It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
If you absolutely need a Chromium browser (if you’re a privacy advocate, I don’t understand why. Using a Chromium browser means Google can do whatever they want with web standards), use Vivaldi or something.
bruh
I think a lot of pro-Brave people are astroturfers, or heavily influenced by astroturfers. They are definitely not a first choice by any privacy advocate worth their salt.
Also, the Brave defenders in this section… holy moly.
Some folks simply cannot admit they made a questionable choice. They picked it and use it, so everyone else must be wrong.
I’ve met people like this in real life.
It’s because no-one knows any alternatives.
If one wants a Chrome-based browser that isn’t Chrome, Brave is the highest-profile one by orders of magnitude. Next is a bunch of high-SEO scamware before honest projects like Vivaldi or Helium are even a whisper.
…So I don’t really blame folks for using Brave. They aren’t omniscient, and an honest effort to avoid Chrome is still a positive.
Use chromium build from source ? It’s the least if you want something chrome based. https://chromium.woolyss.com/
If not, use firefox. It’s still good for everyday task.
I use Firefox. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s not that bad.
And if I didn’t, I’d use Vivaldi. Only reason I don’t is I do prefer open source whenever possible and, well, Firefox isn’t Chromium.
Firefox is the only browser that has mobile extensions, making it the only choice
That’s also a good point.
But it kills the battery on mobile, even scrolling it choppy.
I switched to the Samsung browser a few years ago, I don’t know what black magic they do but it’s super smooth and light on the battery. It has some plugin support but I don’t use it so can’t comment much about it. It’s chromium based.
What phone were you using?
I I’ve never had any issue with firefox, with regards to battery or scrolling, but i use 8 year old flagship (Got it used, I’m not Mr.Moneybags)… which is probably still better than a budget phone of today, though.
Relatively new Samsung S24 Ultra, similar as you: “old” flagship bought used. The scrolling on the Samsung browser is like an iPhone, with Firefox like a windows 95 :(
Happened with a previous Samsung as well. On my old oneplus everything was kinda choppy.
On my Z Fold 6, I do notice that Samsung Internet, Chrome, etc are smoother, that is absolutely true. It’s not really enough to matter to me, though, doesn’t really warrant being described as “choppy” in my experience. My default is IronFox with uBlock Origin.
Well, Samsung is enshitified with its newer phones, that I have no doubt that an S24 would run non-samsung shit poorly to force you to use samsung shit.
Samsung was enshittified with their older phones too.
Pixels are shit too.
I had a One Plus 9 Pro and it was honestly my first phone that I traded in and felt like I got a huge downgrade. It just worked.
I doubt it’s on purpose, many other non-Samsung apps run fine, even when a samsung alternative exists, it’s specifically the browser that is weird. Which is a pity, since I do use Firefox on my desktop and laptop, but the mobile experience is just frustrating.
I have an s24 and had the same experience. Fennec F-droid worked better for me.
LibreWilf is a good choice if you don’t want the Mozilla crap. Just make sure to turn off the cookie clearing and resistFingerprinting then enable WebGL in the browser’s settings.
I had no idea about any of this. Have been using brave on android for a few weeks and very happy with it. What would you recommend instead?
The minute I see that malware junk, I immediately uninstall it.
Yeah it kinda mystifies me that anyone is still recommending that shitty bigotware.
In the emulation scene, RetroArch is in a similar boat if I’m understanding things correctly. Awful maintainers, but people keep recommending it and supporting it. Sucks too, because there are even fewer alternatives there.
Whats going on with RetroArch? I havent really paid attention/kept up since I set up my last Raspberry Pi.
This website details various issues. I’d suggest looking at the Byuu page - as I understand it the RetroArch devs played a large role in the harrassments that were being done to the developer of Higan/bsnes, which eventually led to them killing themself.
Did I miss what you’re talking about? It just mentions Xbox SDKs being proprietary, which I couldn’t care less about. Apologies if I missed what you mentioned
This is the page I’m referring to, where one of the main RA devs is shown saying a lot of really toxic things about byuu. It’s kind of hard to find any reliable info about the dramas, but there are various threads online where people bring up a number of dramas, like this thread.
Thanks for the context.
I used retro arch a decade ago, and when setting up a emulation pi last year the consensus seemed to be batocera. No idea if its better, but it’s as easy to use as I remembered and my kids are still enjoying it, so not too unstable.
Batocera is a relatively minimalist Linux distro for emulation specifically. It’s one example that kind of highlights the problem I’m referring to. All of these retro software stacks still use RetroArch to varying degrees, and depend on it. Even alternative frontends like Emulation Station are just built on top of the same libraries. Or as another example, for most game systems, RetroAchievements only currently work on RetroArch.
Interesting, TIL.
My only issue with batocera is that GameCube was broken out of the box and I haven’t had the time to figure out how to fix it
Yeah, I used Brave for a few years. I made like $10-$40, but the popup ads were super annoying, especially as someone who uses 3 ad blockers. Not to mention the other issues… Not Worth It.
In recent history I’ve used Chrome -> Brave -> Firefox -> LibreWolf -> Floorp -> Midori… So far Midori is good but still testing.
It’s a for profit ad company making a “privacy first browser”.
Thinking for literaly a second about that sentence should tell you all you need to know.
it’s the best browser out there right now. did you know it has the TOR net and ad blocking built in? great huh?
where does firefox make its money
IS IT FROM GOOGLE SEARCHES?
so what have the owners done to the lgbtq+ community in the last 5 years?
Customized firefox, zen browser, helium, and mullvad all with some kind of assortment of privacy extentions.
On Android, we got ironfox and cromite. most of the same privacy extentions are applicable.
If you want to use the tor network, go use the tor browser.
Frankly, I do not care that much that Mozilla makes most of its money from Google. I can change the search engine as the first thing I do and this fact simply stops affecting my experience negatively, especially on Firefox derivates.
You should probably add /s to that, hah.
you can do privacy friendly ads, it’s not because the entire industry has evolved to an horrible point that the good way of doing it can’t exist
This is true. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics used to run and maintain a good sort of ad service called Project Wonderful, that catered to webcomics and blogs and didn’t track users. Sadly he shut it down in 2018.
Currently I know of Comicad Network that’s trying a similar kind of thing.
Did it gettoo hard to run or what?
FWIW I remember a former colleague who recommended it to me and his argument was about the cryptocurrency you “earn” from it.
I asked him if he could withdraw it. I asked him if he tried. He said not yet but he would. He came back to me few days later saying something along the line that “it’s not straightforward” which was a polite way to say he didn’t manage yet. He worked in IT.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s a scam or that one can’t use the crypto “earned” from it but at least back then, few years ago, some people were just riding on the hope, or even faith, that it would amount to something yet it seemed made in such a way to just hold.
So… not a scam but not exactly empowering users IMHO.
They added referrals to links you clicked. If there is one thing a browser should do its go to the link you click without modification.
As far as I remember, there is some browser with a feature of stripping tracking id from the URL, that is modification, but I find it good (if I can opt in, and if the feature is visible enough to know what to try if it doesn’t work)
And you chose to do that or it was a feature that was advertised to you. Adding referral IDs to links you click so the browser company gets money is not comparable to that at all.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that was crappy, just that not any modification of links is bad
I would argue that if you know your browser is stripping tracking info for links then the link you clicked on doesn’t have tracking information.
I’m surprised to read the whole thread and nobody mentioned that TorBrowser is the goat for daily anonymous browsing.
That you’re even suggesting this tells me that you don’t use tor regularly. Many clearnet sites dont want to be accessed through tor and will just block you. If you encounter any recaptchas thats basically a dead end. The time from opening the browser to having a fully loaded site is minutes.
If you don’t plan on doing serious crimes and your not an opposition leader in a totalitarian state, tor is not a good default browser.
Tor is ridiculously slow for daily use.
I thought people gave up on Tor years ago when it was revealed that it wasnt as anonymous as people expected due to the number of entry and exit nodes controlled by governments and spy agencies.
You should never use TOR as a daily driver.
