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108
Why do people switch from chrome to Brave browser and not to Firefox? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 day ago by einfach_orangensaft@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 74 points 1 day ago (2 children)

And run by a homophobic crypto bro.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 31 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Who also inflicted Javascript upon the world, the incompetent piece of shit.

I won't say that's worse than the homophobia because I don't want to seem dismissive about oppression of queer folks, but it sure as Hell isn't better, either!

[–] moseschrute@piefed.social 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Attacking his politics is valid, and that does make me uneasy about using Brave. I’m curious where the security theater accusation comes from. Brave strikes a nice balance imo. If I wanted true security I would use Tor, but honestly that would add so much friction I would probably quit the internet.

Attacking JavaScript is a stupid argument. So many people just pile on JavaScript. I bet a lot of the same people are into FOSS and self hosting. If you write your app in 100% JavaScript without a backend, it can run on almost every operating system. Think about that for a second. We have the ultimate cross platform language. Yes it’s grown out of something that was originally messy, but a lot of work has been done to make it better.

Don’t attack JavaScript, attack the bad parts of JavaScript like type coercion. Yes, you can probably blame Brendan Eich for that part. Attack the businesses that are enshitifying everything.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

We could have had Scheme or Python (both of which are also cross-platform, BTW) embedded in the browser instead. And yes, Netscape was seriously considering those two specific languages before Eich oozed into the situation and fucked it all up.

Javascript did not "need" to happen. The only reasons it exists are Not-Invented-Here and Dunning-Kruger Syndromes (specifically, Netscape wanting something new and vaguely Algol-like that they could name to glom onto the Java hype at the time, and Eich having the inexperience and hubris to think he could hack together a half-assed design in a week and it would somehow turn out okay).

Yes it’s grown out of something that was originally messy, but a lot of work has been done to make it better.

Yeah, no shit! Literally millions upon millions of man-hours, probably! Do you have any concept at all of how much better the Web could have been if all that effort had been put towards something actually useful instead of working around Eich's mistakes?!

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[–] moseschrute@piefed.social 4 points 17 hours ago

I can’t speak to Scheme as I haven’t spent more than a few days using it. Python has a lot of strengths but also a lot of weaknesses. JavaScript has had to evolve with 100% backwards compatibility. The python you enjoy today would have had to evolve differently if it was the language of the browser.

Look I’m kinda young. Not that young, but too young for Netscape. You clearly lived through more of the history than I did. But imo, the thing ruining the internet isn’t JavaScript, it’s late stage capitalism and greedy companies. You could have Python or Scheme or whatever and late stage capitalism would still have ruined it.

If you feel so strongly that JavaScript is the issue, why don’t you invest your time in helping Webassebly grow? Imo that’s more useful than complaining about JavaScript.

[–] sk1nnym1ke@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Source(s) for this?

[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 41 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not my work, it is from a saved comment by @cannedtuna@lemmy.world in a now deleted post.

This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don't want to however, here is a summary of the key points:

  • Brendan Eich's anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement

    • Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.

  • 2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads

    • Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as "blatantly illegal".

  • 2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign

    • Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.

  • 2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets

    • Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.

  • 2020 — Brave puts ads in user's home screens

    • Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.

  • 2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature

    • Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests

  • 2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites

    • Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google's crawler.

  • 2024 - So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection

    • Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.

  • And More!

    • Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to "Forget the Fox". When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
    • The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
    • Brendan Eich's feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be "independent".

Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.

[–] perslue@lemmy.ca -5 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

So you seem pretty well versed in the topic and I've been using Brave for a very long time. But what chromium alternative would you recommend that tries to accomplish what Brave clearly isn't doing well? I'm open to switching but also not really interested in Firefox.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 12 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I would not switch to a chromium-based browser at all. For lots of reasons, but if I had to pick one it would be to avoid creating a dominant browser and ceding control over web standards to a single entity the way MS used IE to do what they wanted and force everyone else to comply.

Those were dark times. I was still being forced to make sites IE5 compatible in 2015 — official support ended in 2005.

[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 12 points 23 hours ago

In the rare instance that I need a chromium browser, I use chromium. But there are very few websites for which I need it and I think I have found alternatives for them all.

[–] gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Vivaldi has built in ad and tracking blocker and a much better UI.

[–] Semester3383@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Kind of. It's still not nearly as effective as Firefox with uBlock and a few other extensions. The downside is that some sites are just broken on Firefox, and blocking ads, etc. makes a relative few sites unusable. Which, yeah, 99.999% of the time I'm fine with. Until it's something I need to do for my day job.