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.
- it’s fucking Chromium
Go use some Firefox-derivative like Librewolf or Fennec, like a sane person.
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 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
This is hilarious for me if only because at some point ages ago I tagged you with, simply, “seems reasonable”.
Fortunately, I also agree with your reasoning for being unreasonable, thus returning you back to the realm of reasonability while striving to be unreasonable.
Self awareness is good haha
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.
Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features
I agree, I know why they do it and I can appreciate it, but it’s just not for me. I do not want my history and cookies cleared when I closed the browser, for instance. That is massively inconvenient and not really relevant to my “threat model.”
So I guess I wouldn’t say they are bad, but certainly not ideal for me.
What’s the problem with the defaults? I use pretty much the default settings with no issue
Forced English language, light mode, fixed window size or borders, cookies removed after closing, no history(? Not sure about this one)
Want those or just one of them? You have to remove ALL fingerprinting protections for some reasons. Might as well use Firefox then…
LibreWolf doesn’t update itself on OSes other than Linux, it’s a security nightmare for an average person.
No, go use Google Chrome like everyone else.
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
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
Brave is just a shitty browser. Did not know they were anti-freedom kind of people. Makes browser no-no.
It’s laggy as shit on my iPad
It depends on what you are comparing it against
I did not know Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla and launched Brave because he was a homophobe who funded anti-LGBT+ campaigns 😬
He also created JavaScript, but I don’t see people getting upset and telling others to not use JavaScript.
Well, JavaScript has a lot of horrible features, but it’s ubiquitous and we’re stuck with it for the time being. Certainly it’s another thing to blame Eich for, rather than something that mitigates his other shitty behavior.
Didnt know JS can collect data and transmit it to their creator.
Neither does Brave unless you specifically opt in to those services. It’s open source, you can check for yourself.
yeah a few of these where made opt in after the userbase backlashed when they made them opt out by default
they actually have a tendency of making changes this way, i don’t see why i should trust them with anything
i’m very upset about it and keep telling people not to use it. have for like 15 years.
Removed by mod
a bad opinion is like thinking “how i met your mother” had a nice ending
actively donating to anti-LGBT campaigns is not a bad opinion, it is a hostile action
I use Firefox. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s not that bad.
And if I didn’t, I’d use Vivaldi. Only reason I don’t is I do prefer open source whenever possible and, well, Firefox isn’t Chromium.
Firefox is the only browser that has mobile extensions, making it the only choice
That’s also a good point.
LibreWilf is a good choice if you don’t want the Mozilla crap. Just make sure to turn off the cookie clearing and resistFingerprinting then enable WebGL in the browser’s settings.
Yeah it kinda mystifies me that anyone is still recommending that shitty bigotware.
In the emulation scene, RetroArch is in a similar boat if I’m understanding things correctly. Awful maintainers, but people keep recommending it and supporting it. Sucks too, because there are even fewer alternatives there.
Whats going on with RetroArch? I havent really paid attention/kept up since I set up my last Raspberry Pi.
This website details various issues. I’d suggest looking at the Byuu page - as I understand it the RetroArch devs played a large role in the harrassments that were being done to the developer of Higan/bsnes, which eventually led to them killing themself.
Did I miss what you’re talking about? It just mentions Xbox SDKs being proprietary, which I couldn’t care less about. Apologies if I missed what you mentioned
This is the page I’m referring to, where one of the main RA devs is shown saying a lot of really toxic things about byuu. It’s kind of hard to find any reliable info about the dramas, but there are various threads online where people bring up a number of dramas, like this thread.
Thanks for the context.
Also, the Brave defenders in this section… holy moly.
Some folks simply cannot admit they made a questionable choice. They picked it and use it, so everyone else must be wrong.
I’ve met people like this in real life.
It’s also a chromium browser.
It’s because no-one knows any alternatives.
If one wants a Chrome-based browser that isn’t Chrome, Brave is the highest-profile one by orders of magnitude. Next is a bunch of high-SEO scamware before honest projects like Vivaldi or Helium are even a whisper.
…So I don’t really blame folks for using Brave. They aren’t omniscient, and an honest effort to avoid Chrome is still a positive.
I don’t blame folks for using it.
I do blame folks for not reading up before recommending it.
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?
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.
LibreWolf
I had soooo many issues with LibreWolf, finally switched to waterfox. If this doesnt pan out, I quit the interweebs
I hope WaterFox pans out for you! Do you mind sharing the issues you had with LibreWolf?
LibreWolf is great once you get yourself onboarded. The onboarding royally sucks. You need to remember that by default LibreWolf is really locked down and it’s on the user to unlock the bits of it they can’t live without. For instance, by default LibreWolf clears its cookies every time you quit, which is great for privacy, but everything’s a tradeoff and that’s too much for me.
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
Vivaldi does have a built in adblocker but it’s not the best yet.
But it does come with a free tier of proton vpn. Great if you don’t need to use a vpn too often but need one in a pinch.
I wouldn’t trust anything Proton for security or privacy, but that’s a whole can of worms I’m not going to open right now.
Fair point, but as long as you’re not doing anything super illegal it should be okay. I only use the VPN service to torrent movies and tv shows.
Currently trying mobile IronFox. I’m liking the privacy options and how stuff like unlock origin is literally included in the setup process. Their dark mode is nice and they offer a lot of compatibility options.
Biggest downsides I’m seeing so far (I’ll see about keeping this updated as I go):
- Can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave, and I have looked extensively.
- No tab groups (not the end of the world, but it was a nice feature). EDIT: Looks like Collections does that! EDIT TWO: Not really good for Incognito mode though.
- Clears your browser history by default on close, which may be undesired behavior. (I personally tend to use incognito for most things and then transfer sites over to tabs in non-incognito (cognito?) modes if I want them available regularly, so for me this was undesired, but it was easy to turn off.)
- Brave had a built-in experimental dark mode to dark modify websites that I am not seeing in IronFox. I’m sure there are extensions that will do it for me, so I’ll go looking, but I just discovered so many sites I did not realize were light mode all along. Reading mode also does the trick for most articles.
Also 1. in Brave: Bookmarks and lists, Bookmark manager, three dot menu, Export Bookmarks, save the HTML file on your computer. Then in LibreWolf/IronFox/whatever: Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks, Import and Backup, Import Bookmarks from HTML, select that file.
I got the export step on my own, but I swear IronFox does not have the Manage Bookmarks option anywhere. Starting to think I’m just going to need to grab a Mozilla account, upload my bookmarks to LibreWolf on desktop, sync bookmarks, and pull them to IronFox that way.
There’s an add-on called Dark Reader which may help with number 4. I don’t know if IronFox supports extensions, but that’s the one you probably want.
Got it on both IronFox and LibreWolf. Not perfect, but neither was Brave dark mode. Probably going to have to disable LibreWolf’s anti-fingerprinting feature just so I can tell sites to use dark mode, though.
I have the habit of running Firefox on Android with thousands of tabs (before unloading them into a list on the desktop and cleaning them up). It does slow down somewhat, but not much.
I use Vivaldi as a secondary browser, it’s not been too bad. Firefox is my primary, but I might go to a fork soon.
FWIW I remember a former colleague who recommended it to me and his argument was about the cryptocurrency you “earn” from it.
I asked him if he could withdraw it. I asked him if he tried. He said not yet but he would. He came back to me few days later saying something along the line that “it’s not straightforward” which was a polite way to say he didn’t manage yet. He worked in IT.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s a scam or that one can’t use the crypto “earned” from it but at least back then, few years ago, some people were just riding on the hope, or even faith, that it would amount to something yet it seemed made in such a way to just hold.
So… not a scam but not exactly empowering users IMHO.
I think a lot of pro-Brave people are astroturfers, or heavily influenced by astroturfers. They are definitely not a first choice by any privacy advocate worth their salt.
I had no idea about any of this. Have been using brave on android for a few weeks and very happy with it. What would you recommend instead?
A Firefox fork.
Fork? Uhg wtf is wrong with firefox now? This better not be about AI
Oh, have I got news for you
A bunch of forks just add extra functions, patches or defaults on top of firefox. It’s not a hard fork as in they maintain everything themselves, they’re still based on the latest official firefox releases.
Removing AI is one of those patches yes.
Yea I’m going to go ahead and recommend against opinionated firefox. Oh yea I want some dweeb with misplaced anger and too much time on their hands to dictate how I use the internet. Bitch asses.
You (the end user) decide how you want to use the internet. The forks you’re probably angry about are the ‘hardened forks’, but whether or not you care about their goals and want to use those is a choice only you can make. Most of what they do is basically change some default configs and remove some ‘bad’(according to the maintainers and the users) features.
There’s also forks like zen that under the hood use firefox, but customize the user experience significantly.
Long way to say what is captured in two words: opinionated firefox.
Just keep using it, if it works for you. Every company that makes browsers is a bit shit around the edges, there’s no perfect, pure, wholesome browser. Just use what you want. If you like edge for android, use that. If you want to use vim, use that too.
Netscape Navigator on Windows Mobile Works for me.
Congratulations on missing the point.
It grinds your gears that people don’t do what you want, doesn’t it?
Have you tried letting people use whatever the fuck browser they want?
Firefox Focus, Ironfox, or others recommended here. I will note that Waterfox was always quite slow on an android device of mine.
I’ve been using Iceraven with uBlock and it’s been pretty great so far. I use Obtainium to keep it updated directly from the repo.
I really like vivaldi
Could someone please recommend an alternative? 😓 I used DuckDuckGo for a while but I NEED something that supports extensions…
I currently use Waterfox which is a fork of Firefox
Firefox forks like Librewolf (or Ironfox for mobile) are good.
Also Vivaldi if you don’t mind proprietary.
I’m a pretty happy Vivaldi user. They have a No AI policy, it is infinitely customizable (you can put tabs any fucking where), has native ad and tracking blockers, you can use extensions, has a notes function w/markdown capability (which I find handy for having quick copypasta ready to go), a built-in mail client and RSS reader, synchs across devices…
You know…stuff.
Now add a kernel, a filesystem and a few more features and you have a full OS.
Dude, this is a browser. Anything beyond the notes feature is uneccessary bloat and can be outsourced to add-ons.
People keep reinventing Emacs.
Vivaldi is the one chromium browser that keeps pulling me towards the dark side. I used it for years before switching to firefox and if it wasn’t for the danger of the chromium monopoly I’d probably switch back to it
I’ve been using vanilla Firefox
Please try Zen browser. I can’t go back to any other browser since I switched
What’s so great about zen?
Its pretty chill.
Its tab and session management tools are my favorite across all browsers.
I use vertical tabs with multiple layers of folders to basically keep everything I need to access frequently organized directly on the tab list instead of having to open it again whenever I need (also saves me from having to remember if I already opened something). For example I have a folder for each project I’m working on and I add to it everything related to that project. Project definition links, Github Pull Requests and so on. The PR links stay there while I wait for them to be reviewed or merged so I can quickly access them to see if they need any action. Once the task is done I remove them from the folder again.
There’s a new feature named Live Folders which automatically opens a tab for every item of an RSS or Github feed. I use it to auto open PRs that are waiting for my review. The feature is still quite limited but already pretty useful.
One of the projects I’m working on is a voice chat web app and the browser helps me by allowing me to open two different sessions of the web app side by side as a single app. Makes it so much easier to test things when I don’t have to be handling two different active windows like I used to have to with other browsers.
One other feature that I don’t use so much anymore is the ability to have completely separate tab lists for different contexts. It’s useful to separate work and personal stuff for example, but I already use separate devices for that.
It has a strong focus on workflow improvements. I love the way it handles pinned tabs where third party links open as a modal and you can reset the tab with a middle click. It also has very good workspace management and useful keybinds.
How does Zen handle blocking adds? I peeked at them but didn’t see anything like uBlock in the mod list. No proton mods there either, which is a tough sell for me.Usability looks awesome though. I’m tempted for that alone.
Edit: I just realized it’s a fork like WaterFox so it will just work. I did also learn there are some weird check ins with Google on that browser though, so maybe not the more security focused browser I’m looking for.
You have access to Firefox addons, can install ublock just fine. As for proton I’m not sure
I tried Zen, didn’t really like it, the UI was too unfamiliar and felt a smidge too opinionated for my taste.
That’s fair, it was based on a similar browser called Arc that had ambitions to reinvent browsing. That one was chromium based though and maintenance stopped when they wanted to create another AI powered browser. Then the Zen people recreated Arc as an open source browser based on Firefox. I was already used to Arc so Zen was familiar.
I think there are a lot of benefits to the way the UI is laid out, give it a try you without changing any defaults for a week or so, you might get hooked.
Me too. Ironically I don’t like its default UI (supposedly its main feature), but after a few setting changes it is great.
Zen’s not great on a multi-monitor setup, but I like it otherwise. Video playback has been improved a ton since I last tried it.
What is your issue with multi monitor setups? On my Mac and Linux machines I have no issues
Vivaldi is Chromium based but with a team that works towards reducing the privacy and usability impact of running something Chromium based. Retains support for adblockers etc, after Google severely limiting that functionality in Chrome itself. Supports Chrome extensions like usual - better than Chrome itself, now.
There is an inherent cost to internet freedom from using chromium browsers. It gives Google, which controls the back-end, leverage to redefine how the internet works. It’s not as though they haven’t already done it on multiple occasions.
People will say things like “some websites run better on Chrome” as though that’s a selling point and not a red flag.
I’m not saying no one should use it or develop on it, but you have to be okay with the real cost.
Especially with their mobile browser! They do a good job of actually keeping up with user feature requests and error reports.
Currently using Fennec on mine and I gotta say, it’s what firefox could’ve been if they actually cared. Smooth, quick, loaded with extensions, and easy.
If you want something privacy focused, then LibreWolf is a Firefox fork widely acclaimed for their work. Otherwise Waterfox is a very popular and high quality fork.
Waterfox with uBlock origin
The Mullvad browser is a good choice. It’s built on the TOR browser, which is built on firefox. As for extensions, they are a privacy liability and most privacy-conscious browsers warn you not to use them.
