Yep, this news actually broke a couple days ago, I remember seeing a Brave fanboy having a meltdown over it and ranting about how Mozilla is the real shady company, blah, blah, blah.
Oh dear lord. What did they say in support of their âMozilla is shadyâ argument?
Brave's CEO was fired from Mozilla so Mozilla bad.
To be fair. Mozilla foundation is shady. They keep pushing things that don't follow their core mission. That try to expand their brand.
You can use Mozilla to build solid privacy respecting systems, but Firefox out of the box not so much. They're better than Google, but that's a low fucking bar.
Mullvad browser, Tor browser, mull for Android - all use the core Firefox open source engine, to make privacy respecting programs that work out of the box with privacy respecting defaults.
So I would say Mozilla is a good guy in this conversation, but not a saint.
Though they are transparent with the fact that they are doing it. I'm not a fan of it either, but it's not too shady when they're open about it IMO.
Fair enough, they aren't evil to be sure.
The Mozilla telemetry, pocket, Mozilla synchronization, experiments, the new tab page basically being an advertisement page. That leaves the sour taste in my mouth, so I don't trust them because of that... Shady good guy vibes:)
They're doing what they think they need to justify their existence, and although I personally believe being just a great browser would be enough I appreciate their communication around their ventures. It's not great, but it's not like they're installing malware in the background.
And may I point out that just being a great browser hasn't worked out so well for Firefox so far. Unfortunately in today's day and age you have to promote yourself to stand out. Chrome is an abject piece of crap that actively spies on you and yet Google's PR has managed to convince the vast majority to use it.
Itâs also worth noting that Chromeâs security model is much more robust than Firefoxâs. Acting like Firefox is superior in every regard only serves to undercut Mozillaâs pleas for more contributors and funding.
They get pretty close sometimes. I respect their mojo, but I don't install vanilla Firefox anymore. On anything. For any reason. I don't trust them anymore.
I wish them the best, if I could donate directly to Firefox development I would, but it's impossible with them. So I don't. I donate to mullvad, I donate to the Tor project, and I donate to servo. That's what I can do to make sure we maintain an open and free web
I dont get why everyone bitches about Pocket, tbh. Ive been a Pocket user for years and Mozilla's purchase of them has made them better if anything.
I've always liked the idea of pocket and have tried to get into using it multiple times but sadly I'm a savage who hates even using bookmarks for some reason. I just keep all of it in my brain (which tends to mean I do not keep it at all).
It took me a long time to get used to pocket, not gonna lie. But once I did, I can't live without it.
They keep trying to make money so they don't go under if/when Google pulls the plug on their easy money.
The problem is Mozilla advertises themselves as this last bastion of privacy but a cursory glance at their own privacy policy makes it very clear that they're blowing smoke up your ass.
Yes, you can change some settings and add extensions to make it private but out of the box it is anything but.
The sad truth is that, despite being a basic necessity, there are no "good" browsers. It's very difficult to have a monetization model that is privacy-respecting.
Yes you can use something like Mullvad that is totally privacy-respecting out of the box, but it's so far down the scale that it will break a lot of sites.
Brave is just the flavor of shit that I choose to eat.
Fair enough. I'm glad it works for you.
For what it's worth mullvad browser works for all of my use cases, I haven't found anything it doesn't work for.
It's mainly NoScript that breaks sites for me, and there's no way to disable it.
Actually currently my Mullvad browser is not working at all. I have no idea why. My other 4 browsers continue unfettered but Mullvad won't load a single webpage.
Plus not being unable to be set as the the default browser means I often forget it's even there.
You can open up the no script options and click on disable globally.
Sorry to hear mullvad's not loading anything. Seems like a weird bug
Setting the default browser, is a problem on Windows, there is a workaround I could dig up for you if you want. But basically you have to make a script and then modify the registry to point to that script as the default browser. It's a pain in the butt but it works. Thankfully on Linux, and Mac OS it just works as the default browser
It does not work on Linux. Not for me.
On Qubes it just worked after I did --register-app
Their GitHub has an issue open for it in Linux, I see that the tor project is working on a solution as well to make it more elegant.
But since it doesn't load any web pages for you, you don't want to make it your default anyway.
On Qubes it just worked after I did --register-app
"Command not found". This is exactly why I don't even bother anymore.
Yeah if it's the comment chain that I think they're referring to, I believe it came down to Mozilla "being in bed with Google" because Google is the default search engine.
I'll take the default search engine being Google over things like affiliate links being hijacked, but maybe I'm crazy for taking that position.
Typical Brave user hating google while using chrome with preinstalled extensions. Everything about that browser is the opposite of what it should be. Same with the users.
I follow Ghacks, a tech site, as well and boy there is a Brave shill on there who attacks everyone there for daring to say anything against it. He knows stuff, judging from his comments, yet is so anti Mozilla and pro Brave that I can't understand. Almost thinks anyone not using Brave is inferior.
It's not good to stereotype people. But, I would bet money that they have any three of these: bought NFCs NFTs unironically, supports OpenAI unconditionally, propose blockchain on everything, bought a pizza with bitcoin years ago that would be millions of dollars today and are still salty about it, have a Starlink receiver, drive a beaten down Tesla they can't afford to repair because they spent their money paying for FSD early access, and would definitely be first in line to fly Starship to Mars if they were allowed to, they posts to imageai regularly.
EDIT: autocorrect.
Yes, that pizza for Bitcoin story is quite popular, though it happened in very early days of the currency. Also, I assume you meant NFTs instead of NFCs :p. For a second, I was wondering what did near field communication had to do with this.
don't you just love projection?
cant accept the facts, so deflect the criticism to something else that is in no way a valid target for them.
The Mozilla foundation is super shady, and some Firefox devs does have it in them to change stuff to piss off people. It doesn't excuse Brave though.
Please cite an actual source for that claim.
Their public reports were a fair share of the money goes to its administration, were the dev funds are lower each years, were some funded orgs does not seem to exist, with the addition of actual user contribution being a drop in the ocean of money influx, is the source for the "shady" part.
Me (and many other) having long debates on their bugzilla about changes they made that ignore user settings, against all common practices, with no chance of reverting them because they knew better, until some big service (say, gmail) is impacted at which point all their arguments are forgotten and the changes are reverted, for the pissing of people part.
I've actually been attacked on several occasions by brave fan boys when I casually mentioned that I switched to Firefox and loved it. Idk what their deal is but I find it hilarious that all this stuff is coming out about brave recently đ€Ł
They're literally on the payroll. It's a pyramid scheme.
Unless browser fingerprinting is your concern, in which case the most generic, unmodified browser is best (e.g. Tor).
But that is a huge topic for another thread.
Overall youâre right but in which world is tor generic and unmodified đ
The Tor browser is a modified version of Firefox, but you are not meant to modify the Tor Browser, in order for everyone using the Tor Browser to look the same and blend in. This is done for maximum privacy and anonymity.
It's not possible to identify you if you use the tor browser without changing the window size or any other settings, because the fingerprint is literally the same amongst everyone that uses it this way. So you kind of blend in with the masses, it's neither generic nor unmodified, I give you that :D
Simply the OS already makes that difficult, true. Nonetheless, it's one of your best bets.
For those who truly want to stay private, installing plugins on the Tor browser is obviously a no go. Changing any setting or even the window size should not be done. Seriously.
And I'd venture that Tor on phones might be the most homogenous, though that still isn't saying a lot, sadly. Plus, smartphones are a privacy nightmare regardless (tip of the iceberg).
And LibreWolf is better. It's Firefox with all of the privacy settings preconfigured and uBlock Origin preinstalled. Also, crap like Sponsored sites and Pocket are removed.
Been very happy with Librewolf. Thought it would be another one of those softwares recommended by linux-losers but which never actually works, but it's quite the opposite.
Is LibreWolf still a version or two behind on Gecko?
AFAIK the most recent Firefox version is 118.0.2 and LibreWolf is based on that
Word. Last I had looked, they lagged a version or two behind on the base FF version. Likely just a lack of contributors or something then. Ty.
They used to lag behind, but now they caught up, so I can recommend LibreWolf to anyone without worries from a security perspective.
How is Librewolf different from Mullvad browser, which is supposed to be Tor browser (hardened FF) without the Tor?
The Mullvad Browser is based on the Tor browser, but it doesn't use the Tor network, whereas LibreWolf is based on Firefox + arkenfox user.js. LibreWolf is better for normal day-to-day browsing, where as Mullvad is meant to be used for high privacy/security tasks. Mullvad is kinda hard to daily drive, because it can't be configured to save cookies, you can't really use extensions and it lacks some other things. These features were removed in the Tor browser, because as I said, it's meant for high thread model usage.
Edit: I like the Mullvad browser and I use it myself, but not as my daily driver.
High threat*
Not trying to correct you at all, only for ppl's understanding :)
Btw ty for mentioning Mulvad Browser. I liked it honestly but it's still new, you feel me.
Thanks, just realized that this is not !privacy@lemmy.ml and people here are probably not aware of threat modeling. But in this context just the word 'thread' might actually fit better as the threat model pretty much stays the same.
Waterfox is similar, though it doesnât install additional extensions but comes with a bit of look and feel customization options instead. It restores those non-floating tabs from quantum by default and is pretty speedy.
Waterfox is more for look and feel, whereas LibreWolf makes significant privacy improvements. You can choose for yourself. Btw: You can also customize the UI on LibreWolf, just enable userChrome.css customization under Settings -> LibreWolf -> 'Allow userChrome.css customization'. Now, you can customize everything you want.
Well yes, Wolf is a lot more focused on privacy, but itâs also a secondary goal for Waterfox. In 6.0 they enabled DNS over Oblivious HTTP (no idea what that means but you probably do) by default and incorporated yokkoffingâs Betterfox preconfig of user.js. Itâs for those who are concerned about privacy but not nearly as much as the privacy community. For me, Iâd rather have cookies.
they enabled DNS over Oblivious HTTP (no idea what that means but you probably do)
It's basically the standard DNS-over-HTTPS functionality that is already present in almost every browser but routed over a special proxy server. Unfortunately though, Firefox uses Cloudflare services for this.
For me, Iâd rather have cookies.
I also have LibreWolf configured to store cookies. It blocks 3rd-party cookies though.
Good call
And the only thing greater than Firefox is Librewolf.
Or hardened Firefox, which is pretty much the same thing (I use Librewolf myself for convenience).
I love Firefox, used it for years. However I eventually had to switch because of weird bugs and issues with functioning sites. In my sparing personal usage I didnât run into many issues, but using it at work I ran into really weird issues all the time.
I'm team Firefox, very happy here. There's a small amount of optional telemetry to disable to maximise your privacy, and it has the best plugins because there's a lot of choice and they're not purposely crippled.
Plus you can use pretty much any plugin on mobile. this is the biggest feature for me.
I like Firefox because it allows, Atleast for now, customization via userchrome.css files. I once tried Edge and hated it's bloated right click context menu. Meanwhile, in Firefox, I can trim down the context menu to only basic elements.
I do wish Firefox had proper PWA support, but otherwise I have been using it as the main browser on both PC and phone(since uBlock Origin is supported on it, the only Chromium browser to support it is Kiwi Browser on Android).
Yes, this one I think I tried some time before. It is not perfect as you said but it is the closest Firefox has. I think I will give it another go to see how the extension has matured.
There's probably an addon for Firefox that gives some PWA support
There does exists one. But when I last tried it, the experience was worse than what a native integration would give. It wasn't streamlined as in other browsers. It doesn't matter much since I only use YouTube Music as a PWA, which I have a relegated to another window in another browser.
Off topic, but screw you Google, for not giving a native app. Spotify meanwhile has command line third party clients even(looks at ncspot) for Premium users.
Check out this custom YouTube Music desktop client: https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music.
It has neat features like an adblocker and a download feature and many more things built-in and it's open source. It's available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
It still uses electron though, but we live in this timeline after all.
Firefox and Mull (a Firefox fork) have your privacy in mind. They work as good as Chrome and don't fuck you without asking.
There is Fennec available on F Droid that is basically Firefox with some blobs removed. Not as hardened as Mull but still a worthy option. There is one more browser based on Firefox called Iceraven for Android but it is not available on F Droid even. Though it supports a much wider variety of extensions than mobile Firefox does as of now. The downside is that it gets security updates usually later than Firefox, being an independent project.
Firefox is the least sucky.
Firefox, or on mobile, Fennec. It's a Firefox clone with some added functionality, maintained by the developers of the F-Droid app store themselves, so highly trusted & fully compatible to stay in sync with the desktop Firefox.
For those rare occasions where a website absolutely doesn't work with FF, and you must use it for some reason, I'd suggest Chromium portable on Desktop, and Kiwi Browser on mobile.
I have Kiwi installed and like that desktop Chrome extensions can be installed on it for the odd occasion. However, IIRC, it is updated infrequently and isn't recommended as a daily driver.
I'd never use it as a daily driver, really just for websites that absolutely don't work with Firefox/Fennec. Happens very infrequent if at all though.
Check out Mull.
Last time I tried Mull, I could only use a handful extensions. I chose Fennec particularly because it supports all desktop extensions. Is that still the case?
Mull has the same limitation as Fennec in that you have a small curated list of available add-ons unless you sign in with a Mozilla account and make a collection or whatever.
Cool, that kinda looks like vivaldi except based on firefox.
It's the closest I've been able to find to vivaldi. Unfortunately no one does workspaces as good as vivaldi, but their implementation deleted all my workspaces one day, with no back up, and that was after several other total wipes of my windows/tabs.
Thanks for pointing me to LibreWolf. I like to use separate browsers as information silos and have been using Brave as my secondary. Been looking forward to switching it out for a long time, LibreWolf sounds like just the ticket.
Information silos.
You can also use Firefox containers. One of the best features of Firefox.
Paired with the Foxytab plugin to automatically open websites in specific containers or restrict containers to a list of websites. Firefox also has profiles, and a simple extension (with a tiny thing to install in your PC) makes them as easy to use as theyâre on Chrome
I don't like brave because Brandon Eich (CEO, formerly with Mozilla) doesn't support gay marriage and was pushing anti-vax stuff on twitter. I don't look for this shit to titillate my tits like some folks, but when it hits me in the face I can't ignore it.
When fact checking myself I found even more controversies, but I'm not wasting time reading articles that feed a confirmation bias.
Itâs crazy to me that people ever thought brave was âprivacy focusedâ when it was clear that they were trying to jump on the crypto bandwagon with their own in-network crypto and ad network. It was always just a reskinned chrome with ublock built in and then their crypto and ad network tacked on top
I don't like Brave because they've done dodgy things like this time and time again over the years, and each time Brandon Eich went on a marketing campaign across social media to drum up new users and drown the story out.
He's also the creator of JavaScript if that irks you any more.
it does
Just a reminder, any time you see a "tech" youtuber with brave installed, they're not going to be an excellent source of information
What browser signifies an excellent source of information? Ice weasel? w3m?
Lynx
raw dogging straight html
Haha, my browser is called curl
I have Orion (macOS only for the time being) and itâs sooo good.
The amazing part is that it even works as a daily driver if youâre a not-so-techie person/normal user⊠but then on top there are all these little extra features and optimizations that make it like Safari if Safari was actually good.
I would at this point a) not be able to go back to either Safari or Firefox (edit: nor Ungoogled Chromium) as well as b) immediately trust an Orion user on most of what they have to say about a âtechâ related opinion :D
Based on your comment, I've just downloaded Orion to give it a shake. Very much enjoyed the OS X-esque intro video. Took me right back to installing Snow Leopard for the first time.
Sounds interesting. Iâd thought Iâd heard of all the browsers that exist lol. Gonna give it a spin .
Wow, Orion is pretty slick! And Orion+ doesn't offer any actual features aside from early access and input on the roadmap. So far so good. Custom buttons is really cool, built in tree style tabs is slick. Also!! orion has workspaces that are as good if not better than vivaldi's! This is really slick, thanks for sharing
Brodie Robertson is an excellent source of information âčïž
Except in terms of browser choice apparently. Either they're ignorant or being paid. Either way it's not a good sign.
You have to be very brave to download that browser
I don't understand when and why Brave became such a household name. It seems so many people use it and swear by it, but its reputation is "suspicious" at best.
Just use Firefox. It's been around way, way longer and it doesn't use the Chromium engine. Google doesn't need more of a monopoly on the internet.
But what's wrong with non Chrome Chromium based browsers?
(Just give me downvotes, I don't care if my question is stupid)
Well Chrome(ium) has almost all of the browser market share and google is trying to push something called web environment integrity which would implement a sort of certification system where web servers evaluate the authenticity of the client. If you extrapolate that idea a bit further it boils down to "we won't serve you content if we don't like your browser, device, OS, etc". Which I would consider as hostile to the open but rapidly closing internet as we know it.
Edit:
I forgot to make my point lol. Firefox is a completely different browser engine from the chromium based browsers which is why you see a lot of people recommending firefox because they don't comply with web integrity. I don't think it's working though because this is something only the techbros and the cybersisters care about while everyone else just goes about their day.
Makes sense.
Chromium is still controlled by Google, so having an overwhelming market share of Chromium-based browsers reduces competition and increases Google's control of the market's position and future. Using Firefox (and Safari, if it were not locked to a single ecosystem) reduces that threat.
When we say "controlled", that's still only accounting for the primary fork, right?
As long as it's open source, it feels like the idea is that the day Google pushes "feat(): Users now automatically have $1 sent to Google a day" commit, someone creates a "chromium-nongooglefucked" fork repository from the prior commit, and everyone uses that.
K
It just means if they want to do something bad then they can
If Google wanted to they could ban VPNs on all Chromium browsers and all the forks downstream would have to comply
More likely they can make it so only verified websites will load and down the line charge to be verified. It kills the open internet and the ability for anyone to make a website/host it where they want
Damn.
It's not a stupid question, some people just don't know.
Mainly it's because:
Chromium holds too much market share which is bad for the health of the Web.
Chromium is controlled by Google which is concerning because they have been known to plant trackers even in software that shouldn't have them.
Chromium is inherently less secure, it contains features that might seem nice but are extremely risk to give access to websites i.e. letting websites access Bluetooth.
There are probably plenty more reasons but these are the big ones, and of coarse this is a simplification, in reality things are always a bit more complicated.
Web dev here. Regardless of my opinion, I need to make sure my web projects work on chrome because of market share.
I think if Firefox can find a way to have full parity with chrome extensions, that might be a big shift. I've talked to more than one person that has a specific extension they rely on that they can't duplicate with Firefox options. They have many of the big names, but also some holes
It's the other way around in my experience
Genuinely curious. What extensions are stopping people from moving to Firefox?
Not OP, (and Firefox is still my main), but I keep Chromium-based browsers around for Ichigo, an addon which automatically translates raw manga - which is a godsend for avid manga readers like myself who frequently run out of existing translated manga to read. There's also Scan Translator which works in a similar way, but sadly Firefox has nothing like them.
In my opinion best bet is ungoogled chromium for any extensions or applications that utilize chromium.
I just spent awhile trying to switch from Vivaldi to Floorp before going back. It just doesn't work as smoothly, things like tabs wouldn't save properly between sessions, pinning tabs doesn't prevent you from closing them, UI elements would disappear, etc.
I use it as my YouTube/spotify browser because the ad block just works. Firefox is janky because I have other extensions running that screw up playback on some sites (this has gotten a lot better but I still just use brave out of habit)
The only real problem I ever had with Firefox was this privacy option that would disable auto playback on sites like Twitch and TikTok but that was a setting I wasn't even aware of. Other than that, I rarely ever have an issue with FF outside of web dev when it doesn't yet support some cutting-edge web API feature.
Yea, it was something with various extensions I had going. I'm not blaming Firefox at all. I love Firefox. Just easier to use the other browser on the occasions when my configuration causes issues than try to troubleshoot it.
I've had issues with add-ons on some sites too. For those times I just use a different Firefox profile (each has its own set of add-ons and settings :D)
That's a good idea.
Brave to me is like an online advertising racket. They push ad-blocking software by default in their browser, then extort companies into using their own ad network to advertise to their users. Brave Ads are of course opt-in and the main incentive of enabling them is to earn BAT (Basic Attention Token) which is their cryptocurrency. In terms of their intrusiveness, they're like push notifications you get up to six times an hour, and from my experience using the browser, it was all mainly crypto marketplaces and VPN's advertising.
Compared to 2020, when you could earn hundreds of dollars in a year from frequently being served Brave Ads, BAT isn't really worth shit anymore thanks to the crypto crash, so the main financial incentive to use Brave is gone.
If you want privacy, Firefox is that way. Or if you absolutely need to use something based on Chromium, everyone and their fucking mother has forked that browser.
Generally speaking, any service or organization that has to pay youtubers or twitch streamers to drive traffic is...a racket. Avoid like the plague.
Blame YouTube for screwing over legitimate content creators and forcing them to be paid shills for shitty VPN and mobile game companies to pay the bills.
Anyone who claims "We're the best most privacy conscious, secure, and safe product" is already extremely suspicious.
Brave has already been caught Red handed doing anti-privacy and crypto shilling before, yet people decided to forgive them. You don't forgive these things EVER.
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
I think angry is good, that helps you pull through. Godspeed!
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 . Honestly, fuck Google.
Check out the Freetube application for watching youtube videos. You can import all your subscriptions from youtube, make playlists, download video/audio etc.
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
Bro said Firefox đ 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.
Care to share some examples?
why so many down votes?
Because it's not true for the browser itself?
Lemmy is a linux/firefox circlejerk overall, don't try
You tried. RIP
It's the most sane thing to do.
The Brave team are basically a bunch of dodgy wankers at this point.
I don't trust Brave, there's too much money tied up in it for it to be good for users.
Download a browser with a built-in VPN
Get browser and VPN services on your computer
Why is this news?
Yea i donât get the hate boner for brave. I get it's sketchy and donât use it myself, but they arenât sneakily installing some VPN to redirect all your web traffic without you knowing. They tell you about it right up front because it's a service they want to sell.
If you donât like the browser, donât use it. There isnât a need to go on some crusade to smear them with bullshit.
It's a bunch of people upset with the company's CEO or whatever over personal views. The browser itself wasn't that bad after you disabled the ad and crypto stuff, which they heavily pushed on you.
I had switched to it from Chrome last year but ended up not caring for it, so I went to Firefox and Librewolf. People can use whatever the hell they want, idgaf. But for those who will eventually end up complaining about YouTube ads and continue to use Chrome, I have no sympathy for if you can't take the few minutes to download and install a new browser and move your favorites over.
This community has some of the worst biased tech readers.
Because it's Brave and people like to jump on bandwagons. This is like the 6th time I've seen this article posted in lemmybin also.
And since we have the reddit-minded folk here, no, I do not support Brave and never will and I would much rather they disappear from the internet, but using ragebait to complain about the browser installing the necessary files to have one of their advertised services working, like pretty much every other software does, is not the way to move forward.
Please Brave: cutout the bullshit defaults game. Everybody's getting smarter and companies are getting stupider
Edit: said this b4, don't fuck with your own competitive advantage where you haven't had a joint and duly qualified computer science lawyer who explains how easy it is to lose trust and commercial viabillity for a sketchy, underhanded product (see LastPass). Also FUCK LastPass, may this Pass be their Last
Why is installing a VPN considered bad? Is it because it is done without user consent? I don't understand if there is any malicious intent.
Brave browser has been automatically installing VPN services on Windows computers without user consent, but it remains inactive unless the user subscribes.
They're installing extra software that's useless unless you give them money. Plus you really want to be aware of your VPN since all your traffic will be going through it.
It doesnât auto enable and chromium also gives you a lot of unnecessary features. While I think Brave is bloat I donât see how this is any more than the usual.
Because a vpn can monitor all the websites that you visit. Not directly what you're looking at, but definitely where you're looking. Just line your provider can, if you're not using a vpn. But at least with your provider, you have a contract with them - you pay them to transport your data and nothing more. Some very scummy providers aside, that's where it stops.
A free vpn, however, needs to pay for transporting your data somehow. And if you're not paying for it with money, then who/what is?
It's not even free, the service itself is a payed subscription. But it's there and it could be working and funneling data without the user knowing it if they wanted to.
I agree with what other people said. And here's a new twist.
Any software that messes with the networking stack, can cause really difficult to debug errors. And it may induce errors in other programs. The more complicated your computer's networking, the more fragile it is.
So introducing, silently, unasked for, network drivers and VPN hooks into the operating system is harming the compute stability of their user base.
At the very least, it should be opt-in! There should be a dialogue asking hey we have this new awesome feature, click okay to install it, something like that. Informed consent
It's "all your mail is now redirected to a third party that makes money by mining it for data without you knowing" level of nastiness. Absolutely deplorable and a reason to never touch anything made by the people behind Brave even with a ten foot pole. Brave is a scam and why people pretend its not is beyond me.
that's what the new outlook 'app' (replacing win 10/11's mail 'app') does with gmail accounts. routes all your mail from gmail through microsoft servers before delivering to the app on your pc.
The ol' bait and switch...classic. Opera used to be good too, then chinese people bought it, then emerged opera vpn. Shaddy af. Same as camscanner
Camscanner hurt. I used it constantly. Then boom, absolute 180. I guess that's the goal. Make a legit app that people love. Then sell it to someone who will exploit your loyalty customers. Cool!
Pretty much everybody has a number they will sell out at, for some itâs astronomical, for others itâs basically what youâd expect
Mine is staggeringly low.
At this point that seems to be the case everywhere. The future looks bleak, and so for most, trying to get what they can out of life before the climate wars, or WW3, or whatever happens seems to be the case. I donât criticize it. I think thereâs a high probability that the reason that we see little extraterrestrial life is that they did the same shit we are doing. The universe has a fractal nature. There are likely many species that also had planets that could support intelligent life. However since the competition for resources is baked into existence, they probably did what we are doing and are themselves no longer alive because they ended themselves before they could really end their stupid arguments about their gods, or work for the collective good more than the individual good
Some of the OG devs who made Opera have made Vivaldi. Itâs chromium under the hood, but with googles tracking and telemetry turned off. Itâs not perfect, but it adds a significant number of power user features, includes its own (limited) ad and tracking blocking. I alternate between that and Firefox dev edition as my daily driver
Can you elaborate on CamScanner please?
Itâs a Chinese app that lets people âscanâ a document using the camera on their phone. It was âfreeâ for a long time, turns out it was dropping injected adware on peopleâs phones.
To be honest, Microsoft lens has had the same features for a long time, but didnât have âscannerâ in the name and most app searches are piss poor so people just literally searched âcamera scannerâ and got the adware result. Microsoft has their own long and shady history, but dropping an adware payload wasnt part of that.
I use it a lot during my study. But when CamScanner started serving ads, intrusive ads, "cloud backup"...i tried searching for alternatives and use microsoft lens. TBH, microsoft lens is shit compared to camscanner. The detection is slow, janky, cant do multiple pages scan and a lot more troublesome to use. CamScanner detection algorithm was way better at that time. So i bite the lbullet and just use it until end of my study.
Thank you!
I'm not so sure that's true anymore with Windows 11.
Showing in app ads is one thing. Installing a Trojan specifically meant to circumvent App Store ad requirements is another. Windows 11, and most MS products at this point are ad delivery platforms, but they still follow the rules of app stores with the basic requirement of âshows in app adsâ and âwonât try to inject a Trojan that beats your phoneâs app sandboxingâ
Opera does this too and nobody bats an eye (anymore).
For some reason people like to clown on Brave specifically.
Probably because nobody cares about Opera doing that since the ones pointing this out are at least privacy aware people that won't use Opera. It is also a problem when Brave does it because it is a "privacy focused" browser. They sure have the balls to do this.
Opera was also 100% up front about it and sold it as a feature. They didn't sneak it into installers and crap. IMO that's the issue, the lack of communication.
Itâs crazy to me that people ever thought brave was âprivacy focusedâ when it was clear that they were trying to jump on the crypto bandwagon with their own in-network crypto and ad network. It was always just a reskinned chrome with ublock built in and then their ad network tacked on top
Firefox over everything. use Vivaldi if you insists on rendering blink
Question: why would they do that? If you don't even know it's there, what good is it doing for them?
It's also enabled by default.
Edit: Apparently it's not enabled by default. I tried brave some time ago and remembered that it was enabled, which promoted me to uninstall it immediately. Maybe it was enabled by default then, maybe I misremembered.
Having a VPN basically just means sending your traffic (albeit encrypted) to someone else's server, before sending it to the wider internet.
That means if you don't specifically disable it, everything you do in the brave browser could theoretically be logged, processed and analyzed by the owners of brave.
Even if the traffic itself is still encrypted, like with online banking, just knowing how many people in a certain city use which bank for example, could be very interesting to advertisers.
Depending on how evil they are, they could also log extensive amounts of user data, just waiting for the day it becomes legal to sift through it (just like a lot of governments do).
Or maybe they just log and sell your data even though it's illegal. Like a lot of companies do all the time (see Cambridge Analytical scandal etc.).
Or maybe they don't. But if I was a browser company I'd sure enjoy having all my users route all their traffic through servers I control.
the toggle shows up by default, but without a paid subscription the vpn is unusable. even then you need to enable it. you can disable it completely in brave://flags and set "enable experimental brave VPN" to disabled. it's shitty that they include it by default, but it's disingenuous to say they're rerouting traffic of all brave users through their own vpn servers.
Are people upset about this? I honestly don't understand.
I honestly don't understand someone that would accept anything from a stranger.
You member U2 and the forced album through iTunes?
No, I have no idea what you're talking about.
But I still don't understand why people would make a big deal about a piece of software that installs multiple software packages...
I mean have you ever installed Microsoft office? Did you ask it to install Microsoft access? What does Microsoft access even do?
Or have you ever installed nvidia drivers? Did you ask for the whole "GeForce experience"? Wtf does that even mean?
Installing extra software packages is definitely par for the course, bit in the brave example, at least the extra shit isn't required for the main app to work, in fact it's disabled by default, that's great!
To answer your original question: yes I do think people are genuinely upset with this.
If you take your office installation example, you're installing a suite of applications. You're not just installing excel, you're installing the office suite so you're bound to get all the applications in the suite.
Meanwhile, this would be like installing the office suite and getting a service installed along with it, that can monitor outgoing network traffic without them saying anything about it.
The main two reasons I'd be upset with this if I used brave was: They installed it without saying anything and It's something that's inherently a privacy and security risk. Even if brave themselves don't do anything malicious with it, doesn't mean that someone who's found a potential exploit in the VPN service won't.
Also just as an aside, I also absolutely despise "GeForce Experience" and there are ways to fetch the drivers as standalone packages without getting the telemetry spyware installed alongside them.
It's something that's inherently a privacy and security risk. Even if brave themselves don't do anything malicious with it, doesn't mean that someone who's found a potential exploit in the VPN service won't.
Ok, well a vpn is a potential security improvement if anything... But regardless, it's off, it's disabled, unusable unless you're paying for it. I mean just for perspective, any browser is much more of an inherent security risk than a VPN app sitting dormant and inactive.
But you're right that users never asked for it, so I get that part.
A VPN is only as much of a security improvement as the service behind it. If it gets installed in a shady way, how much trust can you put into the service?
This was my point exactly. A VPN may just as well be used to spy on your traffic rather than secure it. And that's why I'd be upset, personally: because I don't trust brave or the company behind it.
But I think the main thing people are up in arms about is the fact that they didn't ask for it. :)
BuT bRaVE isN't ThaT bAd đ€Ą
Yep, this news actually broke a couple days ago, I remember seeing a Brave fanboy having a meltdown over it and ranting about how Mozilla is the real shady company, blah, blah, blah.
Oh dear lord. What did they say in support of their âMozilla is shadyâ argument?
Brave's CEO was fired from Mozilla so Mozilla bad.
To be fair. Mozilla foundation is shady. They keep pushing things that don't follow their core mission. That try to expand their brand.
You can use Mozilla to build solid privacy respecting systems, but Firefox out of the box not so much. They're better than Google, but that's a low fucking bar.
Mullvad browser, Tor browser, mull for Android - all use the core Firefox open source engine, to make privacy respecting programs that work out of the box with privacy respecting defaults.
So I would say Mozilla is a good guy in this conversation, but not a saint.
Though they are transparent with the fact that they are doing it. I'm not a fan of it either, but it's not too shady when they're open about it IMO.
Fair enough, they aren't evil to be sure.
The Mozilla telemetry, pocket, Mozilla synchronization, experiments, the new tab page basically being an advertisement page. That leaves the sour taste in my mouth, so I don't trust them because of that... Shady good guy vibes:)
They're doing what they think they need to justify their existence, and although I personally believe being just a great browser would be enough I appreciate their communication around their ventures. It's not great, but it's not like they're installing malware in the background.
And may I point out that just being a great browser hasn't worked out so well for Firefox so far. Unfortunately in today's day and age you have to promote yourself to stand out. Chrome is an abject piece of crap that actively spies on you and yet Google's PR has managed to convince the vast majority to use it.
Itâs also worth noting that Chromeâs security model is much more robust than Firefoxâs. Acting like Firefox is superior in every regard only serves to undercut Mozillaâs pleas for more contributors and funding.
https://itsfoss.com/firefox-looking-glass-controversy/
They get pretty close sometimes. I respect their mojo, but I don't install vanilla Firefox anymore. On anything. For any reason. I don't trust them anymore.
I wish them the best, if I could donate directly to Firefox development I would, but it's impossible with them. So I don't. I donate to mullvad, I donate to the Tor project, and I donate to servo. That's what I can do to make sure we maintain an open and free web
I dont get why everyone bitches about Pocket, tbh. Ive been a Pocket user for years and Mozilla's purchase of them has made them better if anything.
I've always liked the idea of pocket and have tried to get into using it multiple times but sadly I'm a savage who hates even using bookmarks for some reason. I just keep all of it in my brain (which tends to mean I do not keep it at all).
It took me a long time to get used to pocket, not gonna lie. But once I did, I can't live without it.
They keep trying to make money so they don't go under if/when Google pulls the plug on their easy money.
The problem is Mozilla advertises themselves as this last bastion of privacy but a cursory glance at their own privacy policy makes it very clear that they're blowing smoke up your ass.
Yes, you can change some settings and add extensions to make it private but out of the box it is anything but.
The sad truth is that, despite being a basic necessity, there are no "good" browsers. It's very difficult to have a monetization model that is privacy-respecting.
Yes you can use something like Mullvad that is totally privacy-respecting out of the box, but it's so far down the scale that it will break a lot of sites.
Brave is just the flavor of shit that I choose to eat.
Fair enough. I'm glad it works for you.
For what it's worth mullvad browser works for all of my use cases, I haven't found anything it doesn't work for.
It's mainly NoScript that breaks sites for me, and there's no way to disable it.
Actually currently my Mullvad browser is not working at all. I have no idea why. My other 4 browsers continue unfettered but Mullvad won't load a single webpage.
Plus not being unable to be set as the the default browser means I often forget it's even there.
You can open up the no script options and click on disable globally.
Sorry to hear mullvad's not loading anything. Seems like a weird bug
Setting the default browser, is a problem on Windows, there is a workaround I could dig up for you if you want. But basically you have to make a script and then modify the registry to point to that script as the default browser. It's a pain in the butt but it works. Thankfully on Linux, and Mac OS it just works as the default browser
It does not work on Linux. Not for me.
On Qubes it just worked after I did --register-app
Their GitHub has an issue open for it in Linux, I see that the tor project is working on a solution as well to make it more elegant.
But since it doesn't load any web pages for you, you don't want to make it your default anyway.
"Command not found". This is exactly why I don't even bother anymore.
Probably something about Google.
Yeah if it's the comment chain that I think they're referring to, I believe it came down to Mozilla "being in bed with Google" because Google is the default search engine.
I'll take the default search engine being Google over things like affiliate links being hijacked, but maybe I'm crazy for taking that position.
Typical Brave user hating google while using chrome with preinstalled extensions. Everything about that browser is the opposite of what it should be. Same with the users.
I follow Ghacks, a tech site, as well and boy there is a Brave shill on there who attacks everyone there for daring to say anything against it. He knows stuff, judging from his comments, yet is so anti Mozilla and pro Brave that I can't understand. Almost thinks anyone not using Brave is inferior.
It's not good to stereotype people. But, I would bet money that they have any three of these: bought
NFCsNFTs unironically, supports OpenAI unconditionally, propose blockchain on everything, bought a pizza with bitcoin years ago that would be millions of dollars today and are still salty about it, have a Starlink receiver, drive a beaten down Tesla they can't afford to repair because they spent their money paying for FSD early access, and would definitely be first in line to fly Starship to Mars if they were allowed to, they posts to imageai regularly.EDIT: autocorrect.
Yes, that pizza for Bitcoin story is quite popular, though it happened in very early days of the currency. Also, I assume you meant NFTs instead of NFCs :p. For a second, I was wondering what did near field communication had to do with this.
don't you just love projection?
cant accept the facts, so deflect the criticism to something else that is in no way a valid target for them.
The Mozilla foundation is super shady, and some Firefox devs does have it in them to change stuff to piss off people. It doesn't excuse Brave though.
Please cite an actual source for that claim.
Their public reports were a fair share of the money goes to its administration, were the dev funds are lower each years, were some funded orgs does not seem to exist, with the addition of actual user contribution being a drop in the ocean of money influx, is the source for the "shady" part.
Me (and many other) having long debates on their bugzilla about changes they made that ignore user settings, against all common practices, with no chance of reverting them because they knew better, until some big service (say, gmail) is impacted at which point all their arguments are forgotten and the changes are reverted, for the pissing of people part.
I've actually been attacked on several occasions by brave fan boys when I casually mentioned that I switched to Firefox and loved it. Idk what their deal is but I find it hilarious that all this stuff is coming out about brave recently đ€Ł
They're literally on the payroll. It's a pyramid scheme.
Ok. Chrome sucks. Brave sucks. Whatâs good. Firefox?
Firefox is great.
Firefox with good plugins is even better!
Absolutely! Another really good fork of FF to check out is Floorp I'm thinking of making it my main and going steady :) https://floorp.app/en/
Unless browser fingerprinting is your concern, in which case the most generic, unmodified browser is best (e.g. Tor).
But that is a huge topic for another thread.
Overall youâre right but in which world is tor generic and unmodified đ
The Tor browser is a modified version of Firefox, but you are not meant to modify the Tor Browser, in order for everyone using the Tor Browser to look the same and blend in. This is done for maximum privacy and anonymity.
It's not possible to identify you if you use the tor browser without changing the window size or any other settings, because the fingerprint is literally the same amongst everyone that uses it this way. So you kind of blend in with the masses, it's neither generic nor unmodified, I give you that :D
Simply the OS already makes that difficult, true. Nonetheless, it's one of your best bets.
For those who truly want to stay private, installing plugins on the Tor browser is obviously a no go. Changing any setting or even the window size should not be done. Seriously.
And I'd venture that Tor on phones might be the most homogenous, though that still isn't saying a lot, sadly. Plus, smartphones are a privacy nightmare regardless (tip of the iceberg).
In the end, fingerprinting makes true privacy very challenging. Great introduction to the topic.
And an advanced writeup with excellent resources for those who really want to get into the subject matter.
Edit: spelling
This is the way
And LibreWolf is better. It's Firefox with all of the privacy settings preconfigured and uBlock Origin preinstalled. Also, crap like Sponsored sites and Pocket are removed.
Been very happy with Librewolf. Thought it would be another one of those softwares recommended by linux-losers but which never actually works, but it's quite the opposite.
Is LibreWolf still a version or two behind on Gecko?
AFAIK the most recent Firefox version is 118.0.2 and LibreWolf is based on that
Word. Last I had looked, they lagged a version or two behind on the base FF version. Likely just a lack of contributors or something then. Ty.
They used to lag behind, but now they caught up, so I can recommend LibreWolf to anyone without worries from a security perspective.
How is Librewolf different from Mullvad browser, which is supposed to be Tor browser (hardened FF) without the Tor?
The Mullvad Browser is based on the Tor browser, but it doesn't use the Tor network, whereas LibreWolf is based on Firefox + arkenfox user.js. LibreWolf is better for normal day-to-day browsing, where as Mullvad is meant to be used for high privacy/security tasks. Mullvad is kinda hard to daily drive, because it can't be configured to save cookies, you can't really use extensions and it lacks some other things. These features were removed in the Tor browser, because as I said, it's meant for high thread model usage. Edit: I like the Mullvad browser and I use it myself, but not as my daily driver.
High threat*
Not trying to correct you at all, only for ppl's understanding :)
Btw ty for mentioning Mulvad Browser. I liked it honestly but it's still new, you feel me.
Thanks, just realized that this is not !privacy@lemmy.ml and people here are probably not aware of threat modeling. But in this context just the word 'thread' might actually fit better as the threat model pretty much stays the same.
Waterfox is similar, though it doesnât install additional extensions but comes with a bit of look and feel customization options instead. It restores those non-floating tabs from quantum by default and is pretty speedy.
Waterfox is more for look and feel, whereas LibreWolf makes significant privacy improvements. You can choose for yourself. Btw: You can also customize the UI on LibreWolf, just enable userChrome.css customization under Settings -> LibreWolf -> 'Allow userChrome.css customization'. Now, you can customize everything you want.
Well yes, Wolf is a lot more focused on privacy, but itâs also a secondary goal for Waterfox. In 6.0 they enabled DNS over Oblivious HTTP (no idea what that means but you probably do) by default and incorporated yokkoffingâs Betterfox preconfig of user.js. Itâs for those who are concerned about privacy but not nearly as much as the privacy community. For me, Iâd rather have cookies.
It's basically the standard DNS-over-HTTPS functionality that is already present in almost every browser but routed over a special proxy server. Unfortunately though, Firefox uses Cloudflare services for this.
I also have LibreWolf configured to store cookies. It blocks 3rd-party cookies though.
Good call
And the only thing greater than Firefox is Librewolf.
Or hardened Firefox, which is pretty much the same thing (I use Librewolf myself for convenience).
I love Firefox, used it for years. However I eventually had to switch because of weird bugs and issues with functioning sites. In my sparing personal usage I didnât run into many issues, but using it at work I ran into really weird issues all the time.
I'm team Firefox, very happy here. There's a small amount of optional telemetry to disable to maximise your privacy, and it has the best plugins because there's a lot of choice and they're not purposely crippled.
Plus you can use pretty much any plugin on mobile. this is the biggest feature for me.
I like Firefox because it allows, Atleast for now, customization via userchrome.css files. I once tried Edge and hated it's bloated right click context menu. Meanwhile, in Firefox, I can trim down the context menu to only basic elements.
I do wish Firefox had proper PWA support, but otherwise I have been using it as the main browser on both PC and phone(since uBlock Origin is supported on it, the only Chromium browser to support it is Kiwi Browser on Android).
@kirk781 @Deebster Iâm using this, Iâm not satisfied with the solution but thatâs what weâve got https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/
Yes, this one I think I tried some time before. It is not perfect as you said but it is the closest Firefox has. I think I will give it another go to see how the extension has matured.
There's probably an addon for Firefox that gives some PWA support
There does exists one. But when I last tried it, the experience was worse than what a native integration would give. It wasn't streamlined as in other browsers. It doesn't matter much since I only use YouTube Music as a PWA, which I have a relegated to another window in another browser.
Off topic, but screw you Google, for not giving a native app. Spotify meanwhile has command line third party clients even(looks at ncspot) for Premium users.
Check out this custom YouTube Music desktop client: https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music. It has neat features like an adblocker and a download feature and many more things built-in and it's open source. It's available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
It still uses electron though, but we live in this timeline after all.
Firefox and Mull (a Firefox fork) have your privacy in mind. They work as good as Chrome and don't fuck you without asking.
There is Fennec available on F Droid that is basically Firefox with some blobs removed. Not as hardened as Mull but still a worthy option. There is one more browser based on Firefox called Iceraven for Android but it is not available on F Droid even. Though it supports a much wider variety of extensions than mobile Firefox does as of now. The downside is that it gets security updates usually later than Firefox, being an independent project.
Firefox is the least sucky.
Firefox, or on mobile, Fennec. It's a Firefox clone with some added functionality, maintained by the developers of the F-Droid app store themselves, so highly trusted & fully compatible to stay in sync with the desktop Firefox.
For those rare occasions where a website absolutely doesn't work with FF, and you must use it for some reason, I'd suggest Chromium portable on Desktop, and Kiwi Browser on mobile.
I have Kiwi installed and like that desktop Chrome extensions can be installed on it for the odd occasion. However, IIRC, it is updated infrequently and isn't recommended as a daily driver.
I'd never use it as a daily driver, really just for websites that absolutely don't work with Firefox/Fennec. Happens very infrequent if at all though.
Check out Mull.
Last time I tried Mull, I could only use a handful extensions. I chose Fennec particularly because it supports all desktop extensions. Is that still the case?
Mull has the same limitation as Fennec in that you have a small curated list of available add-ons unless you sign in with a Mozilla account and make a collection or whatever.
Floorp is my favorite Firefox fork!
Cool, that kinda looks like vivaldi except based on firefox.
It's the closest I've been able to find to vivaldi. Unfortunately no one does workspaces as good as vivaldi, but their implementation deleted all my workspaces one day, with no back up, and that was after several other total wipes of my windows/tabs.
Itâs got its problem but itâs my preference
Vivaldi is a good Chrome replacement.
It's really great! Been using it for nearly a year now and love the influx of privacy friendly features.
Just use Firefox. Or LibreWolf if you want a pre-hardened Firefox. Remember to install uBlock Origin.
Thanks for pointing me to LibreWolf. I like to use separate browsers as information silos and have been using Brave as my secondary. Been looking forward to switching it out for a long time, LibreWolf sounds like just the ticket.
You can also use Firefox containers. One of the best features of Firefox.
Paired with the Foxytab plugin to automatically open websites in specific containers or restrict containers to a list of websites. Firefox also has profiles, and a simple extension (with a tiny thing to install in your PC) makes them as easy to use as theyâre on Chrome
I don't like brave because Brandon Eich (CEO, formerly with Mozilla) doesn't support gay marriage and was pushing anti-vax stuff on twitter. I don't look for this shit to titillate my tits like some folks, but when it hits me in the face I can't ignore it.
When fact checking myself I found even more controversies, but I'm not wasting time reading articles that feed a confirmation bias.
Itâs crazy to me that people ever thought brave was âprivacy focusedâ when it was clear that they were trying to jump on the crypto bandwagon with their own in-network crypto and ad network. It was always just a reskinned chrome with ublock built in and then their crypto and ad network tacked on top
I don't like Brave because they've done dodgy things like this time and time again over the years, and each time Brandon Eich went on a marketing campaign across social media to drum up new users and drown the story out.
He's also the creator of JavaScript if that irks you any more.
it does
Just a reminder, any time you see a "tech" youtuber with brave installed, they're not going to be an excellent source of information
What browser signifies an excellent source of information? Ice weasel? w3m?
Lynx
raw dogging straight html
Haha, my browser is called curl
I have Orion (macOS only for the time being) and itâs sooo good.
The amazing part is that it even works as a daily driver if youâre a not-so-techie person/normal user⊠but then on top there are all these little extra features and optimizations that make it like Safari if Safari was actually good.
I would at this point a) not be able to go back to either Safari or Firefox (edit: nor Ungoogled Chromium) as well as b) immediately trust an Orion user on most of what they have to say about a âtechâ related opinion :D
Based on your comment, I've just downloaded Orion to give it a shake. Very much enjoyed the OS X-esque intro video. Took me right back to installing Snow Leopard for the first time.
Sounds interesting. Iâd thought Iâd heard of all the browsers that exist lol. Gonna give it a spin .
Wow, Orion is pretty slick! And Orion+ doesn't offer any actual features aside from early access and input on the roadmap. So far so good. Custom buttons is really cool, built in tree style tabs is slick. Also!! orion has workspaces that are as good if not better than vivaldi's! This is really slick, thanks for sharing
Brodie Robertson is an excellent source of information âčïž
Except in terms of browser choice apparently. Either they're ignorant or being paid. Either way it's not a good sign.
You have to be very brave to download that browser
I don't understand when and why Brave became such a household name. It seems so many people use it and swear by it, but its reputation is "suspicious" at best.
Just use Firefox. It's been around way, way longer and it doesn't use the Chromium engine. Google doesn't need more of a monopoly on the internet.
But what's wrong with non Chrome Chromium based browsers?
(Just give me downvotes, I don't care if my question is stupid)
Well Chrome(ium) has almost all of the browser market share and google is trying to push something called web environment integrity which would implement a sort of certification system where web servers evaluate the authenticity of the client. If you extrapolate that idea a bit further it boils down to "we won't serve you content if we don't like your browser, device, OS, etc". Which I would consider as hostile to the open but rapidly closing internet as we know it.
Edit: I forgot to make my point lol. Firefox is a completely different browser engine from the chromium based browsers which is why you see a lot of people recommending firefox because they don't comply with web integrity. I don't think it's working though because this is something only the techbros and the cybersisters care about while everyone else just goes about their day.
Makes sense.
Chromium is still controlled by Google, so having an overwhelming market share of Chromium-based browsers reduces competition and increases Google's control of the market's position and future. Using Firefox (and Safari, if it were not locked to a single ecosystem) reduces that threat.
When we say "controlled", that's still only accounting for the primary fork, right?
As long as it's open source, it feels like the idea is that the day Google pushes "feat(): Users now automatically have $1 sent to Google a day" commit, someone creates a "chromium-nongooglefucked" fork repository from the prior commit, and everyone uses that.
K
It just means if they want to do something bad then they can
If Google wanted to they could ban VPNs on all Chromium browsers and all the forks downstream would have to comply
More likely they can make it so only verified websites will load and down the line charge to be verified. It kills the open internet and the ability for anyone to make a website/host it where they want
Damn.
It's not a stupid question, some people just don't know.
Mainly it's because:
There are probably plenty more reasons but these are the big ones, and of coarse this is a simplification, in reality things are always a bit more complicated.
Web dev here. Regardless of my opinion, I need to make sure my web projects work on chrome because of market share.
I think if Firefox can find a way to have full parity with chrome extensions, that might be a big shift. I've talked to more than one person that has a specific extension they rely on that they can't duplicate with Firefox options. They have many of the big names, but also some holes
It's the other way around in my experience
Genuinely curious. What extensions are stopping people from moving to Firefox?
Not OP, (and Firefox is still my main), but I keep Chromium-based browsers around for Ichigo, an addon which automatically translates raw manga - which is a godsend for avid manga readers like myself who frequently run out of existing translated manga to read. There's also Scan Translator which works in a similar way, but sadly Firefox has nothing like them.
In my opinion best bet is ungoogled chromium for any extensions or applications that utilize chromium.
I just spent awhile trying to switch from Vivaldi to Floorp before going back. It just doesn't work as smoothly, things like tabs wouldn't save properly between sessions, pinning tabs doesn't prevent you from closing them, UI elements would disappear, etc.
I use it as my YouTube/spotify browser because the ad block just works. Firefox is janky because I have other extensions running that screw up playback on some sites (this has gotten a lot better but I still just use brave out of habit)
The only real problem I ever had with Firefox was this privacy option that would disable auto playback on sites like Twitch and TikTok but that was a setting I wasn't even aware of. Other than that, I rarely ever have an issue with FF outside of web dev when it doesn't yet support some cutting-edge web API feature.
Yea, it was something with various extensions I had going. I'm not blaming Firefox at all. I love Firefox. Just easier to use the other browser on the occasions when my configuration causes issues than try to troubleshoot it.
I've had issues with add-ons on some sites too. For those times I just use a different Firefox profile (each has its own set of add-ons and settings :D)
That's a good idea.
Brave to me is like an online advertising racket. They push ad-blocking software by default in their browser, then extort companies into using their own ad network to advertise to their users. Brave Ads are of course opt-in and the main incentive of enabling them is to earn BAT (Basic Attention Token) which is their cryptocurrency. In terms of their intrusiveness, they're like push notifications you get up to six times an hour, and from my experience using the browser, it was all mainly crypto marketplaces and VPN's advertising.
Compared to 2020, when you could earn hundreds of dollars in a year from frequently being served Brave Ads, BAT isn't really worth shit anymore thanks to the crypto crash, so the main financial incentive to use Brave is gone.
If you want privacy, Firefox is that way. Or if you absolutely need to use something based on Chromium, everyone and their fucking mother has forked that browser.
Generally speaking, any service or organization that has to pay youtubers or twitch streamers to drive traffic is...a racket. Avoid like the plague.
Blame YouTube for screwing over legitimate content creators and forcing them to be paid shills for shitty VPN and mobile game companies to pay the bills.
Anyone who claims "We're the best most privacy conscious, secure, and safe product" is already extremely suspicious.
Brave has already been caught Red handed doing anti-privacy and crypto shilling before, yet people decided to forgive them. You don't forgive these things EVER.
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
I think angry is good, that helps you pull through. Godspeed!
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
. Honestly, fuck Google.
Check out the Freetube application for watching youtube videos. You can import all your subscriptions from youtube, make playlists, download video/audio etc.
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
Bro said Firefox đ 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.
Care to share some examples?
why so many down votes?
Because it's not true for the browser itself?
Lemmy is a linux/firefox circlejerk overall, don't try
You tried. RIP
It's the most sane thing to do.
The Brave team are basically a bunch of dodgy wankers at this point.
I don't trust Brave, there's too much money tied up in it for it to be good for users.
Why is this news?
Yea i donât get the hate boner for brave. I get it's sketchy and donât use it myself, but they arenât sneakily installing some VPN to redirect all your web traffic without you knowing. They tell you about it right up front because it's a service they want to sell.
If you donât like the browser, donât use it. There isnât a need to go on some crusade to smear them with bullshit.
It's a bunch of people upset with the company's CEO or whatever over personal views. The browser itself wasn't that bad after you disabled the ad and crypto stuff, which they heavily pushed on you.
I had switched to it from Chrome last year but ended up not caring for it, so I went to Firefox and Librewolf. People can use whatever the hell they want, idgaf. But for those who will eventually end up complaining about YouTube ads and continue to use Chrome, I have no sympathy for if you can't take the few minutes to download and install a new browser and move your favorites over.
This community has some of the worst biased tech readers.
Because it's Brave and people like to jump on bandwagons. This is like the 6th time I've seen this article posted in lemmybin also.
And since we have the reddit-minded folk here, no, I do not support Brave and never will and I would much rather they disappear from the internet, but using ragebait to complain about the browser installing the necessary files to have one of their advertised services working, like pretty much every other software does, is not the way to move forward.
Please Brave: cutout the bullshit defaults game. Everybody's getting smarter and companies are getting stupider
Edit: said this b4, don't fuck with your own competitive advantage where you haven't had a joint and duly qualified computer science lawyer who explains how easy it is to lose trust and commercial viabillity for a sketchy, underhanded product (see LastPass). Also FUCK LastPass, may this Pass be their Last
Why is installing a VPN considered bad? Is it because it is done without user consent? I don't understand if there is any malicious intent.
They're installing extra software that's useless unless you give them money. Plus you really want to be aware of your VPN since all your traffic will be going through it.
It doesnât auto enable and chromium also gives you a lot of unnecessary features. While I think Brave is bloat I donât see how this is any more than the usual.
Because a vpn can monitor all the websites that you visit. Not directly what you're looking at, but definitely where you're looking. Just line your provider can, if you're not using a vpn. But at least with your provider, you have a contract with them - you pay them to transport your data and nothing more. Some very scummy providers aside, that's where it stops.
A free vpn, however, needs to pay for transporting your data somehow. And if you're not paying for it with money, then who/what is?
See also Tom Scott's explanation about vpns, why you probably don't need one, and why he refused their advertisement money.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Tom Scott's explanation about vpns
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It's not even free, the service itself is a payed subscription. But it's there and it could be working and funneling data without the user knowing it if they wanted to.
I agree with what other people said. And here's a new twist.
Any software that messes with the networking stack, can cause really difficult to debug errors. And it may induce errors in other programs. The more complicated your computer's networking, the more fragile it is.
So introducing, silently, unasked for, network drivers and VPN hooks into the operating system is harming the compute stability of their user base.
At the very least, it should be opt-in! There should be a dialogue asking hey we have this new awesome feature, click okay to install it, something like that. Informed consent
It's "all your mail is now redirected to a third party that makes money by mining it for data without you knowing" level of nastiness. Absolutely deplorable and a reason to never touch anything made by the people behind Brave even with a ten foot pole. Brave is a scam and why people pretend its not is beyond me.
that's what the new outlook 'app' (replacing win 10/11's mail 'app') does with gmail accounts. routes all your mail from gmail through microsoft servers before delivering to the app on your pc.
a service has far more privs on the system than a browser should have or need (which can be installed on a per-user basis, no admin/root required).
The ol' bait and switch...classic. Opera used to be good too, then chinese people bought it, then emerged opera vpn. Shaddy af. Same as camscanner
Camscanner hurt. I used it constantly. Then boom, absolute 180. I guess that's the goal. Make a legit app that people love. Then sell it to someone who will exploit your loyalty customers. Cool!
Pretty much everybody has a number they will sell out at, for some itâs astronomical, for others itâs basically what youâd expect
Mine is staggeringly low.
At this point that seems to be the case everywhere. The future looks bleak, and so for most, trying to get what they can out of life before the climate wars, or WW3, or whatever happens seems to be the case. I donât criticize it. I think thereâs a high probability that the reason that we see little extraterrestrial life is that they did the same shit we are doing. The universe has a fractal nature. There are likely many species that also had planets that could support intelligent life. However since the competition for resources is baked into existence, they probably did what we are doing and are themselves no longer alive because they ended themselves before they could really end their stupid arguments about their gods, or work for the collective good more than the individual good
Some of the OG devs who made Opera have made Vivaldi. Itâs chromium under the hood, but with googles tracking and telemetry turned off. Itâs not perfect, but it adds a significant number of power user features, includes its own (limited) ad and tracking blocking. I alternate between that and Firefox dev edition as my daily driver
Can you elaborate on CamScanner please?
Itâs a Chinese app that lets people âscanâ a document using the camera on their phone. It was âfreeâ for a long time, turns out it was dropping injected adware on peopleâs phones.
To be honest, Microsoft lens has had the same features for a long time, but didnât have âscannerâ in the name and most app searches are piss poor so people just literally searched âcamera scannerâ and got the adware result. Microsoft has their own long and shady history, but dropping an adware payload wasnt part of that.
I use it a lot during my study. But when CamScanner started serving ads, intrusive ads, "cloud backup"...i tried searching for alternatives and use microsoft lens. TBH, microsoft lens is shit compared to camscanner. The detection is slow, janky, cant do multiple pages scan and a lot more troublesome to use. CamScanner detection algorithm was way better at that time. So i bite the lbullet and just use it until end of my study.
Thank you!
I'm not so sure that's true anymore with Windows 11.
Showing in app ads is one thing. Installing a Trojan specifically meant to circumvent App Store ad requirements is another. Windows 11, and most MS products at this point are ad delivery platforms, but they still follow the rules of app stores with the basic requirement of âshows in app adsâ and âwonât try to inject a Trojan that beats your phoneâs app sandboxingâ
Opera does this too and nobody bats an eye (anymore).
For some reason people like to clown on Brave specifically.
Probably because nobody cares about Opera doing that since the ones pointing this out are at least privacy aware people that won't use Opera. It is also a problem when Brave does it because it is a "privacy focused" browser. They sure have the balls to do this.
Opera was also 100% up front about it and sold it as a feature. They didn't sneak it into installers and crap. IMO that's the issue, the lack of communication.
Itâs crazy to me that people ever thought brave was âprivacy focusedâ when it was clear that they were trying to jump on the crypto bandwagon with their own in-network crypto and ad network. It was always just a reskinned chrome with ublock built in and then their ad network tacked on top
Brave is doing the same: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/29/brave-partners-with-guardian-to-bring-a-paid-vpn-and-firewall-to-its-browser/
https://brave.com/desktop-vpn
Did you do any research at all before making your statement?
Firefox over everything. use Vivaldi if you insists on rendering blink
Question: why would they do that? If you don't even know it's there, what good is it doing for them?
It's also enabled by default.
Edit: Apparently it's not enabled by default. I tried brave some time ago and remembered that it was enabled, which promoted me to uninstall it immediately. Maybe it was enabled by default then, maybe I misremembered.
Having a VPN basically just means sending your traffic (albeit encrypted) to someone else's server, before sending it to the wider internet.
That means if you don't specifically disable it, everything you do in the brave browser could theoretically be logged, processed and analyzed by the owners of brave.
Even if the traffic itself is still encrypted, like with online banking, just knowing how many people in a certain city use which bank for example, could be very interesting to advertisers.
Depending on how evil they are, they could also log extensive amounts of user data, just waiting for the day it becomes legal to sift through it (just like a lot of governments do).
Or maybe they just log and sell your data even though it's illegal. Like a lot of companies do all the time (see Cambridge Analytical scandal etc.).
Or maybe they don't. But if I was a browser company I'd sure enjoy having all my users route all their traffic through servers I control.
the toggle shows up by default, but without a paid subscription the vpn is unusable. even then you need to enable it. you can disable it completely in brave://flags and set "enable experimental brave VPN" to disabled. it's shitty that they include it by default, but it's disingenuous to say they're rerouting traffic of all brave users through their own vpn servers.
Alright, thanks for the correction.
Holy fuck, well that is a whole other issue...
Nothingburger who cares?
So what?
Are people upset about this? I honestly don't understand.
I honestly don't understand someone that would accept anything from a stranger.
You member U2 and the forced album through iTunes?
No, I have no idea what you're talking about.
But I still don't understand why people would make a big deal about a piece of software that installs multiple software packages...
I mean have you ever installed Microsoft office? Did you ask it to install Microsoft access? What does Microsoft access even do?
Or have you ever installed nvidia drivers? Did you ask for the whole "GeForce experience"? Wtf does that even mean?
Installing extra software packages is definitely par for the course, bit in the brave example, at least the extra shit isn't required for the main app to work, in fact it's disabled by default, that's great!
To answer your original question: yes I do think people are genuinely upset with this.
If you take your office installation example, you're installing a suite of applications. You're not just installing excel, you're installing the office suite so you're bound to get all the applications in the suite.
Meanwhile, this would be like installing the office suite and getting a service installed along with it, that can monitor outgoing network traffic without them saying anything about it.
The main two reasons I'd be upset with this if I used brave was: They installed it without saying anything and It's something that's inherently a privacy and security risk. Even if brave themselves don't do anything malicious with it, doesn't mean that someone who's found a potential exploit in the VPN service won't.
Also just as an aside, I also absolutely despise "GeForce Experience" and there are ways to fetch the drivers as standalone packages without getting the telemetry spyware installed alongside them.
Ok, well a vpn is a potential security improvement if anything... But regardless, it's off, it's disabled, unusable unless you're paying for it. I mean just for perspective, any browser is much more of an inherent security risk than a VPN app sitting dormant and inactive.
But you're right that users never asked for it, so I get that part.
A VPN is only as much of a security improvement as the service behind it. If it gets installed in a shady way, how much trust can you put into the service?
This was my point exactly. A VPN may just as well be used to spy on your traffic rather than secure it. And that's why I'd be upset, personally: because I don't trust brave or the company behind it.
But I think the main thing people are up in arms about is the fact that they didn't ask for it. :)
Sick. Thanks brave.
Installing VPNs without telling the end user isnât a good thing.
And thatâs what we call a Trojan horse