The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

skilledtothegills@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1334 points –
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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.

Just use Firefox? Available on desktop and Android.

It even has adblock extensions on Android!

The suggestion is correct but OP said they want a chromium based option for some reason

Why the hell are you insisting on chromium? It's such a bad idea to throw all our eggs in one basket.

I occasionally use Brave when I need to cast something to my shield. Is this possible with firefox?

Most of the time I use Firefox

not the OP, but I have had some webpages that didn't work correctly in firefox. Firefox's market share is lower than 5% and some web devs have opted out of optimizing for firefox. The crypto stuff is completely opt in, I disabled it, added the typical ublock, decentraleyes, badger and clearurl addons and it's basically as secure as modded firefox with the same addons or the shitty firefox port called librewolf with the settings that takes 1 min to set up already done by default, and yeah it's shitty because it takes longer to update than firefox because all they do is to merge from the main branch.

If they asked chromium, let them, why the hell are you chastising people for their preferences.

When the Addon version change rolls in things will be different, but it has been delayed due to the user pushback and I don't think that it will get implemented. If it does, tons of users will migrate to firefox anyway.

some web devs have opted out of optimizing for firefox

Not if they want to pass QA. I’d not have a ‘dev’ like that near my team.

Sure that sounds nice, but several "modern" government sites haven't worked me correctly in Firefox.

Mainly to make it easier to import my user data (including passwords and such) and extension data.

Firefox can import from Chrome profile.

Including passwords? Because it'd be a pain to have to keep Brave around just because it's where I stored my passwords. And the last time I switched browsers (from Chrome to Brave years ago), there was an issue where all my imported passwords were blank. The solution was to export/ import them using the tool in Chromium's password settings page, which I assume Firefox doesn't have.

I'd recommend just storing passwords separately from your browser. Bitwarden is such an awesome tool and the free version takes care of everything most people would need. You can even self-host it!

Use bitwarden for passwords. It doesn't matter what browser you use.

Why the hell are you storing passwords in a browser only!?!

If you are looking for the most absolute comfort-zone, firefox is not ideal, but it can import bookmarks, passwords and history from any browser. to sync, just create a firefox account and log into it on each device.

Vivaldi. Browser for a power user. Works amazing. Basically opera before it was bought by the Chinese.

Browser for a power user.

That's... an odd claim to make. I'm sure "power users" use a variety of browsers.

Works amazing

Also odd. All browsers "work amazing"

Have you tried it? The amount of customization it offers is pretty unique among "mainstream" browsers. Not sure how many browsers still offer an email client, rss reader, options to read the web in text only, etc etc.

I'm pretty sure most (as in many) people reading my reply can gather what I meant with power users in a discussion about browser alternatives.

It works amazing as in: all functions and customization and added functions it offers work seamlessly together.

But feel free to be more pedantic if it makes you feel good :)

I did try it a while back.

Email and rss in a browser messes with my chi. I don't want a car that can mow my lawn.

I wasn't being pedantic. Surely you can see the arrogance in suggesting that your preferred browser is for power users.

You don't actually even notice that it has these features unless you turn them on. I use Vivaldi because it has really nice built-in tab features, such as tiling, stacking and workspaces, all of which I find invaluable on a laptop or single-screen setup. Its history screen is also quite handy and I find many of these features much more accessible than other browsers, which often streamline things to the point of being annoying.

I previously used Firefox, but it seemed really buggy at times, and the mobile version was especially bad on my old Pixel 4a for some reason, so I switched to Kiwi on mobile for extension support.

I've been using Vivaldi for a while That's run by a team of ex Opera Browser engineers.

Vivaldi! It's got everything you just described without the crypto bro nonsense.

Xbrowsersync extension will make it easy to sync bookmarks across multiple browsers on multiple platforms. It's open source and you can self host it if you want. This for me makes it easy to combine Firefox with brave and similar. Only Vivaldi doesn't support it.

Hope this makes your browser switching easier and cross platform choices simpler.

Been using this for a while now. I use Safari on my iphone and tablet, but Firefox on my Mac and my PC and it synchronizes quickly and flawlessly.

Why chromium based? I use Firefox and it's very rare I come across a website that has an issue with it

It's not that I'm afraid of compatibility issues. It's more that I already had enough trouble bringing over all my settings the last time I switched browsers, and that was between two Chromium-based browsers. I'm willing to go through that same trouble again, but I'd rather not increase it if possible.

If it's for the bookmarks, you can export that, possibly also for the password manager (although that's riskier). As far as history etc, does that really matter? What other settings would you need to bring across

Chromium based

Privacy focused

Pick one

I said "Chromium", not "Chrome". Chromium is open-source like Lemmy, meaning anyone can create a browser based off of it and add or remove whatever features they want on it.

they can't hear you over the sound of their firefox circlejerk

Honestly, I'll probably try using Vivaldi. It's the most-suggested Chromium browser in the replies I got. And, since it's Chromium, it'll give me the least amount of headache when switching, too. IIRC, I spent a good 2-3 hours porting over everything (including manually installing extensions and bringing over my extensions' settings) last time I switched browsers, and I'd rather not increase that time.

Vivaldi is not fully open source, Brave Browser is.

there is no reason to switch from Brave Browser based on this article, it's not even about Brave Browser, its about Brave Search, and nothing in the article affects users in any way or gives any reason to switch from Brave. Not to mention half the article is retracted now that Brave responded.

The author has no idea what they're talking about. It's just a website owner complaining about Brave Search having a summarizer feature so you don't have to read through 20 paragraphs to get to the important info on websites, same as Google and DDG's Featured snippets/quick answers. It's not even shady, it's a useful feature.