- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@beehaw.org
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Today I learned that people take it VERY PERSONALLY when you criticize their chosen browser. 😂
Except for Internet Explorer. Because everyone can agree on: “What a piece of shit that was”…
We already had 2 browser wars.
the hateful browser
Holy shit man imagine if we judged every huge project by one asshole at the top. There wouldn’t be a single thing to enjoy in this world.
Edit:
I am going to add more perspective to this, because holy shit people are so into eating nothing burgers.
Reddit/Twitter was a database and API that everyone was centralized onto, there was no choice. Brave you can literally fork because its open source. Aside from that this was literally the CEO’s personal donation of $1000…in like 2014. Almost 10 yrs ago.
Elon, as CEO and on the X/Twitter brand:
- “brainwashed” https://www.news18.com/buzz/elon-musk-causes-uproar-with-anti-lgbtq-anti-vax-meme-insults-random-twitter-user-6714733.html
- https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-twitter-makes-millions-off-anti-lgbt-groomer-tweets-report
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitter-pronoun-rule-invites-bullying-lgbtq-groups-say-rcna87336
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-triples-down-on-making-twitter-terrible-for-trans-people/
Meanwhile Brendan:
- Literally stepped down as CEO https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-resigns-as-mozilla-corporation-ceo/
- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/
- made personal blog post about inclusivity shortly after https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
- invented and worked on/for javascript, brave, firefox
Gnubyte
Ok but like that asshole is using his money and power to donate to horrible stuff. Even if we take the stance that you shouldn’t let someone’s opinion ruin what they make, you’re still helping him support his causes financially through using his platform.
Or wow, it’s almost like people care about that sort of thing on the platform were most people came from Reddit or twitter because of the awful actions of their respective CEOs or something
Oh believe me I get it. But at the same time the CEO didn’t rename brave browser “anti woke browser” and force it to not load “woke sites man”.
Shits all open source right? Even if I disagree with him politically that’s on him. I can use my money to donate to my political designation and even fork the brave browser if I don’t want to support it.
Elon and Spez were one way no choice fuck you CEOs. We didn’t get much choice there. And they use their platforms to remind you of that. I don’t really feel like brave does that at all.
Edit: I’m also going to add that I don’t use brave. I also don’t care much about politics outside of leave me alone, leave my neighbor alone, and make things affordable.
If the huge asshole at the top uses their money earned as CEO to fund bigoted causes, yeah, I generally stop patronizing that business. Maybe you don’t have the energy to care about things, and that’s fine. Last time I checked, the Mozilla Foundation was still fairly ethical.
Lies. Your CEO is killing Firefox. They are working with Meta and Google.
Twitter.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
No. That is factually wrong. Brave is open source. This is more like if we discovered the creator of mastodon was donating any profits he managed to make to some bigotry party. You wouldn’t see me barking down the nice people who host mastodon or contribute to its code.
Separate the patrons, artists and art. Because it is not the same and that logic cuts all sorts of ways.
Don’t you don’t think that a CEO highly affects (if not sets and controls) the strategy, priorities and direction of an organization?
If you agree with that, would you then agree that a CEOs values and way of doing things highly affects they way he sets strategy, prioritizes and in what direction the organization should move?
Underrated comment - the top is filled with toxic scum. Like if one really looked into it, everything would have to be boycotted (not that it isn’t a worthy thing to do, but it gets exhausting and scumbags seem to own everything)
Underrated comment - the top is filled with toxic scum. True regardless of what side of the political spectrum you fall on.
That’s why life is hard for grownups. You have to decide what you think is important and not.
With your way of seeing things it looks like no one should be criticised since no one is without sin?
Sin is a fictional construct of control. I believe you meant “fault”, but felt it worth noting that the difference in terminology is immense.
English isn’t my first language. It was a play on “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her".
Yes, I presumed as much. My point stands, and “fault” would’ve fit more easily.
Also, downvotes on Lemmy are not the petty things they are on Reddit, so let’s keep the disagreement civil and rational, instead. 🤗
I think most leaders of companies apologize and take ownership when they publicly screw up. The problem in Eich’s case is he doesn’t think it’s wrong to strip same-sex couples of their equal right to marry, so he felt he didn’t need to apologize for helping to make that happen.
The article isn’t judging by the one asshole, it breaks down specific flaws in the core of the product itself. Also when the “one person” is the CEO who guides the decisions the become the spirit of the product, one bad person can be enough. Twitter is now irredeemable because of the cancer of elon musk at the top, for example.
Also, a little tone deaf to make a statement like yours on Lemmy; a place basically populated entirely by people leaving Reddit because of the toxic, user-hostile decisions of spez on Reddit.
I don’t know what it is, but a fair number of people are incoming these types of arguments these days, especially in academia. What started this trend?
I’m not sure if you mean to say people like me arguing to separate patrons, artists and the art - especially where this is open source - or people like the writer of the article in the OP.
So I’ll speak to it from both ends: people naturally want to vote with their time and money. If money is seeing ads and generating crypto for someone they don’t support; fine. I think everyone understands where they’re coming from. On the other hand I can google github + project-name for brave and find all the code and fork it…if you don’t like something about brave just fork it or use a stripped down fork.
I don’t use brave to begin with but the public executions are fucking obnoxious when the product hasn’t taken a unilateral shift in direction. Twitter and Reddit were proprietary platform you were locked in for if you used them daily. There was never an alternative way to use those products in their full functionality; both had to be 100% recreated on mastodon/lemmy. If you don’t like Brave’s CEO you can literally fork the project, remove the shit you don’t like and use the work for free.
Sorry, my comment got mangled and I had some typos. I agree that we can separate artists and art. I am annoyed that so many people try to argue the contrary. In academia, many are currently trying to argue that you cannot separate the artist from their art (at least, in music circles). I find that perspective juvenile.
Anyway, I agree with you Gnubyte.
I agree that you shouldn’t use Brave browser cause of things they’ve done in the past but, oh Jesus, that article is so stupid it reminds me the Hogwarts Legacy boycott.
Between browsers it’s really “what is the least shit”. I don’t like how Brave is full of crypto shit, and well remember how they hooked their own promo links as well. But, it is the best Chromium browser than has cross platform sync built in I have found. And no, I’m not going to use Firefox.
It’s definetely better than using normal Chrome but is the most shit of the better ones so I don’t have reason to use Brave if I can use Librewolf or other more private browsers. I can’t understand why so many downvotes on your comment though.
I’ve been trying out the DuckDuckGo browser lately on mobile. It uses the Chromium backend, so some sites work better in it than in my normal Firefox.
The neatest feature of the browser is the ability to generate random email addresses in signup forms, and those emails all get forwarded to your real email address. As it forwards the emails, it removes trackers from them. You can click a link in one of the forwarded emails to disable that address from being forwarded any more if it gets spammy.
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my only issue with ddg was on mac it uses the safari engine and doesn’t integrate very well with bitwarden
What about Mullvad? I’ve been considering it for a while, especially because I really like the idea of vpn+browser resulting in the exactly same fingerprint as most of the other user of the same VPN, but I’m kind of unsure because I haven’t seen almost anyone talk about Mullvad yet, which may be a red flag.
Mullvad is a fork of firefox so it’s okay to use
Mullvad is trusted. They are pretty open with their policies, exist for a long time already, not involved in any privacy scandals (to my best knowledge), charge flat and fair fee without 60% sales and other dubious marketing practices. It is one of the better VPN providers, not in 5/9 eyes (they are in 14 eyes though), you can buy a subscription with crypto, which (assuming crypto was acquired anonymously too) is a good start for some privacy guarantees.
Pretty much every cyber security professional I know uses Mullvad in one way or another, usually as part of a more complex solution.
But all in all, please bear in mind that VPN is not some magic silver bullet to preserve your privacy and anonymity. With VPNs you basically shift your trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. That trust you put into the provider, it is still a requirement. Not to mention that a good chunk of tracking is happening on a lower level nowadays, so if you use Mullvad on Windows / any Apple device etc. do not expect to become untraceable :)
Wtf is spacebar.news. where do you find sites like this?
Corbin Davenport has been writing tech articles for a long time. Veteran tech journalist at PC Mag, Android Police, How-to Geek, other sites. It’s his new newsletter.
Nice, I’m just always a bit skeptical of random sites. Thanks for the info.
Such a brave article. So brave that they turned off the comments when people started bringing up valid criticisms against it. Such a cop out.
Went straight for the “alt-right” accusations as well.
Such a brave article
eyyyy
I dont know why anyone would leave chrome and land on something like brave.
If youre ditching chrome, which you should, go to an actual different browser and use Firefox.
Streaming services seem to lower bitrate when I’m using Firefox vs Brave, so Brave is my go to for streaming.
I use Firefox for everything else.
Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seems to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don’t buy the argument that it’s easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It’s not as complicated as people make it out to be. It’s not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they’ll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine’s direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! 😄
The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.
Personal anecdote:
When I initially decided to drop Chrome, I moved to Brave because - as a chromium-based browser - it supported the same set of extensions I’d grown accustomed to.
That being said, the crypto stuff weirded me out enough that, once I’d weaned myself off the extensions, I switched to Firefox.
I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
I’ve tried Firefox several times but always end up back on chromium due to compatibility; a lot of sites don’t play well with anything but chrome anymore and this is very much something intentionally caused by Google, who have basically taken a page out of Microsoft’s playbook but with a much more mature product that is going to be substantially harder to replace then IE was
Just use Firefox.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + arkenfox user.js gives you privacy, security and anti-tracking. The only way to fly IMO.
And a Pi Hole for good measure.
A dns blocker cannot do anything more than ublock. It is nice for other apps though.
A DNS blocker is great for other devices on your network!
Or Adguard Home, that I think is superior than Pi-Hole. It runs as a single instance and you can easily upgrade it from the web UI.
White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It’s like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.
Librewolf
No android version = no buy
Mull for android
What does Arkenfox do? I’ll definitely add it if it’s beneficial.
It changes many default Firefox preferences in
about:configto be as private as possible. The main selling point is resist fingerprinting (RFP). I highly suggest reading the wiki. It can break some websites, but you can configure it to fit your needs.
I bounced between the two for years, i guess i am going back to Firefox full time.
I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn’t handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up
The only reason I haven’t switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn’t have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it’s not a priority. 🤷
Firefox for Android removing the ability to open local html files killed it for me. Currently on Vivaldi.
Why did they remove it though? I was surprised too when I found out I needed to run local webserver to access local html files
It was because of ‘security’, which was never explained. And it doesn’t make much sense when other browsers can and do alow it. I’ll see if I can dig up some historical links if I remember tomorrow.
Last time I checked,there was still no acknowledgement of it and appeared to be no intention of ever addressing it. The fact that they’re now telling people to run a webserver suggests that nothing has changed ☹️
So use edge
Its chrome-based… but at least its not brave, and the adblocker(which is off by default…) is decent enough
If you think the things brave has done are bad, go read through the list of things microsoft has done. You really don’t want them to ever have a browser again, and certainly don’t want to personally use it.
I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
Firefox and mozilla aren’t your friend.
They like to play the “user and privacy friendly” company. Meanwhile they are hemoraging users, and laying off staff needed to actually build a great browser.
Mozilla ceo pay increase + layoffs in 2020:
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated “I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That’s too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.”
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
They don’t need to be my friend to be better than the chromium browsers though, so I don’t know what this has to do with anything
Doesn’t Firefox do telemetry and other shady shit out of the box? Ofc you can turn it off but I don’t get the fanaticism over this browser.
Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.
Some examples:
- Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
- Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
- Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared
And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.
Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.
Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.
You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.
But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.
With brave I never see any pc or YouTube ads. With Firefox even with ublock origin I can’t get rid of those damn ads. That’s what keeps me on brave
Brave is a marching band of red flags. It claims privacy while injecting ads, affiliate codes and crypto into the browser. It’s kind of sad to see someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side and pretend this is all fine. It isn’t.
Best advice I could give for anyone who wants privacy is use Firefox or a branch of it. Firefox is out of the box the most privacy conscious mainstream browser and add-ons make it more so. If you want absolute privacy you could even use a derivative like Tor Browser.
Louis Rossmann also recommended Brave in one of his videos. Quite sad.
I like a fair amount of his videos but he has a big ole bag of bad takes
Love everything he criticizes (corporate greed, drm, wasteful planned obsolescence, unrepairable disposable device design) are all incentivized and rewarded under Capitalism … but since he’s a small business owner he still supports the idea of Capitalism.
He gets so close.
Exactly my thoughts. He’s like right on the edge but to me it seems he has some cognitive dissonance re capitalism
These people talking as if not all the crypto bloat would be opt in lol. It just take 30 seconds or even less to turn off everything of that.
Brave is more secure than Firefox out of the box.
Oh boy, this comment section is gonna be spicy. I can already smell the smoke from the Brave enthusiasts heads exploding.
Meh. It’s all just moral BS that I don’t care about. Going to keep using it.
The writer is proposing Vivaldi, a closed-source browser, as an alternative to Brave, which is free and open-source. I think a better alternative would be Ungoogled Chromium.
I can’t think of a reason why anyone would use a browser other than Firefox and its forks.
Because, for years, Chrome and its forks were basically the only good browsers out there. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox were in bad shape at the time.
Internet Explorer never recovered its reputation (and Edge itself is a fork of Chromium, anyway), and, by the time Firefox recovered, too many people were integrated into the Chrome ecosystem, and too many of those people believe it’d be too difficult to switch (and most don’t really care since Chrome’s issues have yet to personally affect them).
I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
Because Firefox on mobile is a pile of shit to be honest. It works great on desktop, but the mobile experience is subpar. For a chromium browser, Bromite used to be an option, but it seems abandoned now. Brave is one of the few Foss chromium browsers left that also supports adblocking.
Works fine for me. The sheer ability to have addons like ublock origin on mobile, something that no chromium-based browser allows you to do, was enough to convince me to switch.
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.
Besides this I cannot find another good reason not to use brave. Nobody point to a specific line of code that ruins privacy, not enough reasons.
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I’ve been using brave for over a year. I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad on my screen. Now there might very well have been some But I have no memory of it.
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They used to change the url which the user typed into the address bar to include a referral code. The article mentions going to binance.us, the browser appended a referral link to the url.
That’s scummy as fuck.
Good enough for this gay Californian.
Gay Nuyorican
I don’t know what you’re saying, but I infer it’s not meant kindly.
So you’ve read all the way up to that line and closed the article didn’t you ?
There were 3 points:
-
CEO is a dick: not enough of a reason
-
Swapping ads: I have ads disabled anyways so what do I care. If I did care I wouldn’t block ads in the first place
3.1. Promoting/friendships with crypto: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
3.2. Privacy leak: it happens ¯_(ツ)_/¯
3.3. Partnering with weird people: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
3.4. IS AN ADVERTISING PLATFORM: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
-
They block the website’s own ads, but inject their own instead. So the user still gets ads, but the profits go to Brave. I know that if the site’s owner is aware of that and goes through the process of registering with Brave they get a share of the profits, but this should really be opt-in. As it is, the whole scheme is shady as fuck.
Because Firefox is better.
I don’t care what the CEO of a corporation is doing because most of them are conservative pieces of shit.
