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.
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.
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.
I mean I’m open to other mobile browsers if you have suggestions. On my actual PC I use Mullvad and Librewolf.
I use Brave selectively. I don’t know about ads. I don’t get ads. I don’t know about donations. It’s never asked me for donations and doesn’t have the info necessary to charge me without me knowing. A little more info on that one would be nice as I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.
To be honest, I kind of don’t care. If I was super adamant about being 100% politically/morally correct I wouldn’t use any product, ever. I don’t pay for it and I don’t feel like it’s taken advantage of me. So I’m going to keep on using it sporadically like I do now.
For reference, I only use it in private window mode.
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.
The minute I see that malware junk, I immediately uninstall it.
Is there anything else with ad blocker for iOS?
Vivaldi has built in ad blocker and tracker blocker.
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?
A Firefox fork.
Fork? Uhg wtf is wrong with firefox now? This better not be about AI
A bunch of forks just add extra functions, patches or defaults on top of firefox. It’s not a hard fork as in they maintain everything themselves, they’re still based on the latest official firefox releases.
Removing AI is one of those patches yes.
Oh, have I got news for you
Just keep using it, if it works for you. Every company that makes browsers is a bit shit around the edges, there’s no perfect, pure, wholesome browser. Just use what you want. If you like edge for android, use that. If you want to use vim, use that too.
Congratulations on missing the point.
It grinds your gears that people don’t do what you want, doesn’t it?
Have you tried letting people use whatever the fuck browser they want?
Netscape Navigator on Windows Mobile Works for me.
I’ve been using Iceraven with uBlock and it’s been pretty great so far. I use Obtainium to keep it updated directly from the repo.
I’m surprised to read the whole thread and nobody mentioned that TorBrowser is the goat for daily anonymous browsing.
Tor is ridiculously slow for daily use.
You should never use TOR as a daily driver.
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.
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.
The NSA wasn’t able to break Tor fundamentally, even with spanning numerous exit nodes to intercept traffic, and high-scale traffic correlation between enter and exit nodes
“We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption
Do we trust a 12 year old article sourced from the government to be honest about current/past capabilities? Genuinely asking.
who and what is your threat model? as @macros@feddit.org pointed out this article was probably rather accurate.
if you just want to browse anonymously - it is likely, that even the biggest tech corpos can’t de-anonymise you.
if you do small time crime, like buying and selling contraband - likely law enforcement would try to catch you in the real world. you have more vertices and vulnerabilities there, different enforcement agencies are experienced exploiting these.
if you paint a big ass target on your back and get the interest of the CIA or similar - you are probably fucked one way or the other. they may have the ability to de-anonymise you. but if you listen to people that did get caught or do the catching (e.g: darknet diaries), most of the times it is a small mistake. if you only ever play defence, that is enough to loose the game. but what are your options if your adversary is a national agency?
In this case I would. Its from the Snowden leaks and from the government for the government, never intended for our public eyes.
Also if you don’t fully trust tor, just add another layer (e.g. VPN). If the government dissuades you from secure open infrastructure and gets you to use closed ones, they have won because companies can always be forced to comply. Algorithms on the other hand, can’t.
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
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.
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.
That’s also a good point.
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.
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.
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
It’s an improvement over most browsers.
It gets your goat? Never heard that before
Why not just use Firefox or it’s forks?
