A case can be made for it even existing in the browser to be an impact for those who don’t want to do anything with such a functionality. I really wish someone smart can just fork Brave, remove the crypto and agentic AI stuff and release it. I’d even pay someone to do this right. That’s how much I detest it.
I’m not trying to criticize your taste, minimalism is great, and I’m all for it. And that’s something I agree with. But I am genuinely trying to understand the mechanics of your objection here. Because you seem to be pretty passionate about hating it.
We currently get a browser which is backed by an actual company, and one of the best privacy shield on the market, entirely for free. The developers have to keep the lights on somehow. The crypto isn’t some insidious background miner draining your GPU. It’s just a ledger for how they give you your ad reward payouts. If you disable it, it sits there as inert code.
What exactly is the “impact” of a dormant feature you’ve opted out of?
Would you rather pay a monthly subscription to remove a feature that is designed to be the alternative to a monthly subscription? That’s a bit like buying a house and offering to pay the contractor extra to brick up the guest room door because the existence of a room you don’t use bothers you.
Is it just the principle of the thing, or do you actually believe the “off” switch isn’t working? Again, I’m not criticizing, because I certainly have my fair share of software that I would love if certain parts were just stripped out entirely. I’m just wondering why this is the issue. Because I think a lot of people misunderstand how their crypto system actually works.
I’m preeeeeetty sure no one asked for this, like ever. Companies adopt AI because other companies adopt AI. It’s strategic speculation to get ahead in the game. But when you ask your friends, family, classmates, coworkers, and anyone on the street you pass by, I’m pretty confident none of them ever demanded AI to be adopted. The demand for AI is artificial, unreal, fake. At least it is in the space of browsers and search engines and whatever.
Yes, and yes. I like all that Brave offers in terms of privacy and security except these features. And I am in the camp of supporting them if need be or even Ladybird if it meant I get the clean minimal private and secure experience I want without what I consider unnecessary features.
I prefer the apps I use to be simple, minimal, and just about the product. And its a preference for this. There is no tangible impact as of right now.
Yes
No
I don’t care they want to do crypto. I just don’t want it in my browser built in. Sure, I can choose not to use it or bother with it but one should not have to live with it even if it doesn’t do anything to them.
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So, hope that is clear. It’s personal preference and opinion for the most part but I do think they should give users an option to fully remove the things they don’t want especially seeing it is an open source product. I am not skilled enough to do it myself and hence my comment above.
They are trying to make the AI narrative work as much as everyone seems to be against it as there is no real need for it today and the damage this is causing from so many fronts doesn’t seem to be worth it.
You how in the 60s when the US was trying to reach the moon and people were protesting the entirety of NASA saying the resources are better used elsewhere and not for the moon or the Vietnam War? Same analogy. But in this case, who are we fighting or racing for what purpose? It’s just big corporations doing things to show “business” so the stock goes up and the wealthy get wealthier.
All this AI and business activity is a ponzi scheme. The burst will however be spectacular to watch though. History repeating itself from last century around the same time almost. 100 year cycles. Humans don’t or rather can’t learn anything. Memories are not painful it seems so we can’t seem to not make the same mistakes every couple decades.
Technically they do, but it’s hidden away behind group policies that I linked above. I don’t see any of this bloat in my Brave browser. Have you not tried it yet?
Not yet. I’m still not sure how to and I don’t want to screw anything up. I am a tech savvy user. Not a technical person or even close to a developer. But if guided, I can follow instructions (just not like the Brave website explains it).
OKay.. I tried making sense of making the changes with the info you shared. I failed. Thank you for trying to help though. At-least I know what changes to make if I ever get to where I can make them and have it stick.
“This is informative, and unfortunate.”- Louis Rossman
Vivaldi it is then.
Just putting this here. 
There are better options. But I’m guessing you already know about them before still choosing Vivaldi.
I just tested it and I actually think it’s great. It is essentially upgraded deep search.
The funny thing: it get blocked by Brave search own captcha. Though it works if you tell it to wait for the captcha to complete itself.
And for those wondering, it is part of the Leo AI interface, so if you don’t open that menu (or hide it by righ click) this won’t bother you.
Edit: it still lackes depth. I asked it to summarise news by going to a series of websites and it only shared the headlines… Even when prompted to read the article, it didn’t consistently cross-referenced news across websites.
Yes, that might be true from a privacy perspective. However, it seems that Vivaldi is literally one of the only options left besides vanilla or UnGoogled Chromium or a DeMozzilla’d fork of Firefox at this point that doesn’t have any sort of AI-embedded or agentic “features” baked in at all.
I find it ironic that Brave, claiming themselves and their browser to be “focused on privacy and security”, is going ahead and even further integrating agentic AI “features” into the Brave browser when this technology is already proven to be littered with countless privacy and security issues. I don’t care what the Brave developers say in how they implement it or how “secure”, “private”, and “open source” their implementation is, or how all of this can be “disabled”. I don’t think that very much of their user base has even asked for any of these AI “features”, including even their Leo AI itself being so heavily baked in, especially when one of the major reasons why most people have moved to Brave (as far as I can imagine anyways) is to get away from mainstream browsers like Edge and Chrome that have been forcefully embedded all of this AI garbage to begin with.
That is to say, all I want is a nice, clean, functional browser that does its job and only its job. That’s it. I don’t want AI crapware running in the background being able to see and view everything that that I am doing on my web browser and all of the web pages that I visit, just so that it can be more “helpful”. I am pretty sure that there are countless users that feel the exact same way as me.
I sincerely hope that Brave sees so much massive and severe backlash and pushback from their user base and community, that it forces them to backtrack on this and not implement yet another unwanted AI “feature” into their browser that I hope that no one that is sane wants. I am quite saddened to see that the amount of browser choices that don’t have any plans of implementing AI/agentic “features” is steadily shrinking.
Vivaldi seems to be one of, if not the only browser that so far has publicly came out and said that they were against this trend in browser-embedded AI, and that they have no plans in implementing it into their own browser. This is one of the reasons why I am personally seriously considering moving from Chrome to Vivaldi for my Chromium-based browser.
I apologize for this emotionally charged post, to anyone who views this as being so, but that is how strongly I feel about being against this growing trend of AI being irremovably embedded into both operating systems and browsers.
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Wrong. Helium browser exists, so does the new Orion browser by Kagi that just came out of beta and works really well. Webkit based but can also install Chrome and FF extensions.
Helium is the answer for you then.
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I have the AI stuff in my browser too and would prefer to remove it. But FF right now ain’t so bad and neither is Mullvad Browser. So, there are options left. Don’t become demoralized just yet.
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Well be it controversial I already cleaned my brave browser and since it is optional and opt-out by default I do have respect for brave for this and I indeed trust they implemented this more securely for those opting in.
I really genuinely cannot get the hate when: guys/gals its literally optional, same with duckduckgo, its optional and can be disabled and there’s even a noai version of the site, why dont we just respect that it’s a choice and not forced upon us. Saying to remove it you know they ain’t gonna do it so the least we could do is respect that it is optional.
I’m sorry but if you fully anti-ai people for once make yourselves more likable I would appreciate it but you never do (in my experience) unfortunately
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Its not being anti AI for the sake of it. If done well, it has its use cases. But today, given the costs of making it happen for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, I don’t think AI and its development is worth it as much as the companies are trying to make it out to be.
There’s a slightly more holistic way to think about AI here at large that you seem to discounting - perhaps unintentionally.
Furthermore, we are only sharing our views for why and why not for our liking or disliking of a feature. In this case, again its not anti-AI. I’m personally anti Brave here because it is not something I see that adds value and not a browser I want to use if it even has such capabilities. The browser and the product at large may still be great but I am indeed criticizing the direction they are headed. And a part of the reason is that yes, I don’t like AI things in my browser because it is not for me and would prefer to use one without any AI.
Lastly, no one I think is here to be more likable necessarily but only engage as best as we can about the subject matter we’re passionate about to learn from each other and partake in this hobby. If I wanted more people to like me, I’d sell or rather give away ice cream. I’m just trying to be me and express what I think and feel as accurately as I can.
a fair assessment indeed, but I would think we universally agreed that brave sucks especially out of the box as it is bloated but other than that does still provide a decent privacy and security out of the box despite that as there;s like almost no other choices but no, now this is the breaking point? I will by all means disrespect companies who force it and/or opts it in in an intrusive way but I see brave and duckduckgo and im like thats fine, I genuinely appreciate that they have the option for those who want an experience with no AI or leave it as is
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Hmm. Fair enough. We all think somewhat differently. Don’t always have to agree 100% with 100% of the things.
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I completely agree with that! I’ve spent all morning racking my brain looking for this, and someone please correct me if I’m wrong here or if I’m just imagining things, but I’m pretty sure there is a source confirming that the Brave team is working on a ‘de-bloated’ version.
I use that term a little liberally, though, because I don’t personally agree that it is bogged down, especially considering how easy it is to opt out of features or remove them from the UI.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind going back to Firefox. I have no issues with it, I absolutely love it, just as I love Brave. Even though Firefox seems to be going full speed on the AI stuff themselves.
My privacy journey actually started back at a law firm, which led to photography, then to publicity. Essentially, it has all been about keeping other people’s secrets safe, which eventually led to IT security work. So, I come primarily from a security background.
I know security and privacy are vastly different disciplines, but at some point, they overlap. My ‘security senses’ always tend to start tingling before my privacy ones do. However you might feel about the crypto aspects of Brave, I feel a million times stronger about the fact that at the end of the day, Helium is a very, very small fork of Ungoogled Chromium. So that browser will always be a very hard no for me.
But if the AI situation in Brave is completely optional as they claim, I won’t have a problem with it, I can live with that. The way I see it, I don’t use every setting or feature in many applications, so it makes no difference if a feature sits unused in my browser or not.
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Alright, I will go ahead and check it out. Thank you JG! I apologize if my previously reply seemed a bit harsh or that I was going against you. I wasn’t trying to or anything like that, and I know that you probably feel the same way as me. That’s just how I feel about embedded AI in general and how strong I feel about it.
Actually, Mozilla has shown a bit more of a harder pro-AI stance lately, as far as I know. Like always, I may be wrong. For evidence, there is an interesting read and critique about Mozilla’s overall stance on implementing AI in Firefox here: Mozilla: AI in the browser is disgusting. Please stop. It was written by Gardiner Bryant, who you may know formerly as “The Linux Gamer”. His writing is a bit emotionally charged, but it is definitely an interesting read. This is why vanilla Firefox isn’t much of a viable option for me now either.
However, I am not trying to turn the direction of this thread into a discussion on Firefox, so I will stop here.