Also in 2023, Brave got caught scraping and reselling people’s data with their custom web crawler, which was designed specifically not to announce itself to website owners.
I don’t think it does get a free pass, but in some categories like web browsers and mobile operating systems your choices are going with the least bad option, or not using them at all. What’s the better Chromium-based browser out there?
And the Mullvad browser doesn’t make sense in many situations. You shouldn’t install other extensions and should use it exactly as you use Tor, without changing anything or almost anything.
Brave is the best option for those who want a good browser that can be used to log into different websites and have some privacy, security, and convenience (alongside Firefox or some other version like Zen).
Cromite no doubt. When i use it on windows 11 every time i google smth google asks me to solve a captcha with like pick the bicycles pick the bridges etc. Cromite is so good at thwarting fingerprinting it makes ur browser look like a bot. I guess the fact i block first party cookies also helps me look like one. And no one is interested in tracking a bot, so they probably don’t bother. And yeah i tried mullvad leta but after the 10th search in 30 secs it gives me error 429 rate limited, so it’s unusable fot me.
Cromite on android, despite it being where 95% of people use it, is actually worse than cromite on windows. While the latter is basically strictly superior to brave on windows, cromite on android is not strictly superior to brave on android. For example, it lacks the ability to truly clean URL tracking parameters pre-request like i described here Support for Extensions? · Issue #256 · uazo/cromite · GitHub however despite this, it is the only mobile browser that makes CreepJS get a completely new ID every time u refresh the page. It also has lots of useful flags like #cleartext-permitted if u set this to Disabled, cromite becomes literally incapable of loading http traffic no matter what it is. U don’t even get the choice to override the warning, it just says Nope no can do. Development is not very fast cuz it’s just 1 guy but for being 1 guy, he has done wonders. Btw, it’s also the only browser that can prevent document.referrer from spying on u when visiting a web page, no other browser has this functionality, not even Tor Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Brave certainly doesn’t get a free pass, but for some reason it has this fanboy cult following. I’m always shocked to see people still professing it as the absolute best browser, but I think it’s maybe also the “Fisher Price My First Privacy Thing” zealots.
I hate using it, but it is the lesser evil compared other Chromium based browsers on Windows. I wish there was another Chromium browser without all the bloatware and uBlock Origin support, or something similar to Brave Shields.
I’ve gone back and forth between Brave and FF so many times now, I don’t even know why I keep using either one.
But Like @jonah said, what else are you going to do? Unless Ladybird becomes real and stable, we got no choice. One known problem for another. Dealer’s choice.
There’s simply not good enough options for Chromium based browsers. For Firefox based ones, there is Tor/Mullvad, Librewolf/Arkenfox, and vanilla Firefox itself too.
For chromium based browsers, there is ungoogled-chromium(no antifingerprinting, just debloated and degoogled), Bromite(no longer maintained), Cromite(fork of Bromite), Brave, Helium, Throrium, Vanadium(only available on GOS), etc. While I do think that Brave might be the least bad option, it still has a long way to go. Hope to see more chromium alternatives in the future
