The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training
The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training
618 comments
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I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
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I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
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I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
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Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can't recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.
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Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
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lmao still thinking moz corporation is your friend
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the payouts
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they'd offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
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no, you are right. there is a lot of talk about the brave browser in this thread, a chromium based ad blocking browser by the brave company that gives you their own crypto in return for unobtrusive ads on the start page, which can then be used to donate to content creators on the internet (i think) or be cashed in. you and the op are talking about brave search, a search engine created by the same company
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When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.
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Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.
I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 510€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).
Now that crypto account is mandatory it's just useless...
I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I'm too lazy to replace it by something else.
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On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?
I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.
I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.
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I thought it was supposed to be the best privacy browser but after reading these comments my view has changed completely and have switched all devices to Firefox.
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I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.
It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.
My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.
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Brave is just too shady and I hate that it's considered a "privacy" browser by people who don't know better.
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Brave is just too shady
It's amazing how so few people seem to understand that Brave's entire business model is an extortion racket wrapped in a crypto scam.
Of course, both that and the new bullshit described in this article is all just par for the course from the guy who (a) inflicted the abomination that is Javascript upon the world, and (b) got booted from Mozilla for being a bigot.
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I found the juxtaposition of your comment to the one below yours to be pretty funny.
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I love how you added yellow border for clarity
(I've screenshotted lemmy comments before and it looks utterly confusing without border lol)
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I have no idea how they developed such a following. They're shady AF.
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Cryptobros who did a code camp and discovered their new brag
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Well, it doesn't help that privacyguides.org lists both Brave browser and search as recommendations.
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I use it as my main browser and I honestly can't go back to Firefox, but I really dislike some parts of it and of it's community. The browser itself is fast, its default ad-blocker is awesome and there are a couple functionnalities that are nice to see, like Tor integration. But they block ads to show you their ads instead, that you cannot block even if you deactivate the "Brave Rewards". The whole reward system in BAT is kind of shady; they need to authenticate you before you can withdraw anything and it's worth peanuts anyway. When I complained about those issues on reddit, I got answers that looked like they were produced by sect members, and it wasn't even on a related sub.
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that's why I point people at librewolf
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It's a shame that there isn't a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn't have much by the way of good ad blockers.
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What are your setting os Firefox? What do you recomend?
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@Compactor9679 @PrivateOnions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Multi-account Containers, Facebook Container, and Decentraleyes are the basic extensions you’d want. Then disable pocket and telemetry in settings. There’s more but that’s a pretty good starting configuration.
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install just adblock origin and consentomatic and the quality of your internet experience will increase 10 fold. that's really all you need and then you can add on some more extensions later.
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Brendan Eich, the guy who co-founded Firefox and developed Javascript, is the CEO of Brave. His politics aside, I think he's a pretty trustworthy guy.
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I hate to burst your bubble but when it comes to 6-7digits of cash at stake what does "trustworthy" even mean? You mean between millions and his word to you he will choose his word? His previously stated values and principles?
The guy who made waterfox seemed pretty nice, friendly, committed to the cause, then sold the project to a data-miner, and so did the honest people who made startpage, the trustworthy privacy minded search engine? Now they see waterfox is independent again and not part of the big multi-natinal data miner.
Mozilla once again made a sudden change that breaks your previous profile or other functionality and if you dare roll back the upgrade your profile has been ruined in transition, so you are forced to start from scratch reconfiguring, setting up you std tabs, bookmarks, history .. Same stuff with TB, addons/plugins disabled, new "features" added, whether you trust them or not, added dependencies .. you roll back you lose.
The google chrome-engine is so intrusive in the way it runs, degoogled or not, it is hell to have on a system. Maybe inside a vm without anything else other than specific browser session may be ?ok? for fluff work, nothing private I hope.
The naivity of people to accept and sometimes welcom large corporations producing FOSS is what got us to this mess, and I don't mean users, but devs, distro managers, .. if it is legally FOSS it is OK, even if it is a huge trojan horse manufactured by corporations to penetrate an other wise safe and secure system. FOSS - no corporate involvement - may be it, but will it boot? LinFound. gets millions and millions to have board seats to influence kernel, and it seems to be dancing with their wishes.
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What he took credit for he didn't invent himself, Also he is a total piece of shit.
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Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don't understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
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Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
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You might want to look into NewPipe then. Lets you do all those things with YT, plus you can also download the videos or their audio only
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Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
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Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
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Iirc the debian of browsers is iceweasle.
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IceWeasel EOL'd 6 years ago
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I find console text only browsers more effective than iceweasel, when pages break with iw you get no text, at least with links/elinks/lynx you get the text.
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I use Brave occasionally, but Firefox has been my #1 for the past 100 years or so. I stopped using Firefox as my only browser after they overhauled the interface. I really miss classic Firefox with my tabs on bottom, old search engine bar, and endless customizations.
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I still remember why: Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, the man who would go on to found Brave, for donating to Christian charities in the politically polarised climate of 2016. After Eich went, they also quietly purged any other employees that showed even a hint of conservative sympathies in their internet presence. They then went on to "experiment" with pushing browser ads on users, and while they eventually ended the experiment because of massive user backlash, they still made no apologies and didn't abandon the idea. Just made a final public response dripping with PR bullshit with a patronising conclusion along the lines of "internet users just aren't ready for this change yet".
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Brandon Eich was fired because he was constantly giving money to politicians and groups that were advocating for the banning of same sex marriage. Also funding the campaign of congressman Tom McClintock, a certified piece of shit, Who denies climate change, is against LGBTQ rights, and was among the republicans trying to overturn the 2020 election.
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Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you're marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
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Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.
The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.
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I don't understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
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Brave had a thing where if you went to website.com, they would add /ref=brave to the URL so they get a kickback as if you clicked on their referral link.
Sneaky? Sure. A huge scandal? I don't think so. No user data was being collected, no privacy was being violated. If I was the company doing the referral system I'd be mad, but as a user, it does not affect me at all.
Firefox fanatics just need something to point to and say "brave bad firefox good" and that is the worst thing they can find on Brave. It's all browser wars to them, like iPhone vs Android or Xbox vs Playstation.
The article in this post also does not affect users in anyway, and has been updated after Brave responded, with most of the worst claims of the article now retracted.
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That’s why i use Firefox.
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I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products.. :(
It'd be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I'd love an open and private search engine that isn't just a meta search :(
Edit:
Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren't just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you're looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites
Yep doesn't come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)
Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn't seem have any kind of summary or answers function.
I think I'll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I'm having a hard time finding something.
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Don't let the Firefox fanboys cloud your judgement with their constant shilling. Most of the claims in the article have been retracted after Brave responded, and the issue didn't affect users anyway.
Also, Brave is a completely independent search engine now, which is why they have web crawlers like the guy in the article is complaining about. And speaking of a distributed crawler, Brave Browser has an opt-in feature for that where sites you visit will be indexed by Brave Search.
Brave Search is the only real contender to be an actual competitor for Google Search, but these Firefox fanatics have such a hate boner for Brave they just want to see it fail. All of their arguments against Brave really aren't serious and don't affect users at all.
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firefox is so laggy nowadays. the scrolling is also weird.
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Firefox is now faster than Chrome as of the latest benchmarks.
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Respectfully disagree, I have no complains about the browser itself. just that lazy web devs don't test on ff, or actually, only on chrome.
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What system are you on that Firefox is laggy? I’ve had no real issues on Windows, Mac, or Linux in the past few years.
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Buy brave token. It price should go up
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After their crypto crap, this doesn't surprise me one bit.
And don't give me that "You can disable the crypto" the fact is, you shouldn't have to because it shouldn't have ever been included in the first place.
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Seriously, early on this company literally deployed a mass MITM attack against their entire userbase.
Any company that pulls some shit like that is just going to do it again whenever they think they can get away with it.
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Breaking their users' trust by appending attribution tags to their URLs should've been unforgivable but I still see people pushing their browser online
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At least it wasnt an NFT? ive never used brave, this is all news to me
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I actually use 5 different browsers:
- Brave for work (need Chromium/Workspace integrations)
- Mullvad for most things not work
- LibreWolf simply because Mullvad can't be set as default
- Ferdium for convenient containers for sites I am regularly logged into
- Tor for "sensitive" browsing
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I use and heavily recommend Waterfox. Less bullshit, more privacy.
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Than librewolf? how exactly?
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I heard chromium is easier to work with than gecko.
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I heard the same - over a decade ago.
Not disagreeing with you, although that information might be outdated. But the fact that you don't see, e.g. , applications that use gecko to embed web content, speaks volumes. I get the feeling that their codebase is very monolithic.
I would really like to hear from a current or former contributor though.
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If someone can explain to me why librewolf refuses to display the specialized font characters that most websites use for necessary navigation symbols, I'll go back to using it. But all of my research suggests it was a problem only I was having, and it genuinely made some websites unusable.
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One of the founders, Brendan Eich, donated his money to take away the equal right for same-sex couples to marry in California (Prop 8). He never acknowledge that it was mistake, so I can only assume that he truly wants to see the marriages of same-sex couples erased, which is quite a hateful thing to desire.
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Not supporting is one thing but being so actively against, is interesting
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This is one of the most stupidest memes going around. https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/tocqueville-on-the-freedom-of-discussion-in-america.html
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There's something that doesn't click in the article, they say:
the issue at stake about that proposition was declaring a marriage to be an union of one man and one woman
But just before that they link to the Wikipedia article:
support for the Proposition 8
Which states:
Proposition 8 [...] was a California ballot proposition and a state constitutional amendment intended to ban same-sex marriage
So I fail to understand how this:
Even couple of LBGT employees of Mozilla Corp. defended Brendan Eich on their blogs claiming that there is no discrimination against them in Mozilla
Could be possible, I tried searching for their blog post, since the author didn't link it anywhere, but not knowing who they are I wasn't able to find anything. It could be true, but still, Mozilla isn't the whole California, if they are treated well due to company culture good for them, but that isn't an excuse to let gay people be discriminated outside of Mozilla
It seems to me like what everyone thinks is right, even if the proposition were made to "declare marriage a union of man and woman" it would just be a roundabout way to say "declare union between man and man/woman and woman not marriage" so... ban same-sex marriage?
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I don't select a browser or any software by political preference, donde Eich departure from Mozilla it went downhill hard.
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i dont agree with it but he can do whatever he wants with his money. not sure it is relevant to internet privacy tho.
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While that's fair, actually funding something to take away the rights of another person, like this guy presumably did, is a lot more weighty than just having an opinion.
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Yes and my opinion is that being anti-gay marriage is a shitty opinion that should be criticised.
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Everyone knows the only safe way to browse is to scrape webpages and print the content to your terminal.
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Lynx FTW
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I like to send the HTML, CSS, and JS to my laser printer personally.
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I use curl to pull the text in a bsd jail running on a qemu instance running on a qubes vm and then copy it down on engineering paper and reconstruct it in my brain
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Such a noob didn't even pipe it through grep to block advertising. Get outta here corporate shill.
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Use a VPN, and pipe the text-only output to your printer
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Firefox users: Another Chromium drama? People never learn
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I hope people finally quit that shit of a browser.
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I groaned hearing Louis Rossmann recommending Brave during one of his videos about Youtube ads. Firefox uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock would be a better recommendation.
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As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
- Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
- Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
- Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
- Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
- Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
- DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
- Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
- Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
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As a web developer you should really take a look at Firefox developer eidition. It comes with very nice features for web developers and you are always at the edge of new things FF will support so you see things that will come soon to the rest of the Firefox users.
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Check out ungoogled-chromium. It needs some extra work to get extensions (and probably drm stuff) to work, but has good defaults otherwise.
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Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
Actually, it does have extensions. You can download them through app store in both iOS and Mac OS.
But it is more limited compared with chromium and firefox environment, and most known extensions in those don't exist for safari, although there are usually alternatives with other names
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I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
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If you want you can just use Vivaldi like any other browser, I would think, what is there that needs to be set up that doesn't in other browsers?
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I'm an ex website designer/dev and only tinker with websites these days. But I was doing this shit back in the days when HTML 4.01 was new. Anyways it was usual to use a bunch of tricks to get multiple different browsers (including different versions) to render the same or similar enough. I had to have a bunch of different browsers installed to test them all on because emulation wasn't a thing yet either.
I think the last serious development I did was a few years ago but as browsers have become better at adhering to standards and rendering more consistently, I haven't had the need to use anywhere near the amount of tricks and hacks as I used to. I've personally had little issue with browser compatibility.
Has something happened in the last few years to change that?
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I have changed the homepage on brave plenty of times.
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Why even make shit for Chromium? Fuck everyone using Chromium.
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Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
I used to do QA for a Web portal, and issues with Firefox not scaling .svg files properly was driving me up the wall. There were more obscure issues, but this one was so basic that I couldn't believe we still had to have a separate code for Firefox browsers.
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I refuse to use Chrome and I use Firefox for work since 99% of my time is on that.
Got any alternatives to use?
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If Brave redirecting users to use their affiliate links without consent didn't make people stop using it, I doubt this will.
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On Firefox. But I do like Brave Search over something like DDG, their AI summarizer is quite good.
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I think Librewolf is a much better option. BUT, I'm glad that at least Brave is taking a stance against Google. (the enemy of my enemy sort of thing). I hope all these firms are sued into following the proper copyright though.
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Brave sucks Google dick by using Chromium like everyone else.
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I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives...
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rendering engines. I use multiple browsers depending on context
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Agreed, like what do chromium based browsers really have over Firefox? Real question.
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It works with Google Cloud's dashboard lol, I swear they broke it in Firefox on purpose.
But seriously it's like the IE days, some sites are designed with one target in mind and that target is now Chrome instead of IE, partly because the Chromium engine is now the de facto one to embed and rebrand. So sometimes you just have to use Chrome.
However I use Firefox 99% of the time myself and only use Chrome when needed (mostly when managing my Google compute engine VMs, sigh)
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Google integration. That’s all. Anything else is anecdotal, is ill-informed hubris or is a combination of both.
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I've been using Brave for a few years now on my desktop and after reading the threads lately about it, I'd like to switch. I don't seem to have the issues other users have, but I don't want to use it based on the CEO's views on some things.
I've always had Firefox installed with uBlock Origin and I use it occasionally. One of the things Chromium based browsers have is built-in tab grouping. I know there are extensions and I've only tried Simple Tab Groups but it didn't behave how I was expecting it to behave, which is like how Chromium handles it.
So far that's the only thing I've noticed.
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I had to use a chrome based browser on Android for a couple of weeks since Firefox had a problem. It was like a nightmare. It is common in IT history that worse quality product wins.
Think about MS-DOS. Microsoft also sold Xenix,a UNIX system that time.
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Using it on Android is honestly the best experience
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For me it's because Firefox is (or at least was) noticeably slower. Didn't support all the extensions I use. And didn't allow YouTube playback with audio beyond 4x play speed.
All of those items led to me to choose brave over Firefox since I encountered every one of them on a daily basis.
Also I hated the default font (or perhaps it was some other quiirk of the layout) of Firefox. I couldn't figure out how to fix it.
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Convenience and performance.
I'm a dual user of Firefox and Brave on different computers. In order to separate work and personal stuff and shopping, I use different profiles. Easy on brave, needs extension with separate app on Firefox, that doesn't work on librewolf. And too often I have to stop my browsing because this Firefox setup is less stable and crashes once in a while causing annoyance.
Plus Chromecast. I like the ability to search for a video on the laptop and cast it to the TV.
It's always a balance of convenience and privacy plus ethics, can't have both.
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I use FF but Chrome is objectively better in side by side comparison. It's faster, more web pages load correctly, its UX is much nicer. For most people, you just install it and go. Most people don't have the time or inclination to faff on with a browser, much less for something as poorly understood as privacy. It has features Firefox doesn't, such as tab groups which Mozilla stupidly decided to remove and no addon does the same job as well.
Mozilla just sucks, to be frank. They can't seem to have any coherent idea about what Firefox should be. The big redesign alienated a lot of the people who used it for its customisation. Adding in unwanted features like Pocket integration made people doubt the credibility of Mozilla's claims of privacy. And cockups like everyones' addons stopping working, despite being warned by the community it would happen, leave a bitter taste in peoples' mouths.
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Your post just links to its own icon. Did you have an article to link to instead?
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I'm assuming it's this article.
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I apologize. I included an image in the submission and it seems it hijacked the URL. I've edited the submission to include the link.
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i have that issue too, sometimes. it's either image or link. maybe you are not supposed to use both fields at the same time?
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wasn't bunching crypto garbage not shady enough?
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Didn't they do some shady stuff before too? I was pretty confused why some people still recommended it
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They got their start redirecting ads to sponsored ads. I've never understood the love for that browser.
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The browser is highly performant, contains (nearly) all necessary (usability and privacy) features and is suitable for beginners.
The search has a nice interface that is usable without javascript, has an onion site and should be low on telemetry. It also (in my opinion) has the best search results after Google. And these search results are Brave's own results, not just resold Bing results; so they're actually bringing real competition to the search engine market.
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I know people advertise a lot of good things for Brave. But I've never seen them. It's installed in my system, it's what I spin up to enter shady websites (don't ask), because it works well with ad based hidden link providers. But it's not that performant, vanilla Brave is way slower than riced up Firefox on my system. It shows sponsored ads, it straight tells you that it might collect data, it's bloated with buttons and crypto bullshit. I just don't see what any of the shills are talking about, and it sells your activity on the browser to AI trainers because their search engine is just that, a meta search engine crawler, sorry but it's just like any other browser.
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To me Firefox is the best browser.
I use Chrome because I'm lazy to move, I have my stuff synced in there and I use it also with my phone (Google Pixel). But lately I'm considering Firefox more and more. At least I now have it installed in my phone and specifically use it for some stuff.
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I made the move, there are mild inconveniences, but you can export your passwords, bookmarks, et al. from chrome to firefox, you can even set firefox as your primary source for app password suggestions on android. The biggest win is having UBlock Origin on my phone browser.
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Just the Multi-Account containers are worth switching. That thing is a godsend if you need to use multiple accounts for one service. And to have your work stuff separate from your personal stuff. And to avoid tracking across sites.
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It takes a little while to get everything moved over and working the way you want to, but for me it's the superior browser. I get better performance especially on older devices and there are a lot of core things like bookmark handling that are better on Firefox.
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TL;DR: Brave Software has their HQ in California and they are they're stealing data and selling it and giving "rights" to other people. Lawsuits are probably already being filed by multiple companies come monday.
And it's not in an "our AI 'read' the page and is making their own", it's straight up taking entire sentences and almost entire paragraphs from places like wikipedia and selling them as original data without attribution(which is required by the license used by wikimedia/pedia)
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without attribution
no..? on every bit of info theres a source button next to it which links you to the original article, similar to what bing chat does.
Brave Software
brave search, not the browser.
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Yea within no time Brave will become evil as hell because the CEO is a silicon valley bro. They just waiting for more people to adapt their product and services.
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Brave will become evil
The were evil since they started with all the cryptobullshit.
You must be evil to enter the crytoworld
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Another case of shitification lol
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I can't and won't ever understand why people keep recommending Brave. This is not even the second or third shady shit they pull off.
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I was a big Brave supporter back in 2019-2020 when it seemed to have a lot of momentum behind it. But they squandered any goodwill they had with their crypto add-ons and rewards
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Every single one of these Brave "scandals" are so irrelevant and meaningless. I was hoping the reddit hive mind wouldn't be brought over to lemmy, but here we are.
This article, especially after the update from Brave, seems like a huge nothing-burger. Just another excuse for the Firefox Fanatics crowd to rag on Brave and circlejerk each other about how good Firefox is.
The article isn't even about Brave Browser, and it has nothing to do with user data. The website owner is mad that Brave Search is crawling their site and using data in their "Summarizer" feature. I thought Firefox users were supposed to be against the Google internet monopoly, but apparently when it comes to one of the only companies with their own independent and actually decent search engine, they don't seem to care anymore because of stupid "Firefox good brave bad" browser wars nonsense.
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I tried Brave for a couple days but I kept getting notifications from it that were ads. Brave had to go.
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You can turn these off. It's part of their crypto rewards system (you get occasional ads, some crypto and then some of it gets distributed back to the websites you vist most, or just the ones you select) so it's on by default. But you can easily opt out of this from settings.
I don't think this whole crypto system lifted off really, but it was a neat idea to reward web content creators and users, according to traffic and preferences.
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Those ads are the point of their business model. They show you ads, and repay you with tokens. You can gift those tokens to content creators or sell them on the market.
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That's like the whole point of brave though, you get "paid" (peanuts) for watching the ads
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You can disable those, they can be set to some frequency per hour and you get paid brave attention tokens based on that
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Not sure if you were aware but you are able yo turn that off.
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Been using brave for a few years on mobile and desktop.
They uses to give away BAT, but they have refined their system to not give any unless you spend hours jumping through hoops and linking shoddy Chinese financial apps and crypto wallets.
I still use it for the privacy, but after reading this I will likely switch back to firefox or another chrome based browser.
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decided to give the bat thing a go, had to sign up for this crypto thing. that is the only time I've ever been apart of a security breach
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I've had nothing but issues, first things were good, then you had to make an Uphold account. Couldn't do that from my country, then account limit issues. You can only link your wallet to 4 devices and if you reset your phone it counted as adding a device. Locked me out of my wallet after 1 phone upgrade and replacing the cpu on my desktop.
Currently you have to set some sort of account overseer to collect BAT. I still get the ads, but they haven't sent a payout in months.
All in all I estimate about 450-550 BAT I "earned" watching their ads over the last 3 or 4 years was never paid out.
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Are there are any mobile browsers that have ad blocking like brave?
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Firefox Focus as well. Built in ad blocker.
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You can use AdGuard on Android to block ads device wide. You can also install uBlock origin in Firefox Mobile.
I'm not sure for iOS
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Mull. It's FOSS (Free open source software). It should be on the official f-droid repo but I believe the divestos repo pushes updates faster since they're the devs of the project.
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Yeah, vivaldi. Vivaldi is pretty neat, it has ad/tracker blocker. It also allows you to create multiple tab groups so your can categorise tabs and they don't get all clutterd. It's also a chromium browser. It doesnt do anything on fingerprinting though, but i don't know if brave does that.
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A few, DDG was popular for a while but I recall reading they sold out recently?
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Firefox. Ad blocking on my mobile is the same as my pc
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Soul Browser with ad block and super configurable.
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That's pretty dumb. Brave is looking for any and every monetisation opportunity. Can't blame them, with competition having free browsers, but it doesn't exactly make them trustworthy.
Someone please make a fork of Brave without the nonsense?
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I never liked Brave. I don't care for the crypto crap they add onto their browser
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That's not a good reason to hate it, there are others (like the chrome engine underneath it all). You don't want ads, you want them blocked, block them, you let them play you get money for it, crypto money. It sounds like a good proposal. If all browsers did this advertising would get really expensive and ineffective, not a bad thing.
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Firefox forever.
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Did nobody read the article? The author is crying that Brave implemented a summary feature so users don't have to read through entire paragraphs to get to the actual content. Of course, he goes on and on about copyright and OpenAI, nothing really about user data.
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Sometimes in some websites I would have unexpected behaviours with firefox. In a government website, some features would straight up not work.
Maybe things changed in the last few years, but there you go why I tend to stick with chromium based browsers
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I’ve seen this and it’s disappointing, but I’d sooner stop using the website than I would Firefox.
On the contrary however the certificate authority I use only grants certificates to Firefox or Safari browsers.. so there’s that.
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I never really liked brave to begin with, I feel safer implementing my privacy myself, and I think gecko just can do it better.
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Damn. Who knew that Brendan Eich was a shady pos.
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agreed, although the fact that you can't block brave's crawler (if I had to guess, I'd say they're probably using the same user-agent as Google to disguise their crawler) and they give "rights" to the data is a bit troubling. also maybe the API doesn't include the citations ? in any case, it is suspicious they managed to make such a good search engine in so short a time, there is more than meets the eye...
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seem like a good place to shill my blog about switching browser and search engine. I recommend Librewolf on desktop and Mull on android tho. view this privacy comparison
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As I user, how does this impact me?
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Websites become less profitable and need to show more ads to survive.
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Websites become less profitable
That's why I use AdNauseam (a fork of uBlock but with a nicer philosophy).
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And Brave blocks ads. The circle closes itself.
Seriously though, internet seems to me to be like a shopping mall and websites tend to be store fronts in the past few years. Search engines have to survive too and tend to be the mall directory. If it wasn't for the fediverse I'd hardly visit any websites. If you have any suggestions on how I and others could improve our browsing experience, I would be grateful.
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Librewolf is king, it's baeicalky Firefox with a little hardening and good defaults!
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That took a dive as well in the last edition, unless you have systemd running many features like the top menu fails. Revert back to previous edition and your profile is ruined and you need to start from 0. A clever way mozilla has forced users to abandon their settings and be forced to go with their defaults. By the time you figure out what to disable again ... it is bye bye!
All librewolf community are large systemd only distros, it was all OK with them to stick it to non-systemd users. IBM pays good, and money is sweet! FOSS ... my w
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happy firefox user for over 5 years now, glad i will never use chromium trash like this
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Aw man I just started using Brave on my Android phone and really enjoy using it's AdBlock features and forced dark mode on pages that don't support it yet.
I tried Firefox and they didn't have an option to force dark mode on webpages without me having to turn this in in developer mode which breaks other apps I use.
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There's a Dark Reader extension that will do that for you, if you have fdroid I'd also recommend grabbing Fennec instead which deblobs Firefox, changes some bad defaults, and enables about:config
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Or Mull over fennec...
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... Looks like it's time to switch browsers again. Anyone got any suggestions? Preferably a Chromium-based privacy-focused browser without any crypto-related bells and whistles. And it has to be able to sync between Android and desktop.
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Firefox. Not chromium, but everything else is there.
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I've been using Vivaldi for a while That's run by a team of ex Opera Browser engineers.
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I'm geniunely asking, what are the alternatives that are fast, have builtin sync, and can block ads on android? I've tried firefox, and while it's gotten better on desktop, in my experience it struggles to play youtube videos on mobile, and the ui is basically unusable on a tablet/foldable.
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Use Firefox for browsing the interwebs and something like NewPipe app for YouTube?
What issues are you having with tablet?
You could try Firefox Nightly and enable addons if they're are any that could improve things for you.
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Since the transition to GeckoView the tablet ui is just scaled up mobile ui, with no tab-bar and no desktop sites by default. For some reason mozilla has marked it as a feature request instead of a bug (which I argue it is, as it used to have those features, as do all of the competing browsers), and successfully have been ignoring for 3 years (here's the discussion on mozilla connect, but there used to be a github issue before that).
As for youtube, I need a browser to use https://chatreplay.stream/ . For everything else of course there are NewPipe, ReVanced, and LibreTube
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Enthusiasts don't like to hear it, but Edge, which is Chromium, has a built in adblocker which can be adjusted to also block safe ads.
It has a genuinely good sync with an account that nearly everyone has. The only reason to dislike Edge post-Chromium is the company Microsoft, but it's IMO the best Chromium browser, for both Windows/Android.
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Try Kiwi Browser and Yandex Browser.
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Vivaldi ftw. The only Chromium browser I trust and use.
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Vivaldi is good, but it's getting bloated as hell. Not to mention it's going to be affected by manifest v3, which worries me.
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I’m not using their browser in part because of all the problems of the past, but the search engine is actually really good. In my case it’s better than DDG and bing.
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i also use brave search a lot, switched after ddg downranked russian search results and the microsoft tracking scandal. but now i am reconsidering. besides searX, what are the best privacy focused search engines atm?
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I just recently tried a few different ones because I want to get away from Brave Search. But they either had poor search results or some firm of censoring/altering search results. So I would also love to know if there's some search engine or there that can produce good results without bias i.e. actually just give me the relevant results I am searching for.
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I am trialling Qwant for a few weeks now after I had to restore a backup for my phone, it's a European privacy oriented search engine. I like it a lot so far, seems to do better than Brave for me. I do miss the option of adding "!g" at the end of a search term to fall back to Google. That is really nice in Brave Search.
I did not like Duckduckgo at all even though I tried it for a few weeks.
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Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?
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Firefox with uBlock Origin has been working well for me, for ads at least. I haven't looked too much into blocking trackers but I think Firefox has some ability to do that
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Yeah it has some and if it doesnt work Extensions can help out. As it uses still the v2 manifest. It is just straight up better to use firefox ( or their "children" like librefox ( a bit hardend firefox browser ). It doesnt depending on chromium, its not a big Corporate that is super greedy.
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This is the golden combo in my opinion. uBlock Origin is an excellent adblocker and it works best with Firefox. The built-in privacy features of Firefox are also decent, even when left at the default settings.
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uBlock Origin for blocking advertisements everywhere, works with YouTube too. SponsorBlock for automatically skipping parts of YouTube videos with sponsored advertising.
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Libre Wolf with uBlock preinstalled could be what you need.
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I use Vivaldi + AdNauseam (though they have a built-in adblocker which I have disabled.)
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never used that "Brave" and never will
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I would use firefox but more and more websites require a specific browser technology or even a specific browser.
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What sites? I haven't run into any that Firefox doesn't work with except maybe some sites that wouldn't be useful day-to-day anyway. Not in 10 years or so.
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Every now and then I still get an error that some media format doesn't play in Firefox.
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It's extremely rare for a site other than Facebook to cause me any trouble with Firefox. It's actually less common than it was a few years ago.
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I use Firefox with arkenfox's user.js on my laptop. For android I use bromite, and update it via F-Droid.
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Don't use Bromite, it's outdated. If you have to use chromium based browser use Mulch instead. but for Android I find Mull (ff based) great.
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I Just noticed that the latest release is in 2022.... Mull seems like a pretty good browser though. Thanks for the recommendation!
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Vivaldi is so much better without crypto.
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I am not useng Brave much as of recently, except for maybe mobile because of UWP apps. Firefox has become really fast in recent versions, and even when I have 8 extensions on, it still opens pages in a breeze. And it is more customizable than most of the other browsers. I do however like DDG Browser's minimalism and use of WebKit, so if I want a very minimal browser with barely any extras whatsoever that respects my privacy, I go to DDG Browser.
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So glad Puffin killed itself... Why does everything good have to go away?
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