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I don’t usually take the software creator’s ideology into account if it works well on my computer. However, I stopped using Brave when I found out that it’s a company funded by Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir and one of the most toxic investors around today. The combination of Brendan Eich and Peter Thiel has now pushed me past the point where I can separate software from its creator’s ideology.
I don’t think “toxic” covers the kind of evil Peter Thiel.
An actor with mildly spicy views on stuff is “toxic”.
Thiel bought a fucking Vice President and got him to do a 180 on his views on Trump.
Technically the order was:
Buy
180 on views
Make him VP
He didn’t really buy a ready-made VP, he groomed him.
This is the guy that Epstein sent an email to saying:
“Finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain.”
3 days before Brexit vote. Peter Thiel is named over 2,200 times in the Epstein files, confirming their extensive correspondence.
And Thiel did nothing but sabotage society for finding the next bargain. He’s a caricature super villain from James Bond, that should be at the bottom of a volcano somewhere not funding web browsers.
Brave Browser: “Privacy Forward”
Funded by Peter Thiel of Palantir, the most un-privacy corporation that ever pravacied.
That math ain’t mathing for me.
As others mentioned, Thiel is basically a cartoon supervillain. There’s definitely something more sinister at play that he’s trying to accomplish with this “privacy forward” web browser. Not sure exactly what it is, but I don’t trust it for a fucking second.
BTW if you want to free yourself from Brendan Eich completely, you can’t. he made Javascript.
Librewolf
🐺
Waterfox?
Both?
Nothing much, what’s up with you?
Brave users will probably prefer Waterfox, as it has a couple QoL features that are useful.
Floorp
🦠
LibreOwOlf
UwU
Why would I use something other than firefox?
Well, I would recommend waterfox over firefox because waterfox has just straight up removed any AI stuff rather than giving you the option to opt out of it.
Sounds like a lot more work than just opting out
~ish, waterfox is reconfigured firefox. They have a single button sync on first launch to clone your firefox data over, it took me like 60 seconds to swap everything over. And you get a lot more than just removing AI from firefox, it’s essentially a preconfigured firefox. Removes a lot of telemetry and analytic stuff, strict-enforces better security protocols, prettier layout and stuff.
It doesn’t really buy you any new functionality, but it’s way quicker to just use waterfox than it is to spend hours configuring the weird shit like private DNS in firefox.
I agree, but also Waterfox just generally has a more free/unmonitozed default and the AI stuff is just an example. It’s a one-time switch to Waterfox and it’ will forever turn off/on the stuff that you would otherwise have to do manually.
Packagemanager Install waterfox
because Mozilla insists on sucking major ass? idk
Mozilla sucks more ass than Google in your opinion?
It’s the important yet subtle differences that matter most between sucking ass and blowing goats.
absolutely not! that wasn’t part of your question though.
You can maybe try Ladybird (most websites is kinds usable now I guess)
the lead developer for ladybird had a controversy regarding transphobia though
while checking to see if anything happened regarding the controversy, i found that the same person that claimed that suggesting using gender neutral pronouns instead of assuming the reader was a man was advertising personal politics, the lead developer for ladybird, also complained about white men being actively discriminated against in tech and said he hopes “many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.” regarding the death of Charlie Kirk
i was going to link sources for everything here, but this article has all of them already and its easier to have a single link
I never knew about any of this, damn.
It’s not even in alpha release yet
Ohh yes, obviously not in the condition to daily drive, and you need to compile from source.
ight straight up what is the use case for ladybird? Who do you think is going to “try” it?
It doesn’t work yet - there’s not really a reason to “use” it unless you’re going to try and develop it
Also, it’s still Chromium, meaning it can be affected by Google’s decisions.
i tell you what, i’ll keep an eye on the brave usage numbers and if they keep heading up because it’s such a great browser i’ll keep it under my hat
deal?
Come and delete this comment when you’re sober again.
Just wanted to say thanks, this spurred me to swap over to Zen until I hear how that one is also terrible for me however far down the road.
If you don’t use Firefox (or webkit) you want Google to control the entire web. Simple as that.
Firefox depends on google for funding and failed massively when they tried to go without them for funding. Google already controls the web.
Wrong. Firefox is still a valid alternative. While those exists Google can’t do anything they want. If they will go too far they will have the same issues Windows has.
- webkit exists
you’re implying specifically firefox.
Ok, or webkit.
ngl my second point doesn’t make too much sense.
Vivaldi Browser 👍
Brave has ran a bunch of youtube ads. Like raid shadow legends style. That’s how I know it’s a shit browser
Shocking number of people under-informed about browsers here.
Brave just released a $60 paid (except on Linux Desktop) version without bloat. It worked barely OK in the first place, but didn’t obfuscate all of your browser fingerprint. It spoofed fonts, that was its major innovation.
Only Tor truly anonymizes web traffic. This is not opinion, this is fact.
LibreWolf, Mullvad, and hardened FF help, but they all give their own fingerprints. As does Vivaldi and Floorp.
Personally, I cycle through all 7 of these. Only things tied to my name on stock FF. Everything else gets its own different browser private mode and VPN location.
Use whatever you want, but understand that unless you’re on Tor or spreading your risk across multiple tools, it’s trivial for Google to triangulate you across the web.
Thanks. Very good comment, I agree… And yet…
Ironically, not being on what most people are using (stock Chrome without extensions) is already a fingerprint. And tor browser, even if it is providing anonymity, is also a huge fingerprint on itself, by blocking all the fingerprinting stuff…
The irony is lost the moment you come up with a proper threat model upon which you base the decisions of what security and privacy measures are going to be taken for a given online activity.
I really liked (and used it for quite a while) that extension, Ad Nauseam, that would actually follow behind scenes all ads and shit…
This is a bit like the “If you’re not doing anything, you have nothing to hide” argument. You’re thinking this is an all or nothing position, and it’s very much not. It depends on one’s threat model, but there’s two sides to the coin worth considering.
First, that your entire life is open to anyone with money. Individuals so motivated can spend a couple grand and buy your advertising data and stalk you. Everything you think, every little whim, every random question, is used to build a profile on you that benefits someone else financially. All you get is free email and a mediocre browser from a billion-dollar company that derives an average of $1,600 from you a year if you’re in the US ? You can pay for those services for a tenth of that. So you’re 90% profit to Google.
On the flip side, by giving up so much high-value data, that profile becomes active in real time. Even if you use ad blockers and don’t see the ads (which as a Chrome user, you no longer can do). You are an active target by companies. Not just you, everyone around you. Friends, family, coworkers. For some big ticket items, advertisers will target anyone connected to your profile. So your parents, your kids, your neighbors, might start to get ads about a cruise. Not for them, but for you, since it looks like you might be a good mark for a cruise. These companies manipulate people around you to be the ads, so that when you bring up “we’re thinking about doing a cruise” at some point, everyone around you jumps in with the same “oh, well I’ve heard that XYZ Cruise company is good.”
You trust a company that much to manipulate you and everyone around you without bias? With your best interests in mind? You want to cede your agency as a human to real-time auctions?
Personally, this is fundamentally abhorrent to me. And I understand that other people are fine with this. However, I’d rather leave a small and bland trail of a few occasional and useless crumbs, and then leave “redacted” as a middle finger because that deprives Google and Meta of using me as a revenue source. The nice part is that even partially masking your footprint and traffic, it’s enough to break the real-time value of you as an individual. So not only does every little bit help, every little bit has effects to protect you and your family.
I’m not super deep into this, i2p doesn’t anonymize web traffic? What does it do then?
i2p is a separate network entirely, and part of that is routing your traffic to someone else’s connection. So your exit node is someone else’s laptop or server. And you’re letting other people doing who knows what else use your connection as an exit node. Which, for me, is an absolute deal breaker. I don’t trust other people online to let them use my connection.
I stopped using Brave for Peter Thiel reasons. Using Librespped, Mullvad browser, Zen browser and Helium. Helium isn’t fully finished, but looking amazing. I like options
Yeah. I stopped using it when I heard about the bigotry. Fuck that. Easily replaceable garbage browser.
Librewolf and you’re done, just look at the settings a bit if you need a website to remember stuff. That’s it, your search is concluded.
It’s good that OG directly linked to the toot but I always hate when dates are cutoff. This toot is from 2024 when Google started introducing manifest v3 which prevented ublock origin from working, hence many people were looking for alternative browsers and Brave was one of the more popular ones. While I would not recommend Brave, I’ve heard the crypto rewarding program is opt-in and the affiliate link injection was removed soon after getting backlash.
Brendan Eich is still an ass though, and Brave has very bad business practices. Only recently Brave announced a 60$ (free on Linux though) minimalist variant that removes unwanted features like the crypto rewarding program, Brave VPN and AI chatbot which are built-in for the default browser variant.
The fact that they did it in the past is proof that they’ll pull shit like that again.
Brave is asking for money to remove the bloatware it has added over the years and to be able to use the original browser it first released.
I’m a big fan of the duckduckgo browser. Love me the burn-all-the-cookies-and-history bonfire button that make it great as a default browser and I click random links more confidently now that it’s my go-to.
