- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
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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
Say no more fam.
Truly no atonement can be sufficient for a sin that grave
TL;DR: The article claims that the Brave web browser is bad and should not be used.
The author points out that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, co-founder (and ex-CEO) of Mozilla, and founder of Brave, donated 1,000 USD in support of a proposition to ban same-sex marriage. Along with making the claim that Brave’s goal is not to act as an ad-blocker, but instead to build and grow their own advertisement network, and he also believes that the network has several flaws:
- Brave Ads paysout in a form of cryptocurrency, called BAT (🦇).
- As BAT is a cryptocurrency there is high volatility.
- BAT can not be redeemed for fiat (“actual”) money directly from within the Brave Wallet.
- The author also believes that “it [the network] has largely failed” but that it “has generated a lot of revenue for Brave,” via the ICO (Initial Coin Offering; IPO for crypto).
In addition to these key points the author also:
- Claims that Brave prompted FTX, before the scandal.
- Cites the The Brave Marketer Podcast where ex-CMO of Crypto.com Steven Kalifowitz shares an ambitious goal of being a “‘brand like Coke and Netflix.’” The author then mentions that:
- In 2023 there was a report from The Financial Times that Crypto.com traded against their customers.
- In 2022 the company try to hide the severity of its layoffs.
- Mentions Brave’s integration with Gemini, and how the crypto exchange is under investigation for lying about FDIC insurance.
- Mentions a partnership with the the 3XP Web3 Gaming Expo where they sponsored the Esports Arena and rewarded contestants with the BAT token.
- Claims that Brave added affiliate/referral codes to URLs, such as “binance.us.”
Finally, the author lists Firefox and Vivaldi as alternatives to Brave, and ends the article with “Brave Browser is irredeemable, and you should not use it under any circumstances.”
I am human, please let me know if I’ve made a mistake.
Edit: Fixed bat emoji and typo.
The author points out that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, co-founder (and ex-CEO) of Mozilla, and founder of Brave, donated 1,000 USD in support of a proposition to ban same-sex marriage.
My impression was Brave got started after he got hoofed out of Mozilla or left on his own accord after the backlash for showing his ass to be a homophobe. Redditor types were of course very angry about this blatant disregard for frozen peaches and jumped onto his new venture in droves
afaik he was pushed out of mozilla over the same 1k dono
As BAT is a cryptocurrency there is high volatilability (I don’t know if I spelled that right :/ ).
Volatility :-)
But Volatilability sounds cool
Very volatibable word
Agree :-D
Thank you, I fixed it!
These guys tried to get a previous employer of mine to advertise with them. It works great if your entire audience is tech bros. Ours was not.
If he’s bad, shouldn’t everything he touches be bad? Why web site that uses JavaScript should be just as bad. Any browser based on Mozilla should be bad. Why is it just Brave that’s bad for what he did in 2008?
As I understand it, the argument isn’t so much “if you use a thing made by a bad person, you are a bad person by association” but rather that using a commercial product made by a bad person, who spends his money on bad causes, is directly helping him spend more money on said bad causes. Since he has never apologized or shown any indication that he has become a better person, not wanting to monetarily support him is a valid reason to not use his product.
It’s really hard for the creator of Javascript to make money off of javascript, and it’s unlikely he has any financial interest in the Mozilla corporation anymore since they’re a nonprofit and thus don’t have share holders. However, he directly profits off of Brave.
Because it is cool thing to cancel everything in 2023.
No. Couldn’t care less what the founder did or didn’t do. We need as many non-Google browsers as possible. The problem with Brave is that it is a chromium browser.
I’d say being chromium makes it a Google browser…
I mean, does that mean Edge is a Google browser, too?
Chromium is open-source. Even if Google adds something malicious to the source code (such as that Web Environment Integrity stuff), it can be removed by someone else creating their own browser based on Chromium. That’s the very definition of open-source.
Related side-note: Lemmy itself is open-source, too. If the creator of Lemmy added something to the software that someone running an instance didn’t agree with, they could simply fork the original software and remove the unwanted addition. Some people do disagree with that person’s views, and yet they’re still here. Many of them joined .world and other instances instead of .ml because they disagreed with the creator’s views.
While Google, the creator of Chromium, isn’t a good company for the consumer, I personally think Chromium itself isn’t a bad idea. It’s just that Google and some other companies modify it for their own means, and those means aren’t always consumer-friendly.
All that to say: while the company that originally created Chromium is bad, the software isn’t. And while some of the companies and people using that software are bad (including Brave, IMO), some of them are looking out for their users’ interests, and those forks of Chromium are generally ok. (You should still actually do research and not pick a fork because the company developing it said it’s okay, though. Take a look at what others are saying and verify it.)
I mean, does that mean Edge is a Google browser, too?
Yes.
All that to say: while the company that originally created Chromium is bad, the software isn’t.
Only to the extent that websites are built for chromium compatibility, due to its monopoly on the internet. It’s great software because it’s the most popular software so all other smaller providers that serve that software have to focus their resources into ensuring compatibility. Chromium(Blink) itself is pretty mid, and definitely equal to WebKit or Gecko, not better or significantly worse.
Brave works for what I need it to do. I don’t like lending credence to bigots(secret or otherwise) but if someone is gonna say “don’t use this browser” they need to list a replacement that has the same functionality. And it can’t be “just use duckduckgo” because we all fucking have that on our phones and none of us can use it as our primary browser and we all know exactly why. 😒
What’s wrong with Firefox?
Nothing. I use it all the time.
A little slower, but nothing. Mullvad is pretty good. A mix of Firefox and Tor.
On Android, Firefox is still less secure than Chromium-based alternatives: Mozilla’s engine, GeckoView, has yet to support site isolation or enable isolatedProcess.
For me personally, the one and only reason I don’t main Firefox is because it doesn’t work with Chromecast and I use that a LOT. I would switch to FF tomorrow if I could easily and reliably cast with it.
getting addicted to proprietary software is a terrible idea. this is just the first of many losses you will have if you stick to that tech
It works almost exactly the same as Chrome.
It has a monopoly on being non-Chromium based
Chromium is the browser monopoly.
Woosh
Why?
As far as I’m aware, the ddg browser collects data and they sell it to Microsoft. The search by itself is fine though.
Do you have a source for the claim that DuckDuckGo browser is selling user data to Microsoft?
You might be referring to the time when the DuckDuckGo browser was blocking all known trackers except Microsoft trackers. After that information was made public and users complained, DuckDuckGo was able to renegotiate its agreement with Microsoft so that it can block their trackers.
Furthermore, DuckDuckGo now publish their blocklist on GitHub.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts
So this privacy issue has been rectified now. But even if it hadn’t, failing to block Microsoft trackers isn’t the same as collecting data and selling it to Microsoft.
But if you are aware of DDG browser selling data to Microsoft, please share a source.
Really? I thought that used Bing search as backend but not that they sell your data
No, you have it right. That person is just conflating the controversy over their agreement with Microsoft as “ThEY’re sELLiNg yOuR DaTa”. 🙄
In fact. Mozilla rely more in Google. If i wasn’t mistaken 90% of their money came from Google and they rely Google safebrowsing wherein it exposes your IP to Google
no one wants to secure their web render so they’ll always use whatever is native to the platform.
on windows that’s chromium. on macos that’s webkit.
What does this even mean. Chromium or Webkit are not “native” to an OS. OSs don’t magically include browser engines, its not a critical component of an OS either.
Most OSs do come with browsers preinstalled, but they are programs just like any other. You can remove Safari from macOS (albeit its pretty hard because root is read only and signed), you can remove Edge from Windows. In my desktop with Windows 10 the only browser I have is Firefox (not even Edge), does that make Gecko the “native” browser engine?
If anything, the native browser engine for Windows would be MSHTML from Internet Explorer.
you’re overthinking the word native.
You’re still not clarifying what you mean.
So what is “native to the platform” according to your definition?
By your definition. If I bought a phone and Facebook came pre-installed it means that Facebook is native to my phone?
Yes. That’s exactly what his definition means.
I can kinda appreciate what he’s trying to say, but I think “default” might be a better word than “native”, but I’m not an expert.
What?
what’s your confusion
Chromium isn’t native to Windows. iOS is the only OS (I’m aware of) where browsers are forced to use a specific engine, but even that will be changing
you’re overthinking the word native.
No, I’m not. Chromium doesn’t exist in Windows unless you install a program that includes it. Chromium web engine is “native” to the chromium web browser, not to any OS (except maybe ChromeOS). As espi mentioned, Internet explorer’s mshtml is the only engine “native” to Windows. Just look at the Opera browser, they changed web engines from Presto to chromium; that’s not using “what’s native to the platform” (Opera works across all OS’s with chromium, except for iOS for the restriction I mentioned before), it’s using what the developers/company want to use to render their pages. Nothing in Windows itself provides any of the chromium engine “pieces”
This was true until Edge transitioned to Chromium. Now the natively installed browser in Windows is Chromium based.
Edge is using EMET for memory protections.
Chrome has EMET disabled because it’s own memory protections conflict and it just won’t execute.
When you’re make a web view for Windows you’re either bringing a long your own rendering or using Edge because it’s included.
No one wants to secure their own rendering which is why they all use whatever is already there which is EMET which is a pita to test so they just go with Edge.
native is just jargon for “what is already there.”
The fact is i don’t care about these things. All it matters is that Brave uses Chromium, therefore I’ll never touch it.
@whou Don’t forget the time they made it possible to ‘donate’ to creators, but when creators weren’t signed up with their program #Brave would just keep the donation. So users would think they have donated for example to Tom Scott, but in reality he never received anything. Overall just a scummy company.
after 90 days, they just send the BAT back to you. They don’t keep it.
He could receive it, if he signed up though, right?
[Eich] 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.
Even though I do not agree at all with the donation and support - out of the things that influence me into choosing a browser, 15 year-old private donations of appointed CEOs is pretty low on that list.
And the whole BAT thing is opt-in and they’re very transparent about it. I don’t get why people get so triggered when the C word - crypto - is involved.
I think the only relevant criticism I see is adding affiliate codes to urls (until they were caught).
The author also forgot the polemic of adding twitter and facebook trackers to the whitelist, and impersonating people in their ads. There are some interesting criticisms against brave, I don’t understand why their detractors are obsessed with the CEO and crypto.
Exactly. They do a lot of things I don’t like, which is why I don’t use them. However, I do recommend them over Chrome if someone isn’t willing to use Firefox (or Safari on iOS with an ad blocking extension).
That said, the ad replacement thing was an interesting idea, and if it got better click-through rate while preventing sites from stealing PII, they probably could’ve cut a profit sharing deal and users would’ve been better off vs the status quo. They could also have a “premium” option where they pay a certain amount for no ads, and that amount gets split with websites who would normally serve ads.
There are some good ideas there, but unfortunately the good ideas don’t seem to have really worked out as intended. I still think they’re better than Chrome, but things can change.
BAT can be distributed to publishers of content you go to based on percentage of visiting those sites. You can purchase BAT or subscribe to the ad program. Nobody in this thread knows even the basics of BAT, smh.
Yes, it’s possible, but that’s not how it works in reality.
I think it’s a good idea, but with some missteps by Brave. They need to get sites on board before I can truly recommend them.
Well nobody is perfect, this thread is making that abundantly clear. If they were still doing all that shit years later everyone might have a point. Make mistakes and learn from it and move on is the only thing I can really ask of anyone. Brave is doing the right thing IMO. As to your comment about BAT, it’s the classic problem of what came first, the chicken or the egg? Not recommending it because it’s not being used so nobody’s recommending it lol.
I don’t recommend it because there are better options. Firefox is privacy respecting, and since it still has an independent rendering and JavaScript engine, it’s better for open web standards. On iOS, all browsers have the same rendering engine as per Apple’s rules, so I recommend Safari with an ad blocker.
If Brave actually offered something tangibly better for the open web, I would recommend it. But it doesn’t, so I recommend something that does.
However, if you need a chromium-based browser, I think Brave and Chromium are about on par, so I recommend both.
Searches: Firefox sends Mozilla what you type into the search bar and Mozilla may share that data with its partners.
By default, pocket makes suggestions to you based on your browsing history and then the aggregate of that is sent to Mozilla. How is that privacy respecting again?
But the data collection sounds like it’s counter to its supposed goals. Multiple campaigns have been discussed that just make it believe they don’t actually care about privacy considering all the ways they keep trying to do stuff is counter to that. Why stay? Tor Browser is available. Hell, Firefox itself is already able to take you pretty far and extensions can do the rest.
Why make the sacrifice of your personal data? Like, how many attempts at collecting personal data do you need to have occur before you realize it’s always been their goal?
Of appointed CEOs who quit after 11 days to boot. But he was CTO prior.
But looks like he was largely ousted very fast with all the negative PR Mozilla was getting.
I would also imagine there are a lot of people that did not support same sex marriage back in 2008 that do now. I do not know the Eich personally, but it doesn’t make sense to hold this stuff against people until we find out if they have or haven’t changed their views.
15 years ago isn’t that long ago - and there is a huge difference between “not supporting same sex marriage” and “donating against same sex marriage”.
TBH it’s not that he opposed same sex marriage that bothers me. People make poor decisions. It’s:
-
He donated to the campaign AFTER it became clear that campaign was using the funds to put up ads claiming gays were a danger to children.
-
His response to people working under him who were upset and had legitimate concerns they wouldn’t be treated fairly was: “the donation does not in itself constitute evidence of animosity. Those asserting this are not providing a reasoned argument, rather they are labeling dissenters to cast them out of polite society.” He has never withdrawn this insult and made little attempt to deal with it before or after becoming Mozilla CEO.
I’m also pissed that the right wing has managed to lie about what happened to the point that if you go against the false narrative, that falsely claims Eich was fired from Mozilla for his hateful views, he was actually promoted to CEO and resigned after a lot of outside pressure made it clear he was harming Mozilla by keeping the role, then you tend to get flamed, downvoted, modded “Troll”, etc in most tech forums.
I’m inclined not to boycott products because I dislike the people who made them’s views, but that said I don’t particularly want to find I’m contributing to the monetization of something that goes to a homophobic asshole, especially at a time when LGBT people are under attack at a level I haven’t seen in 30 years. So I will not be using Brave for that reason, regardless of what I think about the product technologically.
-
15 years is a long time. I know someone who did a complete 180 on their beliefs within a few years: from a conservative, homophobic, and religious pov to the exact opposite. I myself changed some political views I had 5 years ago.
I have no idea about Eich, but if I let this affect my choices of anything, frankly I won’t do anything else in my life facing the millions of variables before me.
It’s not like he’s backed down from his position against gay people over the years.
I don’t use it because the UI and logo are ugly
Honestly…
Based
I don’t use it because it has crypto bullshit.
Firefox is way worse. Fucking bookmarks don’t even have icons half the time in shit-ass Firefox and it’s dated as hell. Fuck firefox.
I mean… I’ve been using Firefox since Google silo’d all log-ins together.
On the other hand, search.brave.com is freaking incredible. It’s so much better than Google, Bing or DDG at this point, it’s shocking. I switched a couple weeks ago and it’s surreal to see so many usable, useful results on the first page again.
Tried it for a couple of weeks and went back to DDG. It’s way better for programming and other geekie stuff imo.
You mean DDG is better for programming or Brave Search is? I’m finding a lot more useful stuff via Brave for whatever reason currently.
(I guess results may vary though if that’s not the case for you!)
I meant that DDG is better for programming.
Try Startpage And you can use addons to filter out bad results, if that helps. Brave search definitely is potent.
Cool! I didn’t think of that, but it would do the trick, you’re right.
(I was hoping for it to be in the popup list of search engines, I guess.)
Please stop reposting this crap every fucking day. What’s up with you and this exact article in particular anyway? Are you getting paid or something?
Fine, but, like, don’t recommend Vivaldi. Also, if you disable the Brave ads, you’re not really supporting them, while still getting the benefits.
— Sent from Librewolf
why not vivaldi? i know it’s not open-source, but is there any other reason?
For something as important as your web browser, that’s a pretty good reason to me.
reasonable!
Vivaldi is chromium
oh right, of course! for some reason i was only thinking of which chromium-based alternatives we could recommend.
You shouldn’t use Brave simply because it’s heavily infected with crypto shit and tries to monitorize your web browsing time by default. Not everything you do has to be a side hustle.
Sure you can “switch it off” but then why not use something else in the first place that’s focus isn’t trying to make money out of you. If Brave ever gained any decent market share the web would be an even shitter place than what Google is suggesting at the moment.
and tries to monitorize your web browsing time by default.
As does Firefox
Brave is used for anonymity that nothing else offers, so what other option is there? I like and use firefox but it’s no Brave.
you seek the crypto miner in the brackground running and want ads injected even you have adblocker on? Use librewolf its a more privacy focused firefox
Does librewolf have tor built in?
Have librewolf screwed users over? with replace ads, claiming referal links, ceo = sshle, secret cryptominer. And why would you NOT use the tor browser as it would reduce the possibility of that *ss ceo spying on u to 0.
Just use TorBrowser, then.
ah nice! I’ve never heard of that one before.
did not know about the founder’s past, cheers for this. whenever i’m forced to open a chromium browser for something from now on, i’ll be using vivaldi.
To be honest the best chromium based browser I’ve used (when I’m forced to use a chromium based browser) is the Samsung internet one. It has a dark mode that actually works and protects my vampire eyes lol.
Never used brave because I heard all of the scammy ad network and crypto stuff years ago, immediately put me off it. Now learning that the creator probably hates me, it’s just another reason not to touch it.
As if people really using a browser with a built-in advertising network.
Apparently yeah. For 1 US dollar a month in highly volatile crypto.
Like Firefox?
No, this article is pretty much idealistic rant aimed at hating the ceo. The product is fine.
Edit: the ads and crypto are opt in. I’d like to see if anyone ranting here about them has actually used Brave and went so far as to opt in to things they don’t want
I don’t use it because if I had to pause to laugh at the self-seriousness every time I opened a browser, I would get even less work done than I do now
