193 points

I don’t trust homophobes or cryptobros, especially not those with a history of selling users out like Brendan Eich

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41 points

Especially when there is Firefox and Firefox-based, privacy-focused alternative with great add-blocking and privacy extensions.

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17 points

I don’t trust anyone who invented Javascript.

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157 points

Very strongly worded, but yes.

Brave have had a history of controversy since their inception. Every time something happens, the CEO went on a marketing campaign across social media and drummed up enough new users to drown it out. However the attitude of the business is clear: it would take a very small sack of money for Brave to sell out its users.

If you’re going to use a Chromium web browser, there are non-commercial open source projects that don’t have a history of shady shit. However Firefox forks are better.

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10 points

Which forks do you suggest?

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56 points

Not the OP, but here are some alternatives anyway.

Firefox:

Chrome:

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5 points

Ok, but why? What’s wrong with Firefox and how do the forks address those points?

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17 points

Mullvad , LibreWolf and Tor.

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7 points
*

Other people have given desktop examples. For Android, I use Mull, which also has a companion Android System Webview implementation (Chromium) called Mulch. These are baked into the DivestOS ROM, which itself is a fork of LineageOS.

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5 points

Does it support extensions like Firefox?

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3 points

Absoutely. I mostly use Firefox because I’m so familiar with it by now but the privacy is generally much better and it doesn’t have a massive monopoly on the web. I’m just a lot more comfortable with it.

When I have to, I use ungoogled-chromium on desktop and Bromite on mobile. I recommend those to anyone familiar with Chrome.

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5 points

Unfortunately Bromite has been abandoned, however someone has made a fork called Cromite.

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110 points

Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

Which is all the reason I need.

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33 points

If he had changed his tune since then and done something to offset that, I might be willing to cut him some slack.

But, instead, he seems to have doubled down…

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25 points

They had me at invented JavaScript

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110 points

People that use Brave always remind of the people pushing crypto.

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35 points
Deleted by creator
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47 points

Crossover? Crypto is built-in! https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

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16 points
Deleted by creator
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11 points

Seems like the Venn diagram of those two groups approaches a circle, if the OP is any indication.

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6 points

I use firefox as my main but have brave as my chromium/PWA browser because I don’t really fancy using edge or chrome

What other browsers out there support PWAs that are less spyware-ey than the big names

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7 points

Chromium is pretty safe to use. There are also builds of “de-googled Chromium” available.

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3 points
*

Vivaldi, though it’s source available rather than fully open source. It’s mostly the frontend JavaScript (I think?) code which is proprietary.

Apparently, if you know enough to understand it, you can technically work out what all the proprietary code is and does because it’s all fairly simple stuff and separate from the Chromium base (which they make available on their site), although distributing it would be against their ToS (I guess it’s technically reverse engineering, which is also against their ToS).

It’s been a very long time and I can’t actually confirm that for the current release, but it was at least true a few years ago when someone who knew far more about programming than me mentioned it on their forums. I think some people took a look at it and found some basic theming stuff, but nothing nefarious.

They have a fairly solid privacy policy last I checked. They also have no intention of sticking with Google’s v3 plans.

The only thing I don’t like is they run a daily user count check by pinging their servers. They’ve made it so that there are no IDs, anonymized or otherwise, but it’s still a bit of a black mark on an otherwise decent piece of software.

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1 point

Firefox supports them

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3 points

Firefox does not support PWAs on desktop, but there is an extension to enable them which works well.

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65 points

To anyone reading this article, only the first quarter of it is about the beliefs and political stance of the developers. The rest of the article after that goes into more technical reasons.

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40 points

All I needed to read was in the first paragraph.

Brave Software, the company behind the browser of the same name, was founded by Brendan Eich. He’s best known as the creator of JavaScript from his days at Netscape Communications

I mean, JS is his baby that’s all there needs to be said about the person’s motivations.

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69 points

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15 points
*

“JS is his baby that’s all there needs to be said about the person’s motivations.”

During these formative years of the Web, web pages could only be static, lacking the capability for dynamic behavior after the page was loaded in the browser. There was a desire in the flourishing web development scene to remove this limitation, so in 1995, Netscape decided to add a scripting language to Navigator. They pursued two routes to achieve this: collaborating with Sun Microsystems to embed the Java programming language, while also hiring Brendan Eich to embed the Scheme language.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

I think you’re confusing the reasons behind the initial intent of JS versus what it has evolved into almost 30 years later.

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7 points

Imagine a world where Java integrated into the web was just as standard as JavaScript is now.

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3 points

During these formative years of the Web, web pages could only be static, lacking the capability for dynamic behavior after the page was loaded in the browser.

And it was better. Frankly, http was a mistake, humanity would be healthier and happier if we stopped at gopher.

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