What a strange take. I switched from Opera to Firefox like 15+ years ago (whenever Firefox added extensions, so I could use Mouse Gestures (why I was on Opera in the first place))

I never have issues with compatibility or speed. I don’t use Google products so I don’t have Chrome to compare it to, but it’s certainly as fast as/faster an IE/Edge.

Wow, that is quite a presumption there. Every couple years I try Chrome again and I am done with it in a few hours. The thing is archaic and its interface uncustomizable. And the only reason it could maybe have more compatibility is because of its market share and peoples’ bias towards it. There was once a time over ten years ago when it was good, but it’s not anymore. Not to mention the privacy issues.

Firefox has been my browser for 10 years or longer.

How so? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything negative against the company, but I’d love to know if I missed something.

ah, that would explain it, thanks!

I’ve been using brave browser for years and, while I vaguely know what you’re talking about, it’s not something I’ve ever even looked at.

The defining feature of Brave for me has always been the built-in ad blocking.

Yep, exactly my thought too. I’ve made too many hops but none of these products truly offer privacy.

I moved from Telegram to Signal for security only to learn more and more about the holes in Signal. At least Proton Mail is fine.

There are adblockers extensions for iphone, like adGuard. It will remove ads on Safari (doesn’t work with other browsers unfortunately)

You can with Firefox Focus! Though to be clear, safari with AdGuard is much better. Even better when used together NextDNS and the HaGaZi blocklist.

You can use pihole and route your traffic there with a vpn such as tailscale to block ads and more

You can literally choose the quantity that you want to see though. You’re choosing to have them pop up, and how often, based on how much you want to earn. You can choose none, or every option between 1 and 10 per hour. I choose 10 because then I get paid the most and I literally just click “close” on the little popup that comes up in the bottom right of the screen, or I just ignore it.

Have you actually used it?

No. The ads from brave itself are only on new tabs and notifications.

They do that, but not in that way. The websites will appear without ads, but once in a while their ad will pop up in a new window/tab. This is optional though

No, you can take your own BAT out and sell it. It’s been some time but I believe they have a function to sell directly on an exchange. Else, you’ll need to buy Ethereum and use it to transfer to any other exchange

I’m on an iPhone, which I why I don’t use all the other things Android people suggest.

Brave has been about the only thing I’ve found that works and is easy for iPhone.

Yes. That is political affiliation. You might not share it, but whether same-sex marriage should be legal is absolutely a political question, even if it is now outside the Overton window.

Personally, I’m not sure I support any form of state marriage, but if it exists, it should include same-sex marriage.

So he was fired for his political affiliation.

deleted by creator

A necessary evil sadly. Never enjoyed having to program in JS, but I enjoy all the fanciness and convienence it brings the UX.

It has nothing to do with it, but I was commenting on a parent level comment to add more info about the stunts they pull that reduce their credibility, making it relevant to the parent comment, but not the overall post.

Ok.

Thank you.

Stealing referral URLs is lowest kind of spyware/malware tactics. Topmoxie which was another for of advanced java app coming with Limewire did it.

didn’t ddg have it’s own problems a while ago?

I don’t really wanna use a meta search engine that just pulls their results from bing or google though. That doesn’t seem like a sustainable way to build an actual alternative, since eventually google and Microsoft may just choose to change their api terms of service. I’d much prefer to support something independent if I can

Thats no reason for you to switch, just an explanation for why I went with brave. I switched to duckduckgo first and found the results weren’t great for me, so I changed to brave anf have found the results better, and they have their own index rather than taking other people’s search results, but instead they’re taking other people’s web content and selling rights to it 🙃. The company seems a little… Lacking :(

Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with additional privacy these days. Effectively is is what Startpage is for Google.

Brave Search is one of the only independent search indexes available these days. Others include Mojeek and Qwant, but neither are as good as Brave Search.

I mean personally for myself, was gonna use Firefox regardless- I’d rather support the open source option and web engine that isn’t chromium based; the question for me was whether to use brave search, and if brave search was providing rights to web content to those who’d like to use it for AI training. I had generally liked brave search okay as my google replacement (though I will say I tired quant looking for a brave alternative because of this article, and qwant is pretty good too! I’ve been impressed!)

Not disclosing sites are being crawled is iffy, but I genuinely do understand the justification given in the email reply that the article updated to add- as long as they’re not selling rights to other people’s content for AI training.

I’m a little out of my depth here from a technical perspective so that probably doesn’t help, but honestly between the comment provided by brave and the original authors interpretation of the email response they received, the whole situation feels pretty muddy. The author and brave seem to be kind of fundamentally at odds about what they’re describing brave as doing, so it’s a little hard to gauge. Even if brave is accurately describing the product they provide (“it’s an api you can make calls to to get ai outputs based on web content”) which doesn’t seem totally consistent with some of the descriptions on their api products page, it still feels somewhat ambiguous because of the fact that websites can’t opt out of their content being provided through an api, whether it’s been filtered through a LLM or not. It all seems very, very mudy; hard to make heads or tails of. I’ll be curious to see any additional updates to the article.

Most of the claims in the article have been retracted after Brave responded

That’s not true, the author pretty explicitly maintained the most important claims…

and the issue didn’t affect users anyway.

So…? You can do unethical things without it affecting the user…? There’s an argument to be had around whether it’s unethical, but it not affecting the user is frankly kinda irrelevant.

Also, Brave is a completely independent search engine now

Indeed! That’s why I was using them. If folks are looking for a brave alternative with their own index though, I’d say qwant has seemed very competitive, and it like their interface even better, though they do lack the helpful ai summary tool- perhaps both for better and worse.

which is why they have web crawlers like the guy in the article is complaining about.

That’s definitely not what he was complaining about. He was complaining about how they’re crawling the web. Tons of people have crawlers, but most do a better job of respecting website consent than brave seems to (even if brave may have understandable reasons, which they might), and that’s especially important given the broader context of the story.

Brave Browser has an opt-in feature for that where sites you visit will be indexed by Brave Search.

Yes, that’s exactly what I was referring to… It’s a cool feature, and I wish Firefox would implement it and maybe use the results to make an open source web index that any alternative search engines could use to supplement their own indexes in order to support competition with bing and google.

Brave Search is the only real contender to be an actual competitor for Google Search

That’s an entirely baseless assertion, I literally listed 3 alternatives to brave, all of which have their own index (and I’m pretty sure there are others, but I may be mistaken), and of those 3 I’d say qwant provides very competitive search results with brave, maybe even better. I plan to keep testing them but its cool for there to be more than one decent private search engine that isn’t a meta search!

All of their arguments against Brave really aren’t serious and don’t affect users at all.

That’s the second time you make this argument and it still doesn’t matter. If were to steal the entirety of other people’s content and copy it 1-1 without attribution that doesn’t affect users either, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean its okay. And I already explained that it genuinely is ambiguous whether what brave is doing is okay- if they’re selling people’s content to train large language models, that’s definitely serious, and for right now it does remain kinda ambiguous whether they’re doing that or not

I get that you’re frustrated and feel like people are biased against something you like, but getting angry, making poor arguments to defend a corporation that doesn’t care about any of us, and calling everyone who says they prefer not to support Brave is more shill-like behavior than the folks you’re frustrated with, it might be worth dialing it back a bit.

Edit: adjusted wording for accuracy, and some of my original wording felt a little more passive aggressive than it need end to be (and some of it kinda still is but I’m tired and don’t wanna edit more 😅 apologies for tone that comes across as somewhat hostile)

it is not lag as in slow, it has. weird scrolling glitch that make it look like a lag. Definitely not extension, because it happen on clean install too, and it is not only me. Plenty of people have it too if you google it.

come home, your mom died.

Core2duo with Nvidia 9400 does very smooth scrolling once you use Wayland. Yes, Linux of course.

They go into detail on their blog: https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/

its referring to their search engine’s ai summarizer feature, i found an article when searching op’s title, quite a low effort post really since only an image was shared and no link to any article… or any description whatsoever.

It just sandboxes your various logins to prevent leaking your browsing habits.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191006213746/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko

It seems they cancelled support for embedding gecko.

On the chromium side, there is the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) which is used absolutely everywhere. Not sure about gecko situation though, but at least their JavaScript engine, SpiderMonkey, also has quite widespread use. I don’t think I’ve seen projects not related with Mozilla/Firefox that use gecko though, but perhaps it’s because I never look hard enough. It’s usually either WebKit or CEF.

I believe libxul is their approach to having gecko as a separate library for others to use.

Brave provides a good balance between features and privacy for normal users.

I think many users will be uncomfortable with Mull and especially Librewolf.

(I personally use Mull but since it’s limited in functionality I sometimes have to switch to a more fully featured browser, that browser being Brave.)

Looks neat, but it still depends on Firefox so I don’t mind supporting Firefox which is our last bastion against a Chrome monopoly.

Normally I would agree with you, but I often need to use the Postman Interceptor extension which is only on Chromium browsers

Firefox performs as well as chrome 99.8% of the time. The problem is chromium keep implementing things that haven’t gone through the spec process fully yet. This causes the following situation:

The other browsers don’t implement half baked privacy violating features which Google decides will be a new web API despite objections. Developers build features on their sites using that half baked crap. Users try to use the new features on Firefox and kick off about “Firefox specific bugs” because they haven’t implemented non standard APIs.

Safari is its own kettle of fish though and causes a lot of drama. Recently they’ve caught up a lot in terms of support for most standard features developers want. However there’s a big issue with supporting iOS Safari - it’s version is tied to the iOS version of the phone. So users with older phones will be stuck forever on older versions of Safari with breaking bugs for things like flexbox. If you’re in a market with lots of older phones then you have to spend a lot of time ensuring you support that older browser version. iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.

One point for Brave, is that they have specifically said they will continue to support Manifest v2 in their browser.

Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information

Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.

deleted by creator

De nada.