There are certainly downsides to Brave which you don’t get with Firefox. Personally I don’t think there’s a clear winner for everyone, it comes down to what you personally value and want to prioritize. For example:
- Brave includes Web3 bloat which likely worsens privacy and security. There’s also a bunch of additional qualms some may have with promoting Web3.
- Brave is downstream from Chromium and can be delayed from updates for several hours or longer. Other Chromium-based browsers can be even worse.
- Chromium/Brave lacks a decent alternative to Firefox’s Multi-Account Containers, which I find quite useful.
- Using Chromium-based browsers (like Brave) increases its market share which in turn can indirectly strengthen Google’s influence on the web, its browsers, and potentially anything based on it. It also weakens web browser diversity and the only independent alternative to big tech engines like Google’s Chromium and Apple’s WebKit.
I seriously doubt that. But feel free to share your reasoning for why popular alternatives like Chrome and Edge wipe the floor with Firefox when it comes to respecting user privacy. Or if you’re excluding the most popular competitors which most people are coming from, perhaps Firefox isn’t literally one of the worst options.
- See the first section of my comment.
- Most people are coming from privacy-invasive browsers. I recall hearing about how Brave’s anti-fingerprinting is better than Firefox’s out of the box, but is it good enough to defeat fingerprinting or at least rival the Tor Browser? If not, why is Brave good enough to recommend? This takes us back to my original point, there isn’t a clear line for what should be “good enough” to recommend the average user.
I can’t seem to find it now but I recall reading a thread on here about whether Firefox should be recommended at all since its sandboxing is apparently weaker than Chromium’s on desktop. I remember Jonah pointing out that it hasn’t been demonstrated that Firefox users are more likely to be compromised than Chromium users.
It doesn’t mean that the sandboxing point should be disregarded, it just means that things are more nuanced. When it comes to making a browser recommendation to the average user, the point that they’ll be much more secure using a Chromium-based browser just doesn’t seem to play out in the real world. I’d say this isn’t dissimilar to the situation with desktop Linux.
Anyways, we’ve gotten off-course from the original thread and I don’t wanna drag it on so I think I’ll let you have the final say. I understand the Brave > Firefox perspective and with the exception of promoting Chromium and Web3, I’d mostly agree with you. I just disagree that “Firefox is the worst, Brave is infinitely better in every regard”. It’s complicated, there’s pros and cons to both and many considerations to make when recommending a browser for the average person.