I don’t know, this seems a bit odd. They say to ditch Brave but then recommend Vivaldi which has closed source ties.
That article is also filled with quite a hefty chunk of falsehoods as well. And yeah, to then go on and recommend Vivaldi is a real head scratcher.
Because I don’t believe in monopolies (please don’t look into where Mozilla gets their funding), I care more about privacy than security (I get privacy by installing a bunch of MV2 extensions), and Brave uses cryptography or something (I don’t understand it, but I know “crypto” is bad because it doesn’t make sense to me).
To some, Brave’s repeated ethical failures are a more pressing issue than a project’s license.
Thanks. I will look into that. Good to know this.
Because I want to do my part to avoid a browser engine monopoly. I keep Brave around as my ‘close to stock’ browser for things that aren’t working in Firefox.
I also use Firefox because I like it ![]()
I understand. I just feel the logic is somewhat unbalanced. My analogy would be, you have two boxes intended to do the same job. One you can open and inspect, the other you have to keep closed and don’t know what’s happening inside. Without additional considerations I’d trust the one I can look inside. To me, it is not just a “project’s license”.
Mozilla has also been very open to things I have upstreamed, including changes that only benefit forks. https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D324783 as an example.
Well it does do a better job from a privacy standpoint. The bloatware can all be disabled and it’s literally like it’s not there AT ALL. It literally takes 30 seconds when u know right where to go, maybe 2 min for your first time.
I used to think the exact same way. Used FF for as long as I can remember (still do as my secondary browser) but brave is just superior and the thing is I wanted to hate it. I tried it to confirm that I was right. Once I got into it (all the settings and set things up the way I wanted) and ran some tests and actually used it as my main browser, it was very difficult to find reasons to not use it. There’s a good chance you haven’t even tried it and are just repeating what you’ve read about the browser without actually giving it a shot and that’s fine. I probably won’t be convinced otherwise and could careless either way. Just sayin.
There are additional considerations, though. Using and recommending Brave (and all its spinoffs) ultimately supports a project that has not been a good citizen of the web via their many shady decisions, and is led by a man that believes in unjust discrimination.
People are free to disregard that aspect, but it’s part of Brave’s objective truth as much as being a Chromium-based browser
In sum, it’s an ethical consideration, which is additional in the eyes of cyber typhoon.
The only way to lose the browser fingerprinting game is to think in absolute terms about “THIS browser is better! All others are trash!”
Brave containers might mask your fingerprint, but they don’t prevent IP triangulation. So what’s the point of using Brave when you’re logged in to your not-wittingly@emailservice.com email on one tab, bank on another, social media on another, giving up who you are anyway?
Use every browser and use every VPN location. I cycle through 7 different browser, so the only consistency of my fingerprints are my OS. I also do 99% of my browsing in private/no cookies mode anyway, so Brave containers are sort of immaterial to me. Vanilla Firefox containers isolate a handful of services from each other well enough now that it’s diminishing returns to move it all over to a new browser.
On top of the notion that anything with your name involved (email, banks, etc.) doesn’t need a masked fingerprint. They know it’s you, so give them a fingerprint that says “Golly, Mister, I sure am glad I only use the internet 20 minutes a day!” and doesn’t give up your full browsing patterns anyway with IP triangulation.
Precisely! I was just explaining it to them, since they expressed confusion about it ![]()
Two minor things that are better in Firefox:
- the powerful PDF editor which had me drop third party software
- tabs management, it’s simply much easier for me to scroll through quite a lot of tabs with the pinned ones firmly anchored on the left side.
Who exactly? Is Brave better than Firefox in terms of privacy? Who said that? Is there a source?
What are the options—pay $60, use Linux, or use policies that don’t work on every system and require digging through documentation and the registry every single time? No thanks.
I also don’t like its built-in adblocker with hardcoded lists that I can’t turn off, where they can unblock sites they want, like statcounter trackers.
I personally think the new Brave Containers + the Traffic Control (still Nightly) and something that gives you a different IP per destination like Portmaster SPN will be a great match. Add email aliases to that and you’re in a very good spot.
With Traffic Control you can set a few websites into persistent containers and the rest via wildcard to temporary ones.
How is Firefox better for privacy?
I care about browser engine diversity so much, that I switched to Safari.
And what are those “ethical failures”?
I suspect there was not a great alternative for Chromium browsers that are all of: secure, private, and open source. So likely, Vivaldi was a middle ground. Missing context is a hazard of providing advice online.