- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.world
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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.
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
Also Mull and Iceraven from F-Droid
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?
Mullvad , LibreWolf and Tor.
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.
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.
People that use Brave always remind of the people pushing crypto.
Seems like the Venn diagram of those two groups approaches a circle, if the OP is any indication.
I use firefox as my main but have brave as my chromium/PWA browser because I don’t really fancy using edge or chrome
What other browsers out there support PWAs that are less spyware-ey than the big names
Chromium is pretty safe to use. There are also builds of “de-googled Chromium” available.
Vivaldi, though it’s source available rather than fully open source. It’s mostly the frontend JavaScript (I think?) code which is proprietary.
Apparently, if you know enough to understand it, you can technically work out what all the proprietary code is and does because it’s all fairly simple stuff and separate from the Chromium base (which they make available on their site), although distributing it would be against their ToS (I guess it’s technically reverse engineering, which is also against their ToS).
It’s been a very long time and I can’t actually confirm that for the current release, but it was at least true a few years ago when someone who knew far more about programming than me mentioned it on their forums. I think some people took a look at it and found some basic theming stuff, but nothing nefarious.
They have a fairly solid privacy policy last I checked. They also have no intention of sticking with Google’s v3 plans.
The only thing I don’t like is they run a daily user count check by pinging their servers. They’ve made it so that there are no IDs, anonymized or otherwise, but it’s still a bit of a black mark on an otherwise decent piece of software.
Firefox supports them
Firefox does not support PWAs on desktop, but there is an extension to enable them which works well.
Out of curiosity, why would you use PWA on desktop?
test my own PWA of websites I’m developing
changing browsers or keeping both open breaks the workflow and sucks. and it’s pretty damn slow for me too
There’s sometimes desktop functionality like saving music on yt music
Also having them in their own window/their own shortcut is pretty handy and firefox doesn’t support shortcuts either nowqdays
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Which is all the reason I need.
If he had changed his tune since then and done something to offset that, I might be willing to cut him some slack.
But, instead, he seems to have doubled down…
They had me at invented JavaScript
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
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.
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.
Nor has he repented.
That’s the important point for me.
People can change after 20 years. But he prefers to double-down instead.
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 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.
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.
They offered a tenuous high yield lending program, that the SEC only jumped on after it collapsed from the FTX contagion. Litigation is pending afaik and depends on whether the program qualifies as a security, but the SEC has been losing ground in their optimistic claims of what they think qualifies as a security (outcome of Ripple lawsuit etc.).
Don’t get me wrong, any such program is sketchy and I trust Gemini less for having offered it, but IMO it doesn’t put them on the same tier as an exchange like FTX or make me think they would inject malware into software they have a connection with.
Yeah that’s fair. I’d say it falls into the same boat as the argument against the CEO; they haven’t done anything clearly malicious, but their bad decisions are enough to give you pause and reconsider.
Yeah this article is not very convincing
Brave is great! No ads, Tor built in, and can install Chrome extensions. I don’t use their crypto wallet and it’s never bothered me
Ad will be injected soon. Tor is not built in.
Tor is not built in
Source? I’ve used Tor with Brave
You’ve used onion links. Brave implemented unsecured onion protocol in thier Chromium browser.
Anything using Firefox as a base can run onion links with a simple add on because Tor is just Firefox. Vivaldi comes with onion support right out of the box, doesn’t support hate and is malware free.
I use brave and think it’s the best browser available, so I’m not arguing against it or anything, but technically it just supports use of the onion protocol, it does not provide the same full suite of protections that the tor browser does
As Brave says themselves:
For users who currently require leakproof privacy, we recommend using the Tor Browser, which provides much stronger and well-tested protection against websites or eavesdroppers using advanced techniques to uncover a true IP address.
The moment my cryptofan buddy started talking up brave, I knew it was time to uninstall.
It should’ve been as simple as stop using any chromium-based browser, but the CEO is also super bigoted, doing ad theft, and pushing crypto scams.
Even the crypto people don’t generally like him. He tried for Bitcoin integration first and got booed away before starting an ICO - nothing about this needed another coin. Pay-to-surf is a Turing test; his idea doesn’t even work in theory.
Stop telling me what to do
Don’t stick your fork in the light socket!
Now it makes sense why some of the Fox News-parroting, right wing people I know use Brave. I had no idea about what the author mentioned about the browser, I just know it is based on Chromium which I will not use. Thus, I am on Firefox. And for many reasons, including those the author laid out, I’m happy I chose wisely.
Don’t need to tell me twice. I’ve distrusted Brave since I saw their advertisement for it. It just feels like they sell the browser in same mood as pyramid schemers does their products.
But its just my gut feeling. Got no good reason why people should avoid the browser. And because the CEO is an ass isn’t a good enough reason for most people.
if you useanything alphabet like chromium, then YOU are the problem.
Firefox ftw
Isn’t this like the fourth time this has been posted? the conversation always goes around in circles with nobody changing their mind.
I never used brave. I wasn’t interested in it since I learned it was chromium and all the crypto stuff.
I used to think Brave was good until I found out they are into crypto.
Nope Nope and Nope! Not using that thing again. Firefox is my friend now.
