Brave is essentially just Chrome with an adblocker, a bunch of bloatware, and a bunch of controversies.
Brave took BAT donations in YouTuber’s names without their consent, with them keeping the money if the YouTubers didn’t claim it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/
Brave’s search engine crawler hides itself from websites by pretending to be Googlebot, and Meta (Facebook) buys API access from them to train their AI. https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
The business model of Brave rewards as a whole is to block all other ad networks to replace them with their own, which is unfair as only YouTubers and websites that have joined can make money from most Brave users.
If Brave actually cared, they would create an acceptable ads style feature which was free for everyone and allowed simple contextual banners while blocking ads which track you, take up most of the page, or have NSFW content.
Their approach is monopolistic as they have full control and can strangle YouTubers and websites by dropping pay at any time.
And Brenden Eich has said on Twitter that he plans to release “Brave Origin”, which is a paid version of Brave without the bloatware. That name is ironic as he is admitting that his browser is commercialised and bloated, which is similar to when gorhill gave uBlock way to Chris Aljoudi who commercialised it, which led him to create uBlock Origin.
If you use Brave, ditch it and look at using Librewolf or Helium instead, which both include no ads nor tracking and don’t have Brave News, Rewards, Wallet, Talk etc bloatware.
Helium has poor anti-fingerprinting.
Firefox derivatives don’t support google meet well.
any better ideas?
Not trying to be facetious, but “don’t use Google Meet”. If you have to for work I get it, but suggest something else.
Use Librewolf as your main browser with Helium for Google Meet.
Can’t anyone more reputable than brave field anti-fingerprinting in a chrome derivative?
I don’t have issues with Firefox and Google Meet? What issues are you having?
Video effects randomly stop working sometimes, and frequently has choppy video
Huh, not something I noticed. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.
Might depend on your graphics card setup. My work laptop has pretty underpowered integrated graphics
Ah that might be something. My PC at home is a monster.
For the Google-specific stuff, maybe just use a different browser that supports it? My current approach is multiple browsers, but minimize Google/Chromium as much as possible.
I’m librewolf for primary
using floccus for syncing so there’s no accounts for anyone.
I’m using a start menu replacement so i’m not sending traffic to the browsers default choice
I tried a bunch of browsers a year ago, set them all up, and tried to use them daily.,
Vivaldi is shoving AI and VPN up my ass, has week fingerprinting and only promises to subvert manifest v3 as long as they can
Edge is bad and getting worse, plus giving data to MS isn’t much better than giving it to google. also locks into manifest v3
I give Helium credit for supporting manifest V2 still. I wish they did better with fingerprint randomization. But then again, I’m not even using Brave for anything but YouTube and Meet, so maybe the anonymization isn’t a big deal.
Brave is a shit company with a bad leader, but they have a fully funded dev team, and they block YouTube ads earlier in the pipeline before extensions get to them, so the manifest BS can’t touch them. I turn off the VPN and BAT shit and don’t use their default page.
Librewolf is doing good randomization for me, and blocks still block. I’d use it exclusively if I could share a single tab’s audio in meet and the camera and mic sharing worked every time in linux without 30 second timeouts.
Last I saw Vivaldi had a very strong no AI stance
Happy long time user of librewolf so havent kept up though
ohh wierd, I def had an ai fame come up on the right, must be some other extension, thanks, i’ll check on it again.