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 is really hard to say, I am using brave and have none of these issues on GNU/Linux. Brave is FOSS, has a built in adblocker, Tor private mode, fast, and brave shields. I prefer it over Firefox, because Firefox went down a path I did not like. I might switch to librewolf of GNU icecat someday.
I’d like to hear more about #3 and #4. They seem to be a software company. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they can’t also be an advertising company (see Google).
Any recommendations for 3 requirements:
- Need android and Linux. Windows maybe, but don’t care much.
- Must be able to open local html files. This means no Firefox and derivatives as it can’t open local files on android.
- Must reliably sync at least bookmarks. I last switched from Vivaldi because their sync was busted for months.
Happy to try out anything
- Must be able to open local html files. This means no Firefox and derivatives as it can’t open local files on android.
???
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?
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?
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.
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!
- 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.
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 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.
It’s also a chromium browser.
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.
No, go use Google Chrome like everyone else.
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
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
Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features
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
I don’t use chromium based browsers for daily use, but I do keep chromium installed just in case
“Privacy-centric” my elbow.
I will be adding this turn of phrase to my vocabulary, thank you.
Is that more or less credulous than your eye?
You’re welcome, wish I could take the credit for it, but I don’t remember where I got it from. Blackadder, I think.
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.
