It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
It’s a for profit ad company making a “privacy first browser”.
Thinking for literaly a second about that sentence should tell you all you need to know.
you can do privacy friendly ads, it’s not because the entire industry has evolved to an horrible point that the good way of doing it can’t exist
This is true. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics used to run and maintain a good sort of ad service called Project Wonderful, that catered to webcomics and blogs and didn’t track users. Sadly he shut it down in 2018.
Currently I know of Comicad Network that’s trying a similar kind of thing.
Did it gettoo hard to run or what?
it’s the best browser out there right now. did you know it has the TOR net and ad blocking built in? great huh?
where does firefox make its money
IS IT FROM GOOGLE SEARCHES?
so what have the owners done to the lgbtq+ community in the last 5 years?
You should probably add /s to that, hah.
Customized firefox, zen browser, helium, and mullvad all with some kind of assortment of privacy extentions.
On Android, we got ironfox and cromite. most of the same privacy extentions are applicable.
If you want to use the tor network, go use the tor browser.
Frankly, I do not care that much that Mozilla makes most of its money from Google. I can change the search engine as the first thing I do and this fact simply stops affecting my experience negatively, especially on Firefox derivates.
- it’s fucking Chromium
Go use some Firefox-derivative like Librewolf or Fennec, like a sane person.
Yeah, this is important. Fuck Google. I will only ever use a chromium browser if I have to for work or for a misbehaving website.
I will reject the misbehaving website rather than resort to using Chromium.
Occasionally though, life requires using a shit website. I do avoid it if possible though
Your attitude is very reasonable. I strive to be as unreasonable as I can.
reference
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
This is hilarious for me if only because at some point ages ago I tagged you with, simply, “seems reasonable”.
Fortunately, I also agree with your reasoning for being unreasonable, thus returning you back to the realm of reasonability while striving to be unreasonable.
Self awareness is good haha
I don’t know enough about browsers to really know anything about chromium. But I did see a statement from Google which I believe stated that they were removing support for adblockers from chromium based browsers. It was at that point that I decided I did want to continue having a usable browsing experience, and immediately swapped.
Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features
Never used librewolf.
But it sounds like the conveniences you want are a compromise for fingerprinting.Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good.
The internet has been significantly ruined by large companies.
There is a loop where companies with the resources to create and maintain frameworks/tooling/whatever are large enough to help define “features” for browsers.
Browsers don’t make money, not really. To even be considered, they have to be able to run what the big companies are pushing.
All of this makes it very easy for smaller companies to deliver better websites. Or abuse the features big companies are pushing.It’s like: email was awesome, then spam emails happened. Websites were accessible, then SPAs happened. Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.
I don’t know what I am trying to say.
Other than browsers do not get the support they deserve to actually be decent unless they are backed by a company that wants to loss-lead them… Which has resulted in the web being pretty fuckedDon’t let perfect stand in the way of good.
Same can be said about fingerprinting protection.
Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.
Google’s quality has decreased, but other engines have improved, and LLM search summaries are really good (brave search is a good example of this)
I think LibreWolf enforces compromises I’m not willing to do, instead of using different techniques
I agree, I know why they do it and I can appreciate it, but it’s just not for me. I do not want my history and cookies cleared when I closed the browser, for instance. That is massively inconvenient and not really relevant to my “threat model.”
So I guess I wouldn’t say they are bad, but certainly not ideal for me.
What’s the problem with the defaults? I use pretty much the default settings with no issue
Forced English language, light mode, fixed window size or borders, cookies removed after closing, no history(? Not sure about this one)
Want those or just one of them? You have to remove ALL fingerprinting protections for some reasons. Might as well use Firefox then…
LibreWolf doesn’t update itself on OSes other than Linux, it’s a security nightmare for an average person.
No, go use Google Chrome like everyone else.
They also tried to get away with URL injection. Do not use Brave.
Basically the thing that turned the internet against Honey, but when a homophobic piece of shit does it it’s fine
Honey swapped the referal code when another reflink was clicked, brave only applied it’s own code when no referral was used. Not saying that it’s good but honey was purposefully robbing creators, often their own partners when brave only tried to make some money on the side.
They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
a for-profit company partially funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, of Palantir fame. the same Palantir spying on Americans in order to allow nazis to round up immigrants and throw them into concentration camps. the same Peter Thiel that said democracy is not compatible with freedom.
The same one who wants to create the apocalypse and believes the anti-Christ is anyone who isn’t fascistic
Just mentioned how I didn’t like people recommending this like last week and got “ok” as a response lol. Some people are just ignorant and don’t care.
ok
ok
Brave is just a shitty browser. Did not know they were anti-freedom kind of people. Makes browser no-no.
It’s laggy as shit on my iPad
It depends on what you are comparing it against
I did not know Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla and launched Brave because he was a homophobe who funded anti-LGBT+ campaigns 😬
He also created JavaScript, but I don’t see people getting upset and telling others to not use JavaScript.
Well, JavaScript has a lot of horrible features, but it’s ubiquitous and we’re stuck with it for the time being. Certainly it’s another thing to blame Eich for, rather than something that mitigates his other shitty behavior.
Didnt know JS can collect data and transmit it to their creator.
Neither does Brave unless you specifically opt in to those services. It’s open source, you can check for yourself.
yeah a few of these where made opt in after the userbase backlashed when they made them opt out by default
they actually have a tendency of making changes this way, i don’t see why i should trust them with anything
i’m very upset about it and keep telling people not to use it. have for like 15 years.
Removed by mod
a bad opinion is like thinking “how i met your mother” had a nice ending
actively donating to anti-LGBT campaigns is not a bad opinion, it is a hostile action
They added referrals to links you clicked. If there is one thing a browser should do its go to the link you click without modification.
As far as I remember, there is some browser with a feature of stripping tracking id from the URL, that is modification, but I find it good (if I can opt in, and if the feature is visible enough to know what to try if it doesn’t work)
And you chose to do that or it was a feature that was advertised to you. Adding referral IDs to links you click so the browser company gets money is not comparable to that at all.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that was crappy, just that not any modification of links is bad
I would argue that if you know your browser is stripping tracking info for links then the link you clicked on doesn’t have tracking information.
I use Firefox. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s not that bad.
And if I didn’t, I’d use Vivaldi. Only reason I don’t is I do prefer open source whenever possible and, well, Firefox isn’t Chromium.
Firefox is the only browser that has mobile extensions, making it the only choice
That’s also a good point.
But it kills the battery on mobile, even scrolling it choppy.
I switched to the Samsung browser a few years ago, I don’t know what black magic they do but it’s super smooth and light on the battery. It has some plugin support but I don’t use it so can’t comment much about it. It’s chromium based.
This is one from 2 days ago…
PS: it’s not some accounting trickery, if I load a few reddit comment threads to read on a plane the battery really lasts forever.
Yeah, that’s my point. 40m on screen 8.4% if battery.
I didn’t use it that much yesterday, but we can extrapolate…
What phone were you using?
I I’ve never had any issue with firefox, with regards to battery or scrolling, but i use 8 year old flagship (Got it used, I’m not Mr.Moneybags)… which is probably still better than a budget phone of today, though.
Relatively new Samsung S24 Ultra, similar as you: “old” flagship bought used. The scrolling on the Samsung browser is like an iPhone, with Firefox like a windows 95 :(
Happened with a previous Samsung as well. On my old oneplus everything was kinda choppy.
Well, Samsung is enshitified with its newer phones, that I have no doubt that an S24 would run non-samsung shit poorly to force you to use samsung shit.
Samsung was enshittified with their older phones too.
Pixels are shit too.
I had a One Plus 9 Pro and it was honestly my first phone that I traded in and felt like I got a huge downgrade. It just worked.
I doubt it’s on purpose, many other non-Samsung apps run fine, even when a samsung alternative exists, it’s specifically the browser that is weird. Which is a pity, since I do use Firefox on my desktop and laptop, but the mobile experience is just frustrating.
I have an s24 and had the same experience. Fennec F-droid worked better for me.
On my Z Fold 6, I do notice that Samsung Internet, Chrome, etc are smoother, that is absolutely true. It’s not really enough to matter to me, though, doesn’t really warrant being described as “choppy” in my experience. My default is IronFox with uBlock Origin.
LibreWilf is a good choice if you don’t want the Mozilla crap. Just make sure to turn off the cookie clearing and resistFingerprinting then enable WebGL in the browser’s settings.
Yeah it kinda mystifies me that anyone is still recommending that shitty bigotware.
In the emulation scene, RetroArch is in a similar boat if I’m understanding things correctly. Awful maintainers, but people keep recommending it and supporting it. Sucks too, because there are even fewer alternatives there.
I used retro arch a decade ago, and when setting up a emulation pi last year the consensus seemed to be batocera. No idea if its better, but it’s as easy to use as I remembered and my kids are still enjoying it, so not too unstable.
Batocera is a relatively minimalist Linux distro for emulation specifically. It’s one example that kind of highlights the problem I’m referring to. All of these retro software stacks still use RetroArch to varying degrees, and depend on it. Even alternative frontends like Emulation Station are just built on top of the same libraries. Or as another example, for most game systems, RetroAchievements only currently work on RetroArch.
Interesting, TIL.
My only issue with batocera is that GameCube was broken out of the box and I haven’t had the time to figure out how to fix it
Whats going on with RetroArch? I havent really paid attention/kept up since I set up my last Raspberry Pi.
This website details various issues. I’d suggest looking at the Byuu page - as I understand it the RetroArch devs played a large role in the harrassments that were being done to the developer of Higan/bsnes, which eventually led to them killing themself.
Did I miss what you’re talking about? It just mentions Xbox SDKs being proprietary, which I couldn’t care less about. Apologies if I missed what you mentioned
This is the page I’m referring to, where one of the main RA devs is shown saying a lot of really toxic things about byuu. It’s kind of hard to find any reliable info about the dramas, but there are various threads online where people bring up a number of dramas, like this thread.
Thanks for the context.
Also, the Brave defenders in this section… holy moly.
Some folks simply cannot admit they made a questionable choice. They picked it and use it, so everyone else must be wrong.
I’ve met people like this in real life.
It’s also a chromium browser.
It’s because no-one knows any alternatives.
If one wants a Chrome-based browser that isn’t Chrome, Brave is the highest-profile one by orders of magnitude. Next is a bunch of high-SEO scamware before honest projects like Vivaldi or Helium are even a whisper.
…So I don’t really blame folks for using Brave. They aren’t omniscient, and an honest effort to avoid Chrome is still a positive.
I have been using Brave for its out of the box ad and tracker blocking. I’d been uncomfortable with the new AI features and had always been skeptical of the crypto integration, but it wasn’t until this post that I realized it was appreciably worse than Firefox on those counts, nor how bad the people running it are.
Obviously, I’m now looking for other options. I’ve seen some good recs for desktop browsers elsewhere on this post, but what I’m not seeing is a lot of good mobile browser suggestions that will have the desired features. What would the folks here suggest for an e/OS browsing experience with similar or better privacy and ad blocking options? I know there’s Firefox, but A. With all the AI it keeps pushing, I’m sure there has to be better and B. I do also have mobile Firefox but have found it substantially less usable for my habit of browsing with a zillion tabs both non-incognito and incognito, so I mostly had only been it when I couldn’t get a video to play in Brave.
I am, obviously, willing to run de-Googled Chromium, but if something else is going to actually support 100+ tabs in a performant fashion I’d be happy to totally de-Chromium too.
I also use the shit out of profiles on Brave desktop, though mobile doesn’t support it. Do the Firefox forks like Waterfox have a similar option on desktop? Does another browser? I know it’s a feature Chrome has because I do sadly have to use Chrome for work, so I would expect at least the de-Googled Chromium-based ones would?
Firefox (and its forks) have an integrated profile manager, though it’s not always intuitive to figure out how to get to it. LibreWolf is the fork I seem to always go back to, and it has zero slop.
I use containers. Right-click on the new tab button and pick a container to open the tab in. There’s also an add-on that will do this automatically for you when you visit a specific website, so if you want every site to live in its own container, you can do that too.
Personally I just use its built-in cross-site cookie blocking, but multiple ways to do the same thing.
LibreWolf looks promising. No mobile app, but they recommend IronFox for that, so I just downloaded that to play with. Thanks!
Edit: mobile IronFox is looking pretty good so far. Made configuring privacy settings an option just out of the box, which I appreciate. Biggest problem right now is that I can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave.
LibreWolf
I had soooo many issues with LibreWolf, finally switched to waterfox. If this doesnt pan out, I quit the interweebs
I hope WaterFox pans out for you! Do you mind sharing the issues you had with LibreWolf?
LibreWolf is great once you get yourself onboarded. The onboarding royally sucks. You need to remember that by default LibreWolf is really locked down and it’s on the user to unlock the bits of it they can’t live without. For instance, by default LibreWolf clears its cookies every time you quit, which is great for privacy, but everything’s a tradeoff and that’s too much for me.
I’ve been using Vivaldi (chromium-based) for about three years now. It’s customizable and has been generally solid. Also has a couple of unique tab management features. Doesn’t have builtin ad blocking afaik. But for that I use adguard desktop and route all my traffic through it, which filters out ads regardless of which browser I’m in. On iOS I can recommend Orion by kagi. It’s the only other webkit browser besides Safari, runs light, and has decent builtin ad blocking
Vivaldi does have a built in adblocker but it’s not the best yet.
But it does come with a free tier of proton vpn. Great if you don’t need to use a vpn too often but need one in a pinch.
I wouldn’t trust anything Proton for security or privacy, but that’s a whole can of worms I’m not going to open right now.
Fair point, but as long as you’re not doing anything super illegal it should be okay. I only use the VPN service to torrent movies and tv shows.
Currently trying mobile IronFox. I’m liking the privacy options and how stuff like unlock origin is literally included in the setup process. Their dark mode is nice and they offer a lot of compatibility options.
Biggest downsides I’m seeing so far (I’ll see about keeping this updated as I go):
- Can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave, and I have looked extensively.
- No tab groups (not the end of the world, but it was a nice feature). EDIT: Looks like Collections does that! EDIT TWO: Not really good for Incognito mode though.
- Clears your browser history by default on close, which may be undesired behavior. (I personally tend to use incognito for most things and then transfer sites over to tabs in non-incognito (cognito?) modes if I want them available regularly, so for me this was undesired, but it was easy to turn off.)
- Brave had a built-in experimental dark mode to dark modify websites that I am not seeing in IronFox. I’m sure there are extensions that will do it for me, so I’ll go looking, but I just discovered so many sites I did not realize were light mode all along. Reading mode also does the trick for most articles.
Also 1. in Brave: Bookmarks and lists, Bookmark manager, three dot menu, Export Bookmarks, save the HTML file on your computer. Then in LibreWolf/IronFox/whatever: Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks, Import and Backup, Import Bookmarks from HTML, select that file.
I got the export step on my own, but I swear IronFox does not have the Manage Bookmarks option anywhere. Starting to think I’m just going to need to grab a Mozilla account, upload my bookmarks to LibreWolf on desktop, sync bookmarks, and pull them to IronFox that way.
There’s an add-on called Dark Reader which may help with number 4. I don’t know if IronFox supports extensions, but that’s the one you probably want.
Got it on both IronFox and LibreWolf. Not perfect, but neither was Brave dark mode. Probably going to have to disable LibreWolf’s anti-fingerprinting feature just so I can tell sites to use dark mode, though.
I use Vivaldi as a secondary browser, it’s not been too bad. Firefox is my primary, but I might go to a fork soon.
I have the habit of running Firefox on Android with thousands of tabs (before unloading them into a list on the desktop and cleaning them up). It does slow down somewhat, but not much.
FWIW I remember a former colleague who recommended it to me and his argument was about the cryptocurrency you “earn” from it.
I asked him if he could withdraw it. I asked him if he tried. He said not yet but he would. He came back to me few days later saying something along the line that “it’s not straightforward” which was a polite way to say he didn’t manage yet. He worked in IT.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s a scam or that one can’t use the crypto “earned” from it but at least back then, few years ago, some people were just riding on the hope, or even faith, that it would amount to something yet it seemed made in such a way to just hold.
So… not a scam but not exactly empowering users IMHO.
