Brave browser quietly slips a VPN service onto your Windows PC

AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 622 points –
Brave browser quietly slips a VPN service onto your Windows PC
androidcentral.com
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Not surprised. Brave is dodgy af.

Use Vivaldi or Firefox if you care about privacy

I tried ff yesterday.... it slowed my laptop like crazy. It was a clean install, not sure what was rhe issue, it was eunnin from an ssd

I'm running FF on a 10 year old Linux laptop with no issues.

Maybe I need to change to Linux, this one is Windows 10 and I am tired of getting errors because of things that Windows change. Last week I had the search bar activated with thr last update. Thanks for the tip

I would strongly recommend looking into it. There's not much you can't do with Linux these days and it's easier than ever to adopt. Check out Linux Mint for a good distro for those new to Linux.

I will do that, I mean there is something wrong with windows, it was slowing ff for some reason. And not only that, other apps. I mean I have 16gb of ram, and only running that and whatsapp

Did it a little over a year ago. Has been fun thus far, my computer really feels like my device now which it didn't really do before. Its like when a meal tastes better because you make it yourself. Still have issues once and again ofc but I had that on windows too tbf. Not an OS advisor, not OS advice

I will try it, i am really angry at ms, it is not normal that it was running ff slow, with 16gb if ram and onky running WhatsApp in the backgroud. Thanks for the recommendation

That would have been around the same time that I did too. High five Linux twin!

Eyyyyy high five. Any good or bad stories or something to recommend? I will start. I am now the go too person on work for people who have issues with their usb drives. Not matter what, on linux I can always read the filesystem or make their flash drives work again. And people are always super thankful :)

Haha that's really cool! I had something similar at work - when the adobe suite stopped working properly with the computers there I was able to get GIMP and and Libreoffice working for everyone instead. I most recommend the application "cherrytree" and avoiding flatpak. Also, if you're thinking about self-hosting check out YUNOhost. How about you?

I did just over a year ago and haven't looked back.

I will do that. Just need to backup my bookmarks and some files and format both drives clean.

Very odd. It's not supposed to effect the os at all

I know, that is why it is so strange. Maybe I need to see if there are addons in the background.

I have issues with FireFox running YouTube on windows 10 - it gets super laggy - the issue is nonexistent if I used the Piped frontend. I think it depends a lot on what website you are using - some don't play well with FireFox.

That being said, I did not have issues with FireFox on Mac when I used that, or on Linux, though I don't use my Linux laptop a lot for web heavy stuff

It's believed to be that Google will serve different websites to non-Chrome (maybe non-Chromium) browsers, or they specifically use features that only they implement to ensure that it performs worse on other browsers. And I don't mean they add a new feature and it's only them, but that they use deprecated features that only they have. Honestly, fuck Google.

I do have lag issues with YouTube on FF as well, but only the video not the audio. I just assumed it was a codec issue, or just RAM management, since it only occurs when I've been running FF plus a game like wow all day

Check out the Freetube application for watching youtube videos. You can import all your subscriptions from youtube, make playlists, download video/audio etc.

Bro said Firefox 😂 Firefox' been Google bitch for a good while now, it's either Librewolf or Mullvad now

Google is paying Mozilla to keep their search engine the default in Firefox. Period. There is no Google spyware (or any spyware in general) in Firefox. Just because Google is the default search engine in Firefox doesn't mean Firefox is Google-controlled spyware.

Also Librewolf's privacy is in some ways selfish on their part. It strips out Firefox's troubleshooting data collection so Mozilla loses a good chunk of clues on how well the browser works. Lack of any data would lead to lower browser quality, ends up as a worse Firefox release, and Librewolf gets to be affected directly as a downstream of Firefox. By removing troubleshooting or usage data (which practically doesn't affect privacy in any way), Librewolf is just hurting itself in the long run. If they're really aggressive against directly contributing data back to Mozilla, then they should just run their own collection server and contribute the final data back to Mozilla.

telemetry and troubleshooting information can be used for fingerprinting. This isn't an issue for most people but I can understand why some wouldn't like it. Tor browser strips a lot of that as well for similar reasons.

My understanding is that google primarily funds Firefox because if chrome becomes a monopoly then google would have to face antitrust laws. Getting broken up would be more expensive to them than keeping Firefox viable with a minority of people using it as their browser.