I don’t trust homophobes or cryptobros, especially not those with a history of selling users out like Brendan Eich
People that use Brave always remind of the people pushing crypto.
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
WASM is basically Java applets but standardised, even acting as a binary blob to run websites in. Web applications written in frameworks like Flutter just render a fullscreen `` element and use obfuscated code to render what looks like a web page to a fancy picture element.
We lost the buggy plugins and the security holes, but the idea of “put a blob in a browser and run it” just keeps getting reinvented by browsers.
I love Brave, use it daily, and this article didn’t convince me at all. Vaguely motioning at the founder’s ancient political donations or the optional crypto features, doesn’t make a strong case.
2008 is not ancient. Nor is same-sex marriage some minor technical legal point.
Nor has he repented.
So? He’s the CEO of a company that already gets no money from me.
Online forums pick the weirdest hills to die on sometimes. You’ve probably used hundreds of products today alone made by companies whose CEOs are worse dickwads than Eich. But this gave you a chance to feel superior online so you had to take it lmao
As a gay Californian, I took prop 8 personally. I spurn its supporters as I would spurn a rabid dog.
Chromium should be enough of a reason to get rid of it.
You have the choice between the engine made by Google and the engine paid for by Google.
Brave at least has its own search engine, something Mozilla doesn’t even dare, as that’s where they get all their Google money from.
Or there’s Safari or Orion, neither of which are what you listed. Also, Firefox is not “paid for by google” they get funding through their nonprofit as well.
Also, Firefox is not “paid for by google”
Around 85% of the $450 million they get each year come from Google.
It’s not like google is guiding their development processes, come off of this horseshit.
something Mozilla doesn’t even dare, as that’s where they get all their Google money from
Or because they’re aware that it’d be a huge waste of time and money? It’d be a lot of work to build a search engine anywhere near as good as the existing alternatives, so it’d give worse user experience and waste time.
It’d be a lot of work to build a search engine anywhere near as good as the existing alternatives,
And yet Brave Search has done so. You got to have to come up with better excuses for Mozilla’s failure here.
Mozilla pushes DuckDuckGo. That is a feature, not a failure.
How exactly are they pushing DuckDuckGo by making Google the default? And anyway, DuckDuckGo is just a wrapper around Bing, so that’s not even much of an improvement.
You see, when someone is known to make bad choices it makes sense to approach what they do with apprehension. This guy not only has a history of bad choices, he’s also the CEO.
You’re free to do as you like of course, but I’d say it’s hardly fair to say the article is unconvincing.
Depends. As long as he doesn’t rub it in my face by putting it into the browser, I don’t care much. So I understand people who are pissed off because crypto is being rubbed in your face with Brave. But since I can disable that (and disabling it syncs to my other devices), I am also fine with that.
In return I get a browser where I like the sync model, with integrated Tor private browsing mode, and which is based on Chromium (which has sadly still the best dev tools, IMO).
Even MS Edge has some nice features and I used it for a while (I very much like that you can specify in which browser profile you want to open external links in). But they started to put more and more of their Microsoft bullshit into it with each version trying to sell me on all the different fucked up services they offer. Saying “no” once or twice: no problem. Saying “no” every fucking time they update the browser: fuck off.
Given their crypto functionality uses a third party which has been found to skirt the legal system I’d be a lot more concerned about this integration even if I don’t intend to use it.
Keep in mind the stuff you read about is only what has been surfaced so far. Who knows what skeletons are still hiding?
Personally, I don’t see any point risking it when there are perfectly viable alternatives such as Firefox. Granted the same guy infected Mozilla, but they stood up and ousted him so credit where credit is due.
Who knows what skeletons are still hiding?
Go and have a look? https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
My argument is that Brave is a Chromium browser with questionable business goals, but it is also the most private and secure, open-source, mainstream* Chromium browser. These keywords cannot be said about Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium and many other projects unfortunately.
That said, I primarily use Vivaldi because of its customizability and added features, something Firefox seems to reduce with every new version.
- Not quite on Edge or Opera level, and no accurate data can be found due to the removal of unique user agent, but nonetheless I’d argue it is more popular than others of similar kind.
Go and have a look? https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
Being open-source doesn’t automatically make you secure or reputable. Especially considering the open-source ecosystem in particular is a big target for exploitation right now. And auditing a software project of this size by its source code alone is no small feat.
it is also the most private and secure, open-source, mainstream* Chromium browser
“Mainstream chromium browser” is doing most if not all the heavy lifting there. Fair enough if that’s what you’re after, but mixing “private and secure, open-source” in feels disingenuous.
That said, I primarily use Vivaldi because of its customizability and added features, something Firefox seems to reduce with every new version.
Last time I played with either Vivaldi or Brave you had to literally monkey patch the source code in order to customize things further than what the extension SDK allowed you to. You could do the same thing with Firefox, except they make it slightly harder because much of the source code is shipped in archives.
That said it’s been years, maybe this can now be done purely through the extension SDK? It’d be news to me.
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.
Which forks do you suggest?
Not the OP, but here are some alternatives anyway.
Firefox:
Chrome:
I use fennec from F-droid on mobile
Not a single solid reason given in this unhinged rent except a mention of that affiliate link fiasco, which even they themselves agree was a major fuckup.
All BAT and crypto stuff are completely opt-in and it barely takes a few clicks to set the browser to never let you see that side of it again. As for Brendan’s political affiliations, most users couldn’t care less. He might as well be a
furryflat-earther but if the product is good, it is good. Stop acting like you’re sure all the things you use throughout the day aren’t made by people with doubtful leanings.I personally don’t use Brave on desktop, Firefox is good enough; but it is the best option on Android currently since Bromite is almost always a Chromium version behind whatever is current.
Edit: Just learnt that I was wrong in my perception of what “furry” meant. Reading the replies objecting to that reference made me dig a bit deeper and realise that it’s just a type of fandom, and not some sex-deviant cult that pop media made me believe. Sorry for the wrong example.
The very first reason seems valid to me. No way anyone should be supporting a hateful asshole like that. Anybody going around saying homosexuality is any less valid than heterosexuality has no place in our society anymore.
There is nothing wrong with Brave. It’s a great browser. I like the cryptocurrency aspect of it.
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.
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 speciSo 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.
Name an alternative browser that has the same level of ability to block trackers built in.
why does it need to be built in? What’s wrong with downloading one extension and being set afterwards?
bobthened
Okay, so name an extension that will provide the same level of tracker blocking as Brave does.
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.
I don’t know how you can follow web development and say Mozilla is a slave to Google. They go against nearly everything Google proposes. I get it that Mozilla makes money off of Google but in practice they are anything but slaves.
I don’t care what his political affiliations are, if the product works I’ll use it. What an absolute set of incompetent garbage.
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.
Stop telling me what to do
Eat your vegetables
What if I eat someone else’s vegetables?
What if they get really sick and die because you ate their vegetables? Ever think of that?
