I don’t mean to be contrarian, but since this point comes up with some frequency, my impression was that, while some parts of the analysis is indeed outdated, the central points aren’t? Per the second post you linked to:
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They are expanded on in the article linked in this comment. You may read through it, and provide your thoughts after you’ve brought yourself up to speed with the discussion.
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This article is a joke.
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.
- He was never hateful toward gay people or anyone else. All he did was make a donation in support of banning same-sex marriage.
- There is a big difference between religious marriage and legal marriage. I don’t see why he or anyone else would be against legal same-sex marriage. But if he opposed it purely from a religious perspective on marriage, and you see that as very bad, then you’re the problem, not him.
- It was in 2008. Over 50% of voters supported this, so I guess let’s go hunt down and cancel half of California. Then let’s go dig up even more wrongdoings from the past that were completely fine back then but aren’t considered fine now. It’s good to know that the author of this article is such a pure saint that he has never done anything wrong in his life and never had to learn from his mistakes and become a better person. Such a magical human being.
- He is very rich and only donated $1,000. If he actually cared that much, he would’ve donated a lot more, like all the other millionaires or billionaires who want to support their interests.
- I like how the author leaves out the fact that Brendan apologized and stepped down without any conditions. Very genuine.
So yes, let’s hate on Brave because the CEO made a tiny donation (compared to his wealth) 20 years ago to oppose what was very likely Christian, church-based marriage rather than legal marriage, while never actually spreading hate toward anyone. Let’s trash the guy who led an open source project for 14 years, created JavaScript, and later created Brave and Brave Search, both of which are amazing.
I’m starting to think that I’m living among perfect, pure saints who have never done anything wrong and never had to learn from their mistakes.
I’m not talking about anyone in particular here, but some people really need to learn empathy, understanding, forgiveness, and just basic human decency, because this is getting insane.
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brave allows you to be fingerprinted between sessions through gpu.
shields break many website and turning them off is almost as bad as google chrome.
check for yourself: https://browserleaks.com/
I’ve never had to turn shields off once for any site.
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Same, and I have been using Brave for years.
You seem to have only read the first section of the article, which is understandable as it is somewhat long. The article expands on other reasons to be suspect of the company behind Brave.
Indeed, what you listed alone would not be enough for me to write the browser off entirely in my own life. However, in combination with the other problematic factors—and in addition to my desire to support browser engine diversity away from Google-owned Chromium—it is enough for me.
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I use both Firefox and Brave, but Firefox is my default browser because of containers.
FF CONTAINERS > BRAVE CONTAINERS
I have played with Brave’s containers, and they’re great, but they are not as customizable as Firefox’s because they are designed to be more user-friendly, especially for beginners.
On FF I use Temporary containers, and I use them in automatic mode. Which means that unless they are assigned to a normal container, every website I visit automatically opens in a new temporary container.
Brave doesn’t have that feature. In Brave, when I open a container, regardless of if it’s temporary or not, and I visit CNN.com, if I click on a link to a BBC article in CNN, it will open in the same container. It will not open in a new container, like on FF.
Brave doesn’t have advanced features that allow you to automatically open every website you visit in a new temporary container.
Brave also doesn’t allow you to lock regular containers. This means that if I create a container for Amazon.com, there is no way for me to lock that container so that no other website can be used for that container.
FINGERPRINTING PROTECTION:
Offsetting Time Zone
Firefox’s fingerprinting protection is more advanced than Brave’s, at least when it comes to specific features. For example, I love that FF offsets my timezone. When you use a VPN, if a website can read your timezone, they can figure out where you really are. Brave does not have the ability to offset your time zone.
Yes, you can install an extension that will offset your timezone or match your timezone to your VPN location. I have used such extensions on Chromium based browsers, but everything has to be done manually. There is also a risk of ringing alarm bells for the websites you visit, and potentially locking yourself out of your accounts.
Dark/Light Theme
This is arguably minor, but when you have fingerprinting protection enabled on FF, it will not be able to read the theme of your computer. Which means that you will always have to manually set any website you visit to light or dark mode.
I can understand how that can be annoying and why one would prefer Brave in this context, which can always read your computer’s theme, and automatically enable websites to light or dark mode.
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Brave allows for every tab to be in a new temporary container with Traffic Control. It’s currently in Nightly so it should be out in a couple of weeks.
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Interesting. What is traffic control? Never heard of this.
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That’s correct, a big part of the analysis (sandbox, isolation, ACG) has been resolved, other exploit mitigations are still lacking and chromium has still an advantage in granularity and JIT.
It depends on what you consider the central points.
For me sandbox and isolation were the central points to have a modern secure base for the browser, in 4 years span Firefox went to be from an insecure browser to a decently secure one today. Chromium is still more secure but the gap has been reduced by a big margin.
That said the mileage may vary quite a lot based on the platform; it seems that Firefox on linux and android is the least secure, lacking a lot of improvements.
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What I don’t like Brave is that they mostly compare to (attack) other privacy-oriented competitors like Firefox. It sounds like many users who are concerning about privacy are so miserable because they don’t choose Brave.
In the previous releases, if I choose DuckDuckGo they will show an unusual big amount of trackers, and asked me twice if I considered Brave Search.
On bypassing cookie notice, I spot how they actually consent YouTube to store cookie and history so that my main page has personal recommendations of videos until I found a page to manually switch off.
I don’t need a perfect browser, but Brave has a lot of these issues for me, and on Firefox at least it works, and if they fails, it won’t be so risky.
On desktop I choose it because Firefox can support older OS versions when my computer can’t update to the latest version.
On mobile I choose Safari which has fingerprint protection and variety of ad blockers which are powerful enough even though they can’t allow uBlock Origin.
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You can get better privacy from browsers based on firefox, or a customized firefox.
I think we tend to pick a “team” when it comes to this topic (and to so many others). If I use a certain brand, if I’m a fan of a certain club, if I hold a certain ideology… it seems like we always have to defend “our side.” But no. I choose to use Brave, and at the same time I can’t help but agree with the criticism of Brave’s CEO or of using Chromium-based browsers. Everyone picks their battles, right?
I think we already do plenty just by trying to be aware and to choose the technology we use (to avoid falling into alienation, btw)
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I’m keeping the below summary since I’d already written it, but I realized halfway that you have already decided what you think on the topic, so this is my earnest, but last, response on Brendan: This is a thread asking for people’s reasons for avoiding Brave. You not liking those reasons because they are unpopular facts about a public figure you’re a fan of doesn’t mean they’re any less valid.
Tangential addressing of some fallacies invoked in defense of only one of the behaviors in the list of reasons people might not wanna use Brave. About as necessary to the discussion as the comment it's replying to.
“Everything I don’t like is a joke”
Depriving someone of legal rights without a valid reason seems pretty hateful to me.
This is kinda meaningless because his donation was in opposition to said marriage as a legal construct. Whatever his reasons are, they’re meaningless.
Bad things are always bad, regardless of time.
Straw man fallacy. The author in no way is pretending to be a saint, but being homophobic is far enough from even basic goodness to make non-homophobes seems like saints, I guess.
This defense only has value when comparing to other, more substantial donors. He still donated infinitely more than anyone that didn’t donate any money. Plus he also donated $2,100 to a politician that supported Prop 8.
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
Arguably his biggest sin! /hj
Yeah! We should think of people with less legal representation and make sure they have access to the same rights we do 
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Completely valid outlook. If you feel like the privacy and security (via chromium’s architecture) you get from Brave give you a sense of tranquility that other browsers don’t with their implementations, then it wouldn’t be very ethical to ask you to renounce that.
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Might be true for Mullvad Browser, but that’s pretty much it.
And it’s a problem. People ego invest in certain software and services, then disregard objective truth and technical details. That’s fine on a personal level, but it shouldn’t be brought into public forums like this.
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Pardon?
Because you don’t like what they say?