no i dont trust brave. i did never understand why people would choose brave over firefox+ublockorigen
Popular tech (a la pop sci or pop psych). Brave uses the right techy sounding buzzwords to appeal to the pseudo power user.
At the time I switched, the built-in blocker worked on a site I regularly used while Firefox+ublock did not (I think it would just prevent things from working or cause infinite ad-loops). If I wasn’t looking for an alternative adblocker, would probably have never bothered switching. There’s also the “get pocket change from using our browser” thing. Some may have been speculating on the value of BATs?
I switched back to Firefox, but the one issue I’m having is the gesture add-ons. They just don’t work near as well as the ones in Chrome ☹️
This is honestly the first valid drawback I’ve seen in this thread about Firefox. Personally, I have to disable most gesture-based features on my device due to my big clumsy hands and perhaps a bit of an inherited neurological problem, but I understand that most users are not like me.
I’d encourage you to share your needs with the Firefox community. I’ve seen some amazing features and add-ons born out of someone simply stepping forward and pointing out how useful a certain feature would be.
Chromium based browsers tend to have less issues. I have to use some government websites that have features that won’t work on firefox
Which government web sites don’t work? I’d like to report them on Bugzilla.
Portuguese IRS and Social Security websites. It’s been years since I tried to access them through firefox though
Your information is probably no longer accurate then. Firefox has undergone many significant updates even within the past year, and it’s very likely those tools are now fully functional, as I’d suspect at some point they’d have been reported on Bugzilla.
I have to access many US government web sites regularly, including the US IRS web site, and I never have a problem.
Back when I was studying computer engineering I was also an avid fan of firefox and I also kept hearing and parroting those lines. Eventually I gave up and stuck with chromium based browsers. (Also because of other reasons, like some extensions only being available for chrome, html games support, etc)
US and portuguese governments are in different leagues. I would assume that yours has better funding and spends more on their virtual infrastructure. I doubt they are comparable, but it is possible that they fixed those issues that I had meanwhile
It’s probably been fixed. I’m not just “parroting those lines” – I’m suggesting that if you find it’s still not functioning on Firefox, the thing to do is to report the issue. (I had previously said Bugzilla, but they get reported to Web Compat now.) I will mention that our IRS is not known for its efficiency and being up to date lol.
Which extensions are missing on Firefox?
I can see that you’re enthusiast and care about firefox, it’s thanks to people like you that these tools get better. But me, for lack of better words, can’t bring myself to care that much about any piece of software that ain’t related to my job, nevermind reporting issues. I’ll use whatever gives me less trouble in my personal time, if in the future things change for chromium, I’ll come back to firefox.
When I get home I’ll check my extensions and pass you the ones that don’t exist for firefox. Right now the only one I remember isn’t really an extension, it’s the text to speech function of Edge, that uses their AI voices.
That used to be true, and I keep Chrome and Edge installed just in case, but honestly I haven’t had to use a different browser in years.
Any web page problems that I found turned out not to be Firefox related.
But if you like Chrome, there’s nothing wrong with that either.
To be clear, I don’t like Chrome itself, I use Edge and sometimes Brave.
Depending on how the whole DRM and adblock thing goes, I might come back to firefox.
Portuguese here. Haven’t had to use anything but Firefox on the IRS and Social Security websites. What are you having trouble accessing?
From what I remember, autoridade tributaria had some buttons or links that wouldn’t do anything on firefox. I remember suspecting it was javascript, but then noticed that Chrome didn’t have issues.
Seg social and fundo ambiental had odd behaviors but I can’t remember exactly what they were.
I remember having to use Internet Explorer to do some actions on the autoridade tributária website, like simulating and submitting IRS (even had to download an external application) but that was like 10-12 years ago. More recently, I had to do some stuff with regards to opening and closing my activity (I was on recibos verdes for a while) and did it all through Firefox. Haven’t had to do much else beyond this.
As for seg. social, I just tried to log in and it said my password expired and I had to create a new one. But when I filled in the password fields and tried to click on the button to submit it, it didn’t work. In any browser. Because there was no fucking link associated with the button. So the button did nothing. I had to manually click on the “recover my password” link so I could a create a new one.
When I logged in, I just clicked on a few things, even simulated my retirement pension and everything worked. It’s not much of a test, I know, but it’s something.
Never entered fundo ambiental so I have no idea if it works or not.
I would have choses firefox if it had the support for tab grouping, something chromium browsers do really well and something I need for my workflow.
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why don’t you read mozilla’s privacy policy and compare it brave’s
Because chromium-based browsers are better in some regards (extensions, good folder support on android). Habit also matter 🙂
That’s in your head. I cannot think of anything Firefox won’t do for me. And if I came across something I needed chromium for, I would open it that one time. My privacy is worth that tiniest bit of effort.
As an independent computer consultant full time, I operate heavily through my browser for a good 60% of my work.
The ability to send tabs to my phone or desktop at will is enough for me. Firefox always.
For me, there are a few plugins that don’t exist on Firefox, which I need. The plugin environment isn’t nearly as robust or kept up-to-date as chromium-based browsers.
Which plugins are they?
Mainly Dragon Medical One
Fair enough. That’s a fairly niche case, but I could see myself using a chromium browser if I had to use this tool at work, but then switching back to Firefox for everything else.
I still wouldn’t use Brave, though, and it would be even better if more developers started supporting Firefox instead.
I agree. I guess I could just use Firefox on mobile and home but use Brave for work.
I’d be interested to hear which plugins you are referring to as my experience with Firefox has been much the opposite. I often find the plug-in selection lacking when required to use a Chromium based browser.
Mainly Dragon Medical One
Tabs folders on Android is a big reason to use Brave instead of Firefox. Tab management is way better. Not some habit. Straight facts. But Firefox has different benefits. F.E. multiple search engines to use in search bar.
Tab folders became such a nuisance for me on Chrome Mobile I started using Firefox. I keep only 5-6 tabs open at a time, webpages opening in the same tab group thing was just too confusing for my very lean tab management mind. Now my 5 tabs really had “9 tabs”.
Firefox tab management is way simpler. It can be good for some people. But sometimes I miss good tab management support in Firefox.
@FarLine99 @orbituary that’s just Google Chrome tab management. You can get the same thing from Cromite, and it’s not even owned by an ad company!
Yup. Cromite is also a very good option. Good to see legacy of Bromite is not lost.
I really like Vivaldi’s tab management on Android myself. It’s more desktop like.
Yup. Good to know you are happy 😃🤘
Chromium browsers could one day be forced to adopt Google Chrome’s updates to maintain their licenses. This could mean that Chrome’s war against ad-block could spread even to Brave. That gives Google too much control over the internet for any one company.
It definetly can happen. Using Firefox is very important this days. Definetly. So do I. Giving all control about WEB to Google is too bad idea. But it is reality we see.
extensions
you mean how Brave doesn’t let you install any on mobile, while Firefox does?
Firefox Android extension support is a killer feature. Use it extensively. I was talking about some extensions that are not available on desktop Firefox compared to chromium browsers.
Being able to use Ublock Origin on my Android was a game changer. I can’t see using any other browser on mobile.
Can I ask which extensions on chromium browsers that you use that aren’t on Firefox. For me, I’ve found every extension I ever needed on Firefox.
For me, everything is OK. But I heard people that needed very specific extensions for work/hobby/productivity that are not available in Firefox. So Brave will be just better on desktop then 🙂
good folder support on android
Can you expand on this? What do you mean by “folder support”? I use Firefox on Android (Fennec branch), and I guess I’m not sure what I’m missing.
Folders for browser tabs. And all in all, working with tabs is more convenient in Chromium browsers.
I’ve never had a problem on Firefox. What is the complaint people have about browser tabs in Firefox? The only complaints I’ve seen have been strictly cosmetic.
I do agree it would be nice to have more folders for my mobile bookmarks. It’s actually one thing that perplexes me. Seems like such a basic thing. It definitely would not make me switch browsers, though, especially not to Brave.
Edit: Perhaps ironically, I just remembered the thing that made me switch from Chrome on Android once and for all was their insistence on displaying browser tabs as cards. At the time, I had heard many of the same myths and half-truths about Firefox that are being shared in this thread (slow, buggy, won’t recognize certificates). Happily, I discovered none of these things were accurate, and in fact if anything it ran faster and more efficiently on my device. It was at that point that I also started becoming more concerned about my privacy, and I subsequently learned that I was already using the best browser where privacy is concerned – I just had to adjust a few settings and switch to a different branch. Funny how “better browser tabs” is hailed as a reason to use a chromium-based browser, when I found the better browser tabs in Firefox all along!
Fency is my addon of choice does all the same but better.
Android 🫡
Firefox for Android allows you to install add-ons
But addons for customizing UI do not work. Can you give me link to this add-on?
- it works out of the box. For no tech-savy people, is all in one
Are you suggesting Firefox doesn’t work out of the box?
No, I mean thst Firefox does not have privacy enchainment tools enabled/installed out of the box. You have to do it manually.
Also a big reason to use it.
I don’t trust Brave one bit. Its whole approach reeks of a bait-and-switch (think “we won’t share or sell your data” pre-9/11 Google). Its founder is a massive homophobe and crypto-bro, and I have a massive learned distrust of homophobes and crypto-bros.
Moreover, I see no reason to use it when we already have far superior options (Firefox).
I agree with this distrust. Something about the browser just feels off to me.
I stick with Firefox for browsing, Ecosia for searching, and Mozilla VPN
Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees! I actually forgot about this one. I’ve been planning to try it.
Only reason I don’t use Ecosia is because you can’t search for “Within the past year”. Which is really necessary when you’re a programmer
I don’t generally use that feature, even as a programmer, but I use Google at work just because my privacy is already pretty exposed at work and I’m not looking up anything wild on a corporate network. I also enjoy the targeting in this particular instance because then my search results are developer focused
Oh yes, that’s very frustrating. It seems like searching within a date range is sadly non-functional on most search engines at this point.
Programmer for many years, didn’t know that feature exists. Not sure I’ll use it knowing it exists.
Your mileage may definitely vary haha, I use that feature a lot (I’m lucky / unlucky enough to work with a lot of new technologies)
You should also check out Tab for a Cause as well! A new tab screen that uses ad revenue to donate to charities. You can select your cause and every new tab you open contributes to it
I can get you a referral link the next time I’m on my desktop, it you’d like
I appreciate the sentiment and the offer, but I know that Tab for a Cause does not support Firefox, and I exclusively use Firefox browsers.
However, I do donate directly to several non-profits, and I work for a charitable non-profit myself, so I’ll actually mention this to my admins because I don’t think we’re part of this yet! So thanks!
Thank you for pointing that fact out! It sounds like it was decided by Mozilla about a year ago to institute that change and I hadn’t noticed the lack of ads until today. At one point it did have issues, but I was able to get around that by changing some settings. But from the sounds of it that may no longer be possible
That’s a shame! I still contribute at work at least, since I use Edge there
I use it sometimes and works fine. Not great, but it’s fine for not super specific stuff
I just tried it, and my one concern is that it appears to tailor its results based on locational data, which is a feature I try to avoid. Like you said, I might use it sometimes, but I’m sticking with Startpage and SearXNG instances as my primary search engines for now. I’m adding it to my list though, so I can test it out a bit more. Maybe there’s a setting I haven’t found yet.
I went to the open streetwise magazine and asked folks if any search engines use open streetmaps by default with searches and they steered me to quant. to boot it otherwise behaves just like duck duck go but does not have the microsoft baggage.
Unfortunately, my experience with qwant does not corroborate this. In spite of promoting themselves as “the search engine that doesn’t know anything about you,” in reality the use locational data derived from your IP to provide tailored search results. This function is not opt-in, and in fact there is apparently no way to opt out.
I don’t think I need to explain why this is deeply problematic in a privacy community, but just in case: Imagine that people in my location tend to have right-wing extremist interests. A search engine could then decide that people in my area are interested in right-wing conspiracies and thus serve me more of this type of result. (This has in fact been the case for me upon first testing a site or app when all it has is my general locational data to serve me algorithmic recommendations, so this is a concrete problem for me.)
On top of this, a search engine that brazenly declares to know nothing about me is in fact using data derived from me to customize results? They have breached my trust from the start.
A search engine should use only search terms, syntax, and data I manually and knowingly provide to produce results. No more than this.
The way I test this is quite simple: Try searching “restaurants in my area.” When I do so, it currently provides a list of restaurants in Helsinki, since that is where I’m currently connecting via VPN. When I disconnect my VPN and try again, it gives results for my home town. Any search engine that does this is not one I opt to use.
Gonna give SearXNG a spin then, since even though “I don’t have anything to hide talk”, privacy is a right we’re better off upholding and I want to use services that respect it.
I use this instance: https://searx.tiekoetter.com/
Does any search engine work well for super specific stuff these days? I’m finding search is increasingly useless for my niches (high level topics usually being Carpentry, Building Codes, and Astronomy) but their results usually take me to a word vomit blog, something clearly GPT generated or Pinterest spam (DuckDuckGo is terrible for that)
To be fair, more often than not I find stuff by going into “siloed sites” (yt, forums, etc) and searching from there than using a search engine, but it’s still good for stuff that are more common but also more of a hassle trying to remember than just searching it quickly (e.g. “how do I add my user to sudoers again?” kind of stuff)
Would it make sense to use ecosia when you’re also using ublock origin? Can they grow trees if you’re not viewing any ads?
Not unless you disable your Ad blocker on Ecosia
but then I’ll be seeing ads lol
You do it for the trees 🌳
Remember when facebook was a new alternative to myspace that offered privacy and control over who sees your posts? Pepperidge farm remembers.
Enshittification intensifies
No
it’s involved in crypto. That’s a permanent red flag for me.
Absolutely not. Brave is a bloated mess with feature creep and stealing advertisements. It’s ran by a right wing nut job that got fired from Mozilla after publicly stating he hated gay marriage. And the greatest sin of them all: it’s chromium.
No idea why people consider them private over Firefox. Literally just install uBlock Origin on Firefox and you’ll have a way better experience.
LibreWolf is better.
LibreFox is LibreWolf now btw
You are right 👍
Do you have a source for the founder claims? I’m no fan of Brave but that’s an intense back story if true
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I mentioned this in the article the other person posted, but I wanted to let the OP be the one to gather the source because then we’re on the same page. If I had gone out and found an article from the opposite end of the spectrum we’d be coming to the conversation from diametrically opposed viewpoints
I realize it sounds lazy, and perhaps there’s some truth to that. But any time I make a claim on Lemmy I do my best to provide a source as well
It was like super publicized news, it’s not very hard to find lol. I duckduckgo’d it for you https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-day-reign-of-fallen-ceo-brendan-eich/
Thank you for the link! I realize it’s very much a
LMGTFYsituation, but I prefer to have the person making the claim provide the source because it puts us on equal ground of having the same source of information. From the article it’s clear that I could have looked up any right-wing article and found information to the contrary and we’d be in different contexts.Now, that being said, for anyone else coming to the thread, I recommend you read the whole article. But the TL;DR is that Eich was made CEO of Mozilla in 2014, which caused increased optics on his $1,000 contribution to Proposition 8, a California initiative to ban gay marriage in the state. Because of this, and because of his failure to diffuse the situation, he was removed as CEO shortly after. He was offered a high-ranking position at the company but declined.
So, I would say he definitely has (had?) some close-minded views on gay marriage, however, he never publicly stated anything, but instead made a public donation that was “found out” by investigation, not because he outwardly publicized it. In fact, the article (and apparently Eich and his employees) makes it clear that he never let the viewpoint affect him professionally. But, it did make many of his co-workers uncomfortable and feel unwelcome in the Mozilla community, especially having someone hold those opinions so high up in the corporate chain.
I just wanted to make sure the context was all straight here. I don’t agree with his close-minded views, I’m glad he was removed as CEO, and it’s another reason that I don’t want to use the Brave browser (assuming his views haven’t changed). But, I just want to make sure I had the whole picture
Lol why are you making this a political beliefs things. There are so many things in this post I disagree with but I got better things to do with my time.
You made it political, not me? I’m responding to you not using Brave at least in part due to the founder’s political beliefs
Gay marriage isn’t a political view
But in the US it unfortunately is. The right has made it a political “stance” while it’s just a matter of human rights. It shouldn’t be political, but it is and it pisses me off
@Notnotmike pretty well-known! also OKCupid started warning Mozilla users about it based on HTTP headers which was an interesting form of protest https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536
I read about that in the article the other commenter posted! The article also mentioned that, once he was removed as CEO, some right-wing websites, namely something called “RedState”, just outright blocked FireFox users in a counter-protest.
“We wanted to remind people that the totalitarian impulse of the Mozilla corporation is real,” said right-wing site RedState on April 8 after blocking access by Firefox users.
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Google monopoly which is causing huge issues right now
Chromium isn’t that bad. It’s Google that’s bad
You mean the crypto-bro browser funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who runs the corporate intelligence agency Palantir, which contracts with the Department of Defense to spy on Americans?
Uh, no.
Its entire business model is a protection racket wrapped in a crypto scam, so no, I don’t trust it!
It also doesn’t help that that it’s run by the incompetent dipshit who inflicted JavaScript on the world and who later got kicked out of Mozilla for being a bad person. Furthermore, being based on Chromium instead of Firefox is an unforgivable sin by itself. Really, from my perspective there’s basically nothing in its favor at all.
Never trust a web browser sold to you with crypto incentives.
Firefox is foss, transparent and it has more than enough add-ons to make brave pointless.
but RAM and page loading speed
Oh no!
(no one cares)
Also FF has great loading times. Never noticed a problem with speed or Ram in the last decade
Especially since quantum threading individual tabs, I’ve never really had an issue with Firefox performance.
Individual site performance and things like DNS over https and ddos mitigation add more latency than anything I’ll notice from the browser level. And I’m happy to wait an extra second if it means having more control of my data and my privacy.
Exactly this.
Plus, Brave’s CEO is a piece of shit
and firefox has manifest v2 so you can controll what network loads.
Never trust anything sold to you with crypto incentives honestly.
Games, software, no matter what.
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and they tried to add a cryptominer to the browser.
Never trust Brave. The CEO is a horrible person too
Firefox is the only browser I trust.
CEO is a massive bigot. no way
👌🙂
I just switched to Librewolf from Brave because fuck Chromium and fuck Google.
Did I trust brave as a Browser? Yes, at least enough to use it as my daily driver. Because the worst thing they’ve done that I’m aware of is add affiliate links. When somebody noticed they didn’t bullshit their way out of it, they apologised and fixed it:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
There is a lot of hand wringing about various aspects of their browser and the personality of their CEO but the browser is open source and the code is watched by a lot of eyeballs. If they went truly bad somebody is going to notice quickly.
They are a company and have to find a way to make money but they never once forced anything on me. It was always relatively simple to disable anything they added that I didn’t want and they never added anything surreptitiously. Unlike Firefox: https://medium.com/@neothefox/firefox-installs-add-ons-into-your-browser-without-consent-again-d3e2c8e08587 and https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/mozillas-mr-robot-promo-backfires-after-it-installs-firefox-extension-without-permission/
I know it’s not going to be popular to criticise Firefox and I understand it’s importance as the last true alternative to chromium but my point is that none of the options are whiter than white. And in so far as the available options, Brave and Firefox stand head and shoulders above the rest.
I imagine product managers at Google and Microsoft would be very happy to see us shitting on one of the few open source browsers to gain any kind of traction, instead of focusing our outrage towards their behaviour.
This comment is way underrated. Thanks for this.
I use Brave on my work machine. Tried Firefox, but it just collided with too many internal web tools I need to use. I also heavily use tab grouping, and last I checked, it was a no-go on FF.
People are desperately looking for a hero browser. In the end, you just may wanna roll with the browser that ticks the most boxes…
Yup. Brave and Firefox are basically the best options out there. Big tech is very happy when privacy people are shitting about choice.
The best options for me is either Librewolf or ungoogled chromium when it comes to privacy.
Brave as a whole? Brendan Eich is the next Elon Musk. Not in wealth, mind you, but dude’s got the antics, is all I’m saying. (Not a good look. Look just what’s going on with Reddit.) Also, a dipshit of EPIC proportions.
Brave Browser? Hell no. The whole marketing point is “oh, it’s a web browser, but with ad blocker”. …installing uBlock Origin is a 2 minute job on Firefox and even on Edge. Have literally walked elderly people through the process. (It got even weirder when they talked about replacing ads with approved ones. I don’t know if they still do that.)
I do draw the line on the whole BAT nonsense. “Oh, you can use cryptocurrencies to support your fave content creators? Even if they didn’t opt in to the program in the first place, and you still make it seem like the donations go to them? And then say ‘oh yeah the donations will eventually go to them IF they sign up for the program’ oh FUCK YOU you’re just deceiving fans aren’t you.”
Brendan Eich is the next Elon Musk
Say what you will of Elon Musk, at least he didn’t inflict Javascript upon the world.
I don’t know about this take. I’m not sure how serious you are about it, but imagine a web without Javascript. Perhaps we’d all be using proprietary abominations such as Java or Flash today, not knowing what would’ve been possible with a more open, albeit somewhat clunky, programming language that’s supported by every browser.
Just because something is slightly less atrocious than something else doesn’t make it good.
No.
I’d prefer them over Chrome, jus slightly, but thank the gods for Firefox.
God bless Firefox. Definitely. I use Brave as a second browser sometimes. But my main browser is Firefox (Fennec) with uBlock Origin and Skip Redirect.
