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.

  • mrnobody@reddthat.com
    1·
    8 hours ago

    It’s a solid mix of having a lot of the privacy settings enabled, but without fully disabling all services that a majority of people might like or use (having a Firefox acct to sync favorites might be one). There are auto updates and patching that’re pretty quick to get released too.

    I found a reddit post from the dev commenting on it a while back. Seemed like a sensible balance. https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/14seevh/comment/jqwuan8/

    Either way, Librewolf and Waterfox seem like they can accomplish the same things, but just have a few default settings that differ. LW eliminates all possible Firefox account sync and services, but the fact I don’t use them, they’re not enabled. WF unfortunately leaves the default search to Google instead of startpage or Ecosia, but that’s a simple click at the top or change in settings. LW has Duckduckgo. LW has strict cookie settings enabled by default which might break some sites that require it for full functionality. Some people might not like that or want to whereas WF didn’t mess with settings. I’m more so talking about the masses or someone just starting out getting into privacy stuff that might prefer these things, but by no means are th either bad or worse than Firefox or Chrome.