I currently use Brave and am curious about the pros and cons of both since I see many people recommend Firefox.
If you left chrome thinking brave is not google, both are from companies made for profit. Both are based on chromium. You left one ad company for another.
I recently made the move to librewolf(windows) and mull(android). Essentially just Firefox but with more protection. Super easy switch, hardly notice a difference so far.
This. I’ve moved to those browsers some time ago and I’m very satisfied. uBO is also a MUST.
Brave is not your friend - if they’re willing to violate copyright law by secretly scraping websites and then selling the content in their AI, I’m sure they’re willing to sell your data if the price is high enough (if they aren’t already).
Firefox, on the other hand, has been the most trusted browser since dial-up, and is run by a non-profit. It’s an easy choice for me.
Firefox is a little more complicated than that. Yes, the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, however it’s subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation is not. It’s better than Google but like all things, it’s worth asking where the money comes from.
Brave is open source. You can review and compile from source if you have privacy concerns.
To be completely fair, Mozilla is no angel. They installed extensions in people’s browsers without asking for permission, for example. No thanks.
Librewolf is my recommended go-to from a privacy perspective. And Brave is not horrible. If you look at Brave the company, they aren’t any worse than Mozilla the company.
And if you look at privacy features from a purely test driven point of view, Brave is better than Firefox, and Librewolf is better than both.
Finally someone that is being objective here!
If I had to suggest a browser to a non techie person I’d definitely tell them to use Brave since it’s the best middle ground between full privacy to the point of clunkiness and, well… Chrome.
It is still a little invasive by shoving features/ads in your face (wallet, videoconferencing web app, sponsored backgrounds, etc.), but they’re less armful than other options and easier to turn off than slightly obscure about:config settings that break the experience of a non privacy concious user
Firefox.
Brave team has been caught doing sketchy and controversial things over time, and I personally can’t be bothered to support them.
I’m no privacy savant, but I like Firefox better. I think it has the better “modern” interface. It is less buggy on my laptop, has better scrolling to my eye.
From a philosophical perspective I think the web should support more than one rendering engine.
Brave is great out of the box experience with a lot of privacy toggles enabled by default. Firefox can be hardened a bit more, but it requires more of a user input. Both are great options, so it mostly comes down to which engine you prefer, Blink or Gecko.
Some people also choose to use Firefox for a simple reason if it not based on Chromium to avoid monopolization.
Nobody has mentioned librewolf, which is a fantastic out of the box privacy browser. It’s a Firefox fork.
Is it truly just download and use?
I ask because I am not a tech person. I do not understand how to read or write code, what settings are the ones you need to safely change, etc.
I would happily try Librewolf if the browser is as simple as downloading
For the most part it really is. A lot of what it does I would do anyway, but it has that by default, which saves a lot of time for me every time I install it (which is quite often due to my endless distro-hopping). Not everything works perfectly, and a lot of that is intentional (such as spoofing the timezone). I would definitely recommend giving it a shot, and if something doesn’t work well you can probably just turn it off (and they’ll probably explain how in their FAQ).
