It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
I’ve yet to find a browser on iOS that blocks ads as effectively. I’d like to use Firefox but they don’t seem interested in adding Adblock on their iOS app. I don’t want to use Brave but browsing the internet with ads is an absolute non-starter.
Brave is just a shitty browser. Did not know they were anti-freedom kind of people. Makes browser no-no.
I have been using Brave for its out of the box ad and tracker blocking. I’d been uncomfortable with the new AI features and had always been skeptical of the crypto integration, but it wasn’t until this post that I realized it was appreciably worse than Firefox on those counts, nor how bad the people running it are.
Obviously, I’m now looking for other options. I’ve seen some good recs for desktop browsers elsewhere on this post, but what I’m not seeing is a lot of good mobile browser suggestions that will have the desired features. What would the folks here suggest for an e/OS browsing experience with similar or better privacy and ad blocking options? I know there’s Firefox, but A. With all the AI it keeps pushing, I’m sure there has to be better and B. I do also have mobile Firefox but have found it substantially less usable for my habit of browsing with a zillion tabs both non-incognito and incognito, so I mostly had only been it when I couldn’t get a video to play in Brave.
I am, obviously, willing to run de-Googled Chromium, but if something else is going to actually support 100+ tabs in a performant fashion I’d be happy to totally de-Chromium too.
I also use the shit out of profiles on Brave desktop, though mobile doesn’t support it. Do the Firefox forks like Waterfox have a similar option on desktop? Does another browser? I know it’s a feature Chrome has because I do sadly have to use Chrome for work, so I would expect at least the de-Googled Chromium-based ones would?
I’ve been using Vivaldi (chromium-based) for about three years now. It’s customizable and has been generally solid. Also has a couple of unique tab management features. Doesn’t have builtin ad blocking afaik. But for that I use adguard desktop and route all my traffic through it, which filters out ads regardless of which browser I’m in. On iOS I can recommend Orion by kagi. It’s the only other webkit browser besides Safari, runs light, and has decent builtin ad blocking
Firefox (and its forks) have an integrated profile manager, though it’s not always intuitive to figure out how to get to it. LibreWolf is the fork I seem to always go back to, and it has zero slop.
I use containers. Right-click on the new tab button and pick a container to open the tab in. There’s also an add-on that will do this automatically for you when you visit a specific website, so if you want every site to live in its own container, you can do that too.
Personally I just use its built-in cross-site cookie blocking, but multiple ways to do the same thing.
LibreWolf looks promising. No mobile app, but they recommend IronFox for that, so I just downloaded that to play with. Thanks!
Edit: mobile IronFox is looking pretty good so far. Made configuring privacy settings an option just out of the box, which I appreciate. Biggest problem right now is that I can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave.
They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
a for-profit company partially funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, of Palantir fame. the same Palantir spying on Americans in order to allow nazis to round up immigrants and throw them into concentration camps. the same Peter Thiel that said democracy is not compatible with freedom.
The same one who wants to create the apocalypse and believes the anti-Christ is anyone who isn’t fascistic
I think you are probably assuming most people are as informed about such things, even tech literate people. As someone who tends to stick his head in the sand on anything that isn’t specific tech news I care about organically it would be pretty easy to miss all of the scummy things Brave has done over the years. Let alone the sketchy history of Eich himself.
It’s also a chromium browser.
“Privacy-centric” my elbow.
I will be adding this turn of phrase to my vocabulary, thank you.
You’re welcome, wish I could take the credit for it, but I don’t remember where I got it from. Blackadder, I think.
Just mentioned how I didn’t like people recommending this like last week and got “ok” as a response lol. Some people are just ignorant and don’t care.
ok
ok
It’s a for profit ad company making a “privacy first browser”.
Thinking for literaly a second about that sentence should tell you all you need to know.
you can do privacy friendly ads, it’s not because the entire industry has evolved to an horrible point that the good way of doing it can’t exist
- it’s fucking Chromium
Go use some Firefox-derivative like Librewolf or Fennec, like a sane person.
Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features
Yeah, this is important. Fuck Google. I will only ever use a chromium browser if I have to for work or for a misbehaving website.
I don’t know enough about browsers to really know anything about chromium. But I did see a statement from Google which I believe stated that they were removing support for adblockers from chromium based browsers. It was at that point that I decided I did want to continue having a usable browsing experience, and immediately swapped.
I will reject the misbehaving website rather than resort to using Chromium.
Occasionally though, life requires using a shit website. I do avoid it if possible though
Your attitude is very reasonable. I strive to be as unreasonable as I can.
reference
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
Self awareness is good haha
I feel like I’m getting too old for the Internet. I still fondly remember the times where you could create a Geocities page and add it yourself to the Yahoo directory, and other netizens clicked through categories to get to your listing, instead of using a search engine.
But I digress. I’m finding myself browsing the www less over time, and I’m already limited to only a hadful of pages I visit regularly. For me personally, Vivaldi is the best choice for a desktop, and Brave is hands-down the best choice for my smartphone. But I appreciate that others may have different use cases.
Remember when sites had webring links at the bottom? Before Google solved it (then destroyed it completely several years later), discoverability used to be a community effort.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s you used to get an email address and some webspace included in your internet subscription. I remember making a small personal website on the 15 MB of web space I got. The URL was a bit cumbersome http://www.my.isp/www/somesuperlonguserid/index.html but it worked fine.
These times are sadly over.
Why did I click that link lol
I don’t use chromium based browsers for daily use, but I do keep chromium installed just in case
They also tried to get away with URL injection. Do not use Brave.
Basically the thing that turned the internet against Honey, but when a homophobic piece of shit does it it’s fine
Why don’t other browsers have ad blocking as good as Brave’s and also work on Android. It just works well out of the box.
Firefox + UBO?
Nowhere near. I use it at work, but Brave still outshines it. Most people haven’t tried Brave because of the icky factor of the CEO, fair enough, but then they don’t know it just works without fuss and that’s why people use it. And Android, as I mentioned
Nowhere near how? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad with Firefox + ublock in several years of use. How can brave be better?
What problems have you had with it? I’ve used it for several years now and honestly can’t remember a time when it fell short.
