this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Why I recommend against Brave. (thelibre.news)
submitted 1 week ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
315 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?

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[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 79 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 24 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Prop 8 was not merely proposed, it was approved by voters and actually banned same-sex marriage for several years before it was ruled unconstitutional.

Brendan Eich contributed to the actual banning of same-sex marriage in California for several years.

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Corrected the mistake, thanks.

[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 6 points 6 days ago

Thank you!

[–] MemmingenFan923@feddit.org 12 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Oof. It seems that most of the users simply don't care.

[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 14 points 1 week ago

Every time I mention that brave is a bad choice that is basically the response I get.

[–] eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 6 days ago

Every time someone uses Brave, I know I can ignore their opinion. They're either a useful moron who is too dumb to look around them, or they support every single one of these things.

It's no wonder why 4chan's /g/ loves Brave.

[–] mke@programming.dev 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Might be nicer if they just didn't care.

Check the comment section for the video version of this article by Niccolò, or the comment section of the post on r/browsers, or the replies whenever these issues are mentioned on Twitter, and so on, and you'll find a bunch of brave people saying stuff like:

you unintentionally just made me like brave over firefox. now i can switch to a chromium based browser and not even feel bad about it

Yes i am installing Brave after this advertisment!

Thanks to this video I deleted Brave then redownloaded it

These were taken directly from the video. They're on the mild side. Throw in also some "stop inserting politics (other than mine) into tech" comments, and a few homophobes not even trying to hide it. Rather than not caring, many of them like it a lot, especially the right-wing politics.

I don't think every Brave user is a cunt, but fucking hell, are loud cunts seemingly attracted to Brave.

To folks bothered by this: know that the lead developer of Ladybird is a big fan of Brendan Eich.

[–] Tristus@lemmy.world -5 points 6 days ago

I don't use Brave as my main browser but I think some of the accusations are not fair.

  1. TOR Feature. I don't think it was deliberately done. Similarly Firefox revealed your up address even if you used VPN while using. As long as there was no malicious intent we can't say anything other than that they software has big bugs.
  2. Yes, it is questionable what they do for getting money but same can be said for most donations or schemes that FOSS use. There was long discussions about the money Mozilla receives from Google, or things Opera did (basically similar to Brave)
  3. Getting news from right wing is useful if you ever need to do research, I had a course in uni about anti-islam and getting really right wings news was difficult. We all knew the same 2 sites.
  4. The political opinion of the CEO is concerning but not important enough. In that case I'm wholly on the same boat as the developer of the Factorio, if Hitler were to make good Browsers I'd use them.
  5. It is also important to note most of the problems are in the past. Sure it means there are likely a lot we could not find and it is annoying to use a product where they would exploit you if they are given a chance.

That said Brave is still #1 Browser I'd recommend someone installing. If I can I'd install Firefox myself, but on the phone it is what I recommend. I don't trust my uncle to install Firefox and install uBlock etc. on top of it. But I trust him to install Brave and use it.

Most privacy minded Browsers like Libre Wolf have restrictions, like not enabling WebRTC out of the box, meaning using Zoom, Meet etc is not possible. There are people who are forced to use such software and not able to tweak with config files. Some people think just because they can do it, everybody should be able to. I think it is a good choice to recommend to people, very good in place replacement for Chrome, you can even take your bookmarks and addons with you