I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
I’m not sure what that means. It doesn’t “use Chromium”, it is a fork of Chromium.
No. It isn’t. You’re thinking of Chrome. Don’t know how many times I can say this but Chromium forks are not Chrome.
…huh?
Because it makes zero sense.
Using a fork of Chromium is still using Chromium, and still helping Google’s dominance in the browser market. Using forks of Chromium is still supporting Google in the same way using forks of Firefox is still supporting Mozilla.
That’s not correct. Chromium is an entirely different browser. It has a logo that looks like the Chrome logo but gray.
When there becomes a suitable alternative that I can use for daily tasks and still preserves privacy, I’ll recommend that one.
Currently I use 1 of 5 different browsers, depending on the task. I can’t really recommend other people do the same. So the one is typically recommend is Brave because it’s the only out-of-the-box privacy-preserving browser that works with virtually any webpage.
Literally any Firefox fork is a suitable alternative that can be daily driven. As for out-of-the-box function I don’t see that as a factor in a community all about privacy, changing settings is pretty much the norm.
Edit: Also I said using a fork of Chromium is still using Chromium, not Chrome.
That’s simply incorrect. I’ve used a few and many of them don’t load webpages properly. We can argue about who’s to blame for that but at the end of the day they don’t work the way any Chromium browsers would.
I’ve never had any such issues.
I have come across web pages in the past that refuse to load if the user agent isn’t chrome/edge
I haven’t encountered this issue. And Ungoogled Chromium is always an option.
That would run the risk of the user agent displaying as chromium. So you would still need to change the user agent, which I’m not sure why you wouldn’t do that to begin with
Ah. So then these issues don’t exist or what?
I’m not saying they don’t exist, just that I have never personally experienced them. The only issues I’ve ever really experienced are with DRM-ridden websites which you should avoid using anyway.