan Eich to embed the Scheme language.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
I think you’re confusing the reasons behind the initial intent of JS versus what it has evolved into almost 30 years later.
Imagine a world where Java integrated into the web was just as standard as JavaScript is now.
we were really close… I remember lots of placeholders for where Java applets were meant to be
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During these formative years of the Web, web pages could only be static, lacking the capability for dynamic behavior after the page was loaded in the browser.
And it was better. Frankly, http was a mistake, humanity would be healthier and happier if we stopped at gopher.
Very strongly worded, but yes.
Brave have had a history of controversy since their inception. Every time something happens, the CEO went on a marketing campaign across social media and drummed up enough new users to drown it out. However the attitude of the business is clear: it would take a very small sack of money for Brave to sell out its users.
If you’re going to use a Chromium web browser, there are non-commercial open source projects that don’t have a history of shady shit. However Firefox forks are better.
Absoutely. I mostly use Firefox because I’m so familiar with it by now but the privacy is generally much better and it doesn’t have a massive monopoly on the web. I’m just a lot more comfortable with it.
When I have to, I use ungoogled-chromium on desktop and Bromite on mobile. I recommend those to anyone familiar with Chrome.
Unfortunately Bromite has been abandoned, however someone has made a fork called Cromite.
Which forks do you suggest?
Other people have given desktop examples. For Android, I use Mull, which also has a companion Android System Webview implementation (Chromium) called Mulch. These are baked into the DivestOS ROM, which itself is a fork of LineageOS.
Does it support extensions like Firefox?
Yes, full support for desktop Firefox extensions. I think it also comes with uBlock Origin by default.
Just saw it does support custom add-on collections like Firefox beta and nightly… I’m going to give it a try
Edit: it supports startpage as search engine out of the box as well!
All I can say is try DivestOS :)
My opinion: It doesn’t have full customisation (compared to eg. CRDroid) but it does at least have call recording and long press back button = kill app process, along with traffic monitors for the status bar. All regular phone calls have a banner at the top reminding you that they’re not secure (as opposed to E2E encrypted chat calls over the internet) and Location permission settings seem to be a bit more expansive than other ROMs.
Mullvad , LibreWolf and Tor.
Not the OP, but here are some alternatives anyway.
Firefox:
Chrome:
Ok, but why? What’s wrong with Firefox and how do the forks address those points?
I posted the list of alternatives simply because OP asked for forks.
What’s wrong with Firefox
Me posting this list shouldn’t be an implication that I believe Firefox to be bad. I’m offering alternatives as the OP requests.
and how do the forks address those points?
Every one of the links I shared have detailed information about how their product mutates the original Firefox or Chromium browser. Do you really need me to copy-paste that information into a comment?
I use fennec from F-droid on mobile
Also Mull and Iceraven from F-Droid
I don’t trust homophobes or cryptobros, especially not those with a history of selling users out like Brendan Eich
Especially when there is Firefox and Firefox-based, privacy-focused alternative with great add-blocking and privacy extensions.
I don’t trust anyone who invented Javascript.
Im just waiting for Firefox mobile to add back support for all add-ons.
FireFox Beta and Nightly, and forks like Fennec and Mull from F-Droid support all add-ons.
https://www.androidpolice.com/firefox-beta-107-android-install-any-browser-add-on/
Have you tried Fennec? It’s a stable and up-to-date release of Firefox with full support for add-ons and about:config
Not all add-ons work for mobile, but many of them do. You just have to use the “save to collection” feature to add them. I’ve got sponsorblock working in mine.
I don’t know why but firefox feels sluggish compared to chromium based browsers on android
See, I’ve heard people say this, but this has not been my experience at all, and the data seem to support that it’s not slower on Android. If anything, it should be faster.
I always disable intrusive settings like “suggestions from sponsors” and “improve the Firefox experience,” so maybe that’s the reason?
Strange, I’m using Fennec so it shouldn’t be using any telemetry. But I’ll give it another shot for science
Could be a unique hardware thing as well. I have an S21 FE running the stock OS, but I’ve disabled certain system apps I find annoying, such as Samsung Internet and Modes and Routines
Mull supports add-ons. Also has a companion to replace the system browser Android System Webview, called Mulch.
