I updated Brave browser on Windows, and just like other users I quickly saw a popup saying “Brave VPN Service installed” + found a new icon next to clock named “Brave VPN”. When looking into it a bit more I found two services (using services.msc from command prompt) that I did not see before:
Brave VPN Service
Brave VPN Wireguard Service
Both services had to be manually started (so they are not running by default), but just to be sure I set them to inactive. Perhaps this could/should be added to the guide for Brave browser?
If anyone has any info (link or so) from Brave team that would be appreciated - I’m now reconsidering if I should stay on Brave or move to some other browser.
Out of all the privacy tools I use, I feel like Brave is the most likely one to go down a path I will not be comfortable with. This is one example of that. Unfortunately, I do not think there exists a good chromium-based browser as an alternative. I am open to suggestions if anyone has any.
@Unperson, why do you require a chromium browser for desktop? These days a gecko-based browser like Firefox does everything chromium-based browsers do. Plus you have a lot of added customization on Firefox that you won’t get on Brave.
Not the person you quoted, but I’ll chime in to say that I use Firefox for 99% of my desktop browsing, but every now and again I encounter something that doesn’t play well with Gecko. Mostly local government websites and things like that. That’s when I reach for Brave.
I have Mullvad Browser for general browsing and since there are no cookie exceptions on Mullvad, I use Brave for websites where I need to stay logged in. Sometimes websites would not be compatible with the security level I have set on Mullvad. In that case, I find it easier to open that webpage on Brave instead of changing my security level and forgetting to set it back.
I was looking at Thorium the other day, but if you look at their releases they’re consistently far behind. The current release is 117 from a week ago, despite 118 being released to stable 2 weeks ago and 117 being released to stable a month ago.
This is quite bad because it means it received the major WebP vulnerability fix nearly a month late for example.
Looks like the ”dock icon” only appeared also on one of my Windows machines. However Brave VPN services I found on other Windows also.
I did not check if Brave VPN Windows services where installed before: I noticed the dock icon + found the reddit thread implying the Brave VPN Windows services are installed as part of recent update.
Lol I can confrim that it sets its vpn service to autostart on windows. That’s a joke
As I posted some new steps for the brave browser and disabled the VPN, I thought it’s probably a bug that the browser crashes when VPN is disabled. But apparently they wanted it that way, so no one disables their VPN flag.
