Please, do not use Brave. - eviltoast

I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.

Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.

Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.

After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.

Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.

One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.

Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.

  • Ujjwal Kanth@lemm.ee
    2·
    1 year ago

    I had a similar problem and got around this by using couple of add-ons.

    • always use containers or something similarly named
    • container tab sidebar, basically similar to tree style tabs with better container handling, although not an actual tree of tabs

    I have three containers, work, personal and default. The first addon forces me to choose which container to open to and second let’s me view which tab in which container I have opened.

    For the websites which I know I am going to always open in a specific container, I use Firefox’s built in mechanism to force open in specific containers, say JIRA for work. For websites where it is ambiguous, eg gmail for work and personal use, I let the addon handle it. It is convenient enough, as I usually type the URL, but even if you use mouse, the container selection is right there on center of screen.

    • Katlah@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      always use containers or something similarly named

      This is built into Firefox.

      privacy.userContext.newTabContainerOnLeftClick.enabled

      • Ujjwal Kanth@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        True, but I use keyboard shortcut cmd T and I would have to learn a new shortcut for this. Cmd T followed by typing url pops up a page where I choose container.

        Moreover, I don’t really have tab bar enabled as I use container tabs addon. I don’t really have the (+) button to create new tab.