Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser

dantheclamman@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1633 points –
Stop using Brave Browser
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Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

That has nothing to do with the software. And that's a tiny donation. I'm not going to stop using an excellent tool because one of the guys in charge is a bigot. If that were the case, I wouldn't be able to eat, drink, breathe, make a phone call, or do anything really. There's a lot of people out there. Some of them are bigots. We should work to reduce their influence but we can't boycott literally everything. Every alternative to Brave has at least one bigot involved in it, I guarantee it.

Brave’s replacement for ads doesn’t reward users in a meaningful amount

Not enough > 0, which is what you get without adblock. And I'm fine with occasional non-targeted and unobtrusive ads to help fund a service I use.

Brave’s BAT was built around the cryptocurrency ecosystem

Who gives a shit except crypto bros? And who gives a shit about crypto bros anyway?

Brave was also caught up in a privacy scandal in 2020, when it was revealed that the browser was adding affiliate codes to some URLs typed into the address bar.

Are these affiliate codes tracking you? No? Who gives a shit? It's more money for Brave, same webpage for you.

That should have been enough to swear off Brave as a privacy-centric browser forever, considering the entire point of affiliate links is to collect data about the user and traffic source. For example, when you click an Amazon affiliate link in a web article, the publisher can see the exact products you purchase in the timeframe the tracking cookie remains active

Brave blocks cookies by default. Unless they specifically made an exception in their own browser for these codes, then this carefully-worded paragraph is just bullshit.

Much like the rest of this article. Bunch of poo-flinging. "Brave is involved in crypto, here's all the bad things crypto has done, that's why you shouldn't use Brave". Stupid guilt by association and a lot of hot air. Bringing a smoke machine to make people think there's fire.

There's a lot of effort going into making Brave seem like a bad browser and I don't know why.

A lot of people on Lemmy don't like bigots, they don't like crypto, they don't like scammy tracking and they don't like dishonesty. So I'm gonna fling that poo and point it out for as many people as possible, in case they don't know.

A lot of people on lemmy don't care about bigots, crypto, or anything else until something they dislike because it's not en vogue is doing it.

Some dude at Firefox donates $1000 against prop 8? I sleep
Some dude at Brave donates $1000 against prop 8? REAL SHIT

I'm not trying to get into the "everyone is equally bad" thing here, but with projects as large as these if you dig into the history of everyone involved you WILL find some distasteful shit, it's just statistics.

There's a lot of "Brave bad" going around the Fediverse, and people trying to find reasons to support that emotional belief, and stuff like that annoys me.

"some dude" is the CEO. Has the CEO of Mozilla donated money against same-sex marriage? If not, you are the one who is engaging in "poo-flinging".

That's literally why Eich was made to resign as Mozilla CEO: his anti-LGBTQ+ history is poison for one hell of a lot of web engineers.

Internet engineering, as a field, has always been rather queer.

"There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny." — Eric Allman, author of sendmail

Exactly. The ex-CEO. Emphasis on ex. Mozilla took the right decision, Brave didn't. That is literally why the "both-sides" argument is ridiculous.

He's probably done some horrible thing

Edit: yep https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-ceo-eich-resigns-after-controversy/

Brendan Eich steps down following calls for his ouster over his support for California's anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.

Wow, on the nose. Literally, yes.

Yes, he stepped down as CEO of Mozilla and is now CEO of Brave. I’m not sure if you’re joking or genuinely didn’t notice that they’re the same person.

Yeah but Mozilla isn't tainted by it? Come on, that's ridiculous. He's not building some anti-gay code into the software, the homepage of Brave (or Firefox) isn't "lol fuck the woke".

Dig into any company, or any CEO, you'll find something to get angry about. People are people. Products are products. Open source products especially so.