The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training
https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/Open linkView original on lemmy.world1386
Comments557https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can't recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
Firefox. The slowest browser, the least compatible browser, the most annoying when it comes to bugs and issues (Firefox snap anyone?)
I just cannot disagree more. You seriously have to gaslight yourself into liking it.
What a strange take. I switched from Opera to Firefox like 15+ years ago (whenever Firefox added extensions, so I could use Mouse Gestures (why I was on Opera in the first place))
I never have issues with compatibility or speed. I don’t use Google products so I don’t have Chrome to compare it to, but it’s certainly as fast as/faster an IE/Edge.
Firefox has been my browser for eons, but I admit I think Edge is faster. It doesn't matter to me in the end though.
Edge feels like the same speed to me, but our household has monster computers!
Edge is Chrome.
*Chromium, which is not the same. But I get your point.
Yes, there is a difference, but it's minor and big stuff, like adblocking not working as well, are true of Chrome and Chromium.
Wow, that is quite a presumption there. Every couple years I try Chrome again and I am done with it in a few hours. The thing is archaic and its interface uncustomizable. And the only reason it could maybe have more compatibility is because of its market share and peoples' bias towards it. There was once a time over ten years ago when it was good, but it's not anymore. Not to mention the privacy issues.
Firefox has been my browser for 10 years or longer.
To each their own.
Every couple of years I try firefox, and it doesn't take me long to be disappointed. Usually just some random incoherent firefox incompatibility with a major feature like logging in on a site or something.
How so? I don't think I've ever heard anything negative against the company, but I'd love to know if I missed something.
The latest controversy was about Mozilla working with Meta in a project about privacy in ads.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/
Don't really know if this is a good or bad thing
You’re going to need to cite some sources for these fairly wild claims.
This is the most egregious lie of the bunch. Firefox is extremely close in terms of features, performance, usability, HTML/JS/CSS support, developer tools, etc. It’s privacy tools are, if anything, significantly better. And once Manifest v2 extensions stop being supported by Chrome (which is coming next year) it’ll have significantly better adblocker support.
HUGE lie. Firefox is so freaking slow compared to basically anything else.
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they'd offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
no, you are right. there is a lot of talk about the brave browser in this thread, a chromium based ad blocking browser by the brave company that gives you their own crypto in return for unobtrusive ads on the start page, which can then be used to donate to content creators on the internet (i think) or be cashed in. you and the op are talking about brave search, a search engine created by the same company
ah, that would explain it, thanks!
I've been using brave browser for years and, while I vaguely know what you're talking about, it's not something I've ever even looked at.
The defining feature of Brave for me has always been the built-in ad blocking.
I don't think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.
I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I'm switching to Firefox tomorrow.
Yep, exactly my thought too. I've made too many hops but none of these products truly offer privacy.
I moved from Telegram to Signal for security only to learn more and more about the holes in Signal. At least Proton Mail is fine.
Yeah can I get adblock on iPhone with Firefox?
There are adblockers extensions for iphone, like adGuard. It will remove ads on Safari (doesn't work with other browsers unfortunately)
You can with Firefox Focus! Though to be clear, safari with AdGuard is much better. Even better when used together NextDNS and the HaGaZi blocklist.
You can use pihole and route your traffic there with a vpn such as tailscale to block ads and more
When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.
Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.
I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 5~10€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).
Now that crypto account is mandatory it's just useless...
I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I'm too lazy to replace it by something else.
On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?
I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.
I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.
The problem isn’t the ads, it’s the quantity. And they turn themselves into OS level alerts, that you train yourself to ignore
You can literally choose the quantity that you want to see though. You're choosing to have them pop up, and how often, based on how much you want to earn. You can choose none, or every option between 1 and 10 per hour. I choose 10 because then I get paid the most and I literally just click "close" on the little popup that comes up in the bottom right of the screen, or I just ignore it.
Have you actually used it?
Not since the last time they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,
So if my information is out of date, whoops. But they are still scumbags, particularly with that CEO
I thought it was supposed to be the best privacy browser but after reading these comments my view has changed completely and have switched all devices to Firefox.
I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.
It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.
My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.
I might be wrong, as I’ve never used Brave, but isn’t it the case that they remove ads from the actual content owners and replace them with their own ads, basically monetizing other people’s content? I block all ads in my browser, don’t get me wrong, but what Brave is doing seems a bit shady to me.
No. The ads from brave itself are only on new tabs and notifications.
They do that, but not in that way. The websites will appear without ads, but once in a while their ad will pop up in a new window/tab. This is optional though
No, you can take your own BAT out and sell it. It's been some time but I believe they have a function to sell directly on an exchange. Else, you'll need to buy Ethereum and use it to transfer to any other exchange
Brave is just too shady and I hate that it's considered a "privacy" browser by people who don't know better.
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don't understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
You might want to look into NewPipe then. Lets you do all those things with YT, plus you can also download the videos or their audio only
I’m on an iPhone, which I why I don’t use all the other things Android people suggest.
Brave has been about the only thing I’ve found that works and is easy for iPhone.
That is unfortunate, newpipe is awesome, dare I say better than YouTube Premium.
Yeah, I mean Brave seems to give me all the features premium does, at least the ones I want. I have a Google account specifically for YouTube watching with which I’ve trained/brute-force-hidden-trash to the point the algorithm 99% of the time gives me what I’m interested in, so it’s pretty simple to pop open the browser and put something on to listen to on a drive.
Newpipe doesn't use the algorithm (besides the feed for popular but you don't really contribute to it though) which is actually one of the reasons I like it because it allows me to cut down on my watch time (though I also tend to listen much more than watch nowadays).
It does have downloads too, admittedly I never use this feature but it is neat because you can choose the format and quality which goes above even premium's choices for quality.
3rd party solutions for these corporate run apps truly are amazing!
I do download on my desktop with an extension (I think it’s just called “YouTube downloader”) or something.
Downloading videos is a regular habit not just to bypass ads but because the videos can disappear for everything from corporate to personal to esoteric reasons.
I use Revanced, personally, but also have NewPipe installed.
You could check out uYouPlus then, it doesn’t require jailbreaking or anything but instead works through “sideloading”. I’ve used it for years and it’s honestlygreat:
https://github.com/qnblackcat/uYouPlus
Or they could keep using Brave? I use Brave on my phone and Firefox on my desktop for the same reasons mentioned, but in general Brave is a great browser on phones. I'm amazed it isn't hugely popular if only for the YouTube features.
“No you MUST uninstall Brave, the company is too shady!” -someone using a phone made by a literal advertising company
Of course they can, I never said they couldn’t. I just personally prefer YouTube’s app UI and UX over the website on mobile.
I’ll look at it further thanks.
If you’re on apple I’d recommend giving Orion browser a try. It blocks all ads by default, including YouTube. It’s become my default browser on all my devices.
On iPhone you are using WebKit no matter what browser you use. Unfortunately it is the same deal with Firefox too. In addition, Apple isn't forgiving when it comes to their customers privacy and security. They actually "sell" this comfort in their adverts. So it would be crazy if they pulled their windows and Android tricks on Apple.
Try 1Blocker and Safari. I’ve had a way better, less buggy experience using that combo as opposed to Brave. I used Brave almost exclusively for ages but found that it was killing my battery life and processor. I have a five year old iPhone 8 and swapping breathed new life into it. It also solved an issue I had where I couldn’t get captions to work while using Brave but there’s no such issue on Safari
Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
Iirc the debian of browsers is iceweasle.
I use Brave occasionally, but Firefox has been my #1 for the past 100 years or so. I stopped using Firefox as my only browser after they overhauled the interface. I really miss classic Firefox with my tabs on bottom, old search engine bar, and endless customizations.
I still remember why: Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, the man who would go on to found Brave, for donating to Christian charities in the politically polarised climate of 2016. After Eich went, they also quietly purged any other employees that showed even a hint of conservative sympathies in their internet presence. They then went on to "experiment" with pushing browser ads on users, and while they eventually ended the experiment because of massive user backlash, they still made no apologies and didn't abandon the idea. Just made a final public response dripping with PR bullshit with a patronising conclusion along the lines of "internet users just aren't ready for this change yet".
Brandon Eich was fired because he was constantly giving money to politicians and groups that were advocating for the banning of same sex marriage. Also funding the campaign of congressman Tom McClintock, a certified piece of shit, Who denies climate change, is against LGBTQ rights, and was among the republicans trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Yes. That is political affiliation. You might not share it, but whether same-sex marriage should be legal is absolutely a political question, even if it is now outside the Overton window.
Personally, I'm not sure I support any form of state marriage, but if it exists, it should include same-sex marriage.
So he was fired for his political affiliation.
In OK with that
From an outside perspective, I find it astonishing that those ideas are considered acceptable political positions in the US. With that said, I believe in individuals having the right to support or promote their chosen cause, but also the right of others to choose whether or not they wish to associate with them.
I hope so. Fascists have no place in democracy
Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you're marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
Also, he invented JavaScript. He got on my shitlist permanently for that alone.
A necessary evil sadly. Never enjoyed having to program in JS, but I enjoy all the fanciness and convienence it brings the UX.
I don't understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
They replaced links to crypto exhange Binance with their own affiliate links that they profit from without the users concent. It's bad because they did it behind their user's backs hoping no one would notice. Makes me question what else they're not telling me about.
Ok.
Brave had a thing where if you went to website.com, they would add /ref=brave to the URL so they get a kickback as if you clicked on their referral link.
Sneaky? Sure. A huge scandal? I don't think so. No user data was being collected, no privacy was being violated. If I was the company doing the referral system I'd be mad, but as a user, it does not affect me at all.
Firefox fanatics just need something to point to and say "brave bad firefox good" and that is the worst thing they can find on Brave. It's all browser wars to them, like iPhone vs Android or Xbox vs Playstation.
The article in this post also does not affect users in anyway, and has been updated after Brave responded, with most of the worst claims of the article now retracted.
Thank you.
Stealing referral URLs is lowest kind of spyware/malware tactics. Topmoxie which was another for of advanced java app coming with Limewire did it.
That’s why i use Firefox.
I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products.. :(
It'd be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I'd love an open and private search engine that isn't just a meta search :(
Edit:
Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren't just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you're looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites
Yep doesn't come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)
Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn't seem have any kind of summary or answers function.
I think I'll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I'm having a hard time finding something.
I switched to Duck Duck Go and Firefox and have never looked back.
Brave always seemed kinda scummy to me, like they're robbing Peter to pay Paul.
didn't ddg have it's own problems a while ago?
They sold data to Microsoft, iirc, but that was the Android browser, not the search engine (something people forget to mention)
I don't really wanna use a meta search engine that just pulls their results from bing or google though. That doesn't seem like a sustainable way to build an actual alternative, since eventually google and Microsoft may just choose to change their api terms of service. I'd much prefer to support something independent if I can
Thats no reason for you to switch, just an explanation for why I went with brave. I switched to duckduckgo first and found the results weren't great for me, so I changed to brave anf have found the results better, and they have their own index rather than taking other people's search results, but instead they're taking other people's web content and selling rights to it 🙃. The company seems a little... Lacking :(
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with additional privacy these days. Effectively is is what Startpage is for Google.
Brave Search is one of the only independent search indexes available these days. Others include Mojeek and Qwant, but neither are as good as Brave Search.
Don't let the Firefox fanboys cloud your judgement with their constant shilling. Most of the claims in the article have been retracted after Brave responded, and the issue didn't affect users anyway.
Also, Brave is a completely independent search engine now, which is why they have web crawlers like the guy in the article is complaining about. And speaking of a distributed crawler, Brave Browser has an opt-in feature for that where sites you visit will be indexed by Brave Search.
Brave Search is the only real contender to be an actual competitor for Google Search, but these Firefox fanatics have such a hate boner for Brave they just want to see it fail. All of their arguments against Brave really aren't serious and don't affect users at all.
I mean personally for myself, was gonna use Firefox regardless- I'd rather support the open source option and web engine that isn't chromium based; the question for me was whether to use brave search, and if brave search was providing rights to web content to those who'd like to use it for AI training. I had generally liked brave search okay as my google replacement (though I will say I tired quant looking for a brave alternative because of this article, and qwant is pretty good too! I've been impressed!)
Not disclosing sites are being crawled is iffy, but I genuinely do understand the justification given in the email reply that the article updated to add- as long as they're not selling rights to other people's content for AI training.
I'm a little out of my depth here from a technical perspective so that probably doesn't help, but honestly between the comment provided by brave and the original authors interpretation of the email response they received, the whole situation feels pretty muddy. The author and brave seem to be kind of fundamentally at odds about what they're describing brave as doing, so it's a little hard to gauge. Even if brave is accurately describing the product they provide ("it's an api you can make calls to to get ai outputs based on web content") which doesn't seem totally consistent with some of the descriptions on their api products page, it still feels somewhat ambiguous because of the fact that websites can't opt out of their content being provided through an api, whether it's been filtered through a LLM or not. It all seems very, very mudy; hard to make heads or tails of. I'll be curious to see any additional updates to the article.
That's not true, the author pretty explicitly maintained the most important claims...
So...? You can do unethical things without it affecting the user...? There's an argument to be had around whether it's unethical, but it not affecting the user is frankly kinda irrelevant.
Indeed! That's why I was using them. If folks are looking for a brave alternative with their own index though, I'd say qwant has seemed very competitive, and it like their interface even better, though they do lack the helpful ai summary tool- perhaps both for better and worse.
That's definitely not what he was complaining about. He was complaining about how they're crawling the web. Tons of people have crawlers, but most do a better job of respecting website consent than brave seems to (even if brave may have understandable reasons, which they might), and that's especially important given the broader context of the story.
Yes, that's exactly what I was referring to... It's a cool feature, and I wish Firefox would implement it and maybe use the results to make an open source web index that any alternative search engines could use to supplement their own indexes in order to support competition with bing and google.
That's an entirely baseless assertion, I literally listed 3 alternatives to brave, all of which have their own index (and I'm pretty sure there are others, but I may be mistaken), and of those 3 I'd say qwant provides very competitive search results with brave, maybe even better. I plan to keep testing them but its cool for there to be more than one decent private search engine that isn't a meta search!
That's the second time you make this argument and it still doesn't matter. If were to steal the entirety of other people's content and copy it 1-1 without attribution that doesn't affect users either, but that sure as hell doesn't mean its okay. And I already explained that it genuinely is ambiguous whether what brave is doing is okay- if they're selling people's content to train large language models, that's definitely serious, and for right now it does remain kinda ambiguous whether they're doing that or not
I get that you're frustrated and feel like people are biased against something you like, but getting angry, making poor arguments to defend a corporation that doesn't care about any of us, and calling everyone who says they prefer not to support Brave is more shill-like behavior than the folks you're frustrated with, it might be worth dialing it back a bit.
Edit: adjusted wording for accuracy, and some of my original wording felt a little more passive aggressive than it need end to be (and some of it kinda still is but I'm tired and don't wanna edit more 😅 apologies for tone that comes across as somewhat hostile)
just a few counter points:
brave is open source too
AI copyright precident has not been set by courts, there is no precident for any of this. i don't see why this is such a big deal you'd stop using their search.
As a pirate, I think copyright law is bullshit anyway and holds us back as a species. Most copyright law is outdated and stunts creativity and innovation
most people only care if it affects them. which this does not. it is relevant because that is how people operate if they're not virtue signaling
there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. every large organization does some shady shit. Brave in comparison to most hasn't done anything to warrant such a huge campaign against them. maybe some criticism, sure.
I meant brave is the only good alternative to Google. all the others have terrible results. Brave is almost as good as google
and I'm not defending a corporation, I am just tired of Firefox fans jumping on any small thing and making a mountain out of a molehill to try and save their dying browser market share
also no idea why you think I'm angry about this. I'm just annoyed at the constant Firefox circlejerk/astroturfing campaign
I actually didn't realize that, thank you for pointing that out to me. I do generally feel better about supporting Mozilla's web engine since otherwise chromium has a monopoly and google has generally been shitty with the power that has granted them in the market, and Mozilla has generally done a great job of championing a free, open, and inter-compatible internet, but that's a personal choice on my part; chromium will be better suited to the needs of plenty of users 🤷🏻
I don't really agree that because something isn't illegal its therefore okay. Especially when its because laws haven't has a chance to catch up. But regardless, laws don't determine whether something is good or right.
I generally agree, I think modern copyright law is broken as all fuck and only exists to further the interests of massive companies at the expense of everyone else. But I do think its important for people who do creative labor to be able to profit off of doing so, which requires some amount of protection since intellectual labor can be copied without doing the labor again. Coming up with a novel idea or writing an article requires creative labor, but copying them does not, as opposed to like manufacturing a physical product, which generally requires the same effort and resources to reproduce (all other factors being equal). But modern interpretation of intellectual property law is complete and utter bullshit, I 100% agree. That being said, if brave is selling people's content that required intellectual labor to produce, personally I find that pretty unequivocally wrong, the question is whether that's the actually the case here, and the nature of AI, plus the ambiguity around the specifics of this situation, really muddy the water.
I absolutely disagree that anyone who cares about issues that don't directly affect them is virtue signalling- to me the term 'virtue signaling' intrinsically implies that someone's care about an issue is disingenuous or insincere. And I also think that only caring about issues that directly affect you is a horrible way to go through life. I'm getting the impression that we may have somewhat fundamentally different worldviews on this subject; to me, caring about things that are harmful or damaging to others even if they don't affect me directly is a moral imperative unless I wish to loose any shred of respect I may have for myself. I think we could go back and forth on whether most people do or don't actually care about issues that don't directly affect them, but I am generally of the mind that people should. If you look at this differently I understand, and am more than happy to chalk this up to a difference in worldviews.
I don't think that just because nothing can be perfect that one option can't be less bad than another. That being said, I'm really not super in the loop on any controversies that have happened with Brave though, I honestly have no idea whether they've been involved in past wrongdoing or not. I've definitely seen bad press they've gotten, and I'd never really enjoyed how closely integrated crypto stuff is with their browser (I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with crypto, it's just been involved in so many scams it makes me warry at this point, especially if it's showing up somewhere that doesn't feel like it belongs like a browser) but that was never a big enough deal that I felt it should affect whether I use something of theirs like a search engine. If this turns out to be nothing then I'll likely just decide between qwant and brave based on preference, I'm curious to continue comparing them and see how they stack up against each other.
That's fair, that's what I understood you to mean, I just don't know that I agree it's the only meaningful competitor. Though I do certainly agree there aren't many, and brave is among the best options. Like I said, I'm genuinely really curious to continue comparing brave, qwant, and probably also mojeek though so far it hasn't impressed me as much. I think there may have been others I considered before going with Brave I could continue comparing, but I'd need to find them again. Techlore on YouTube said he ended up picking brave for search so when I got tired of duckduckgo, I kinda just ended up using Brave.
I can understand that frustration. Personally I'm super happy with Firefox and am glad to support it, but I think the open source world in general can kinda just "be like that" sometimes when they feel its better to support one project or another. I often agree with them on what I'd like to support, but I do think there are helpful and unhelpful ways to express one's opionons on that kinda subject, and people often express them in a way that just kinda sucjs sucks. I think its kinda just an eventuality that discourse ends up that way, given the open source community's particular cultural mix of genuine care about supporting good projects, varrying levels of "moral superiority" mindset about said projects they support, and the echo chamber aspect of any online community with lots of people sounding off about what they think and why. It really can get frustrating, especially if you're supporting a project that isn't what the general majority has chosen to support.
I appreciate your willingness to engage in sincere discussion with me :)
Thanks for the understanding and reasonable reply. I also appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
I don't even dislike Firefox, I have it installed on my PC and my phone alongside Brave. And I don't think Brave is completely undeserving of criticism either, just not to the extent that it is portrayed at large.
Of course. Always nice to have real conversation with someone online 😊
And get what you're saying, I'll be keeping what you've had to say in mind as I see more of that discussion about brave. Its not the right fit for me, but I'm not going to begrudge anyone making the choice that's right for them.
Hope you have a great day!
firefox is so laggy nowadays. the scrolling is also weird.
Firefox is now faster than Chrome as of the latest benchmarks.
Respectfully disagree, I have no complains about the browser itself. just that lazy web devs don't test on ff, or actually, only on chrome.
Eh... I have absolutely NO PROBLEMS on Windows, Linux and MacOS. You should know that some extensions can cause problems. Try a new profile.
it is not lag as in slow, it has. weird scrolling glitch that make it look like a lag. Definitely not extension, because it happen on clean install too, and it is not only me. Plenty of people have it too if you google it.
On which OS?
What system are you on that Firefox is laggy? I’ve had no real issues on Windows, Mac, or Linux in the past few years.
Oh shit turn on CNN, a plane just flew onto one of the twin towers!
.... What? Wait, we're not quoting old posts? I dunno man, I know this is a huge "works on my machine", but I really haven't seen Firefox be a problem on any machine in at least, hard minimum, half a decade.
come home, your mom died.
https://mozilla.social/@stevetex/110696689018983577
Upgrade to a computer built in the 2010s maybe?
Core2duo with Nvidia 9400 does very smooth scrolling once you use Wayland. Yes, Linux of course.
i wish i could use linux on this pc.
Business issue or hardware? If it is hardware there is always help, e.g. high level kernel devs cared about my HP boot issue or NetBSD.
Buy brave token. It price should go up
After their crypto crap, this doesn't surprise me one bit.
And don't give me that "You can disable the crypto" the fact is, you shouldn't have to because it shouldn't have ever been included in the first place.
Seriously, early on this company literally deployed a mass MITM attack against their entire userbase.
Any company that pulls some shit like that is just going to do it again whenever they think they can get away with it.
Breaking their users' trust by appending attribution tags to their URLs should've been unforgivable but I still see people pushing their browser online
At least it wasnt an NFT? ive never used brave, this is all news to me
One of the founders, Brendan Eich, donated his money to take away the equal right for same-sex couples to marry in California (Prop 8). He never acknowledge that it was mistake, so I can only assume that he truly wants to see the marriages of same-sex couples erased, which is quite a hateful thing to desire.
Ironically, Brave tried to be Firefox based in their early days but they ultimately decided Chromium would meet their needs better so they switched over.
They go into detail on their blog: https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/
Hoping manifest v3 ends up being enough of a problem for adblockers that it pushes them to consider moving to firefox.
its referring to their search engine's ai summarizer feature, i found an article when searching op's title, quite a low effort post really since only an image was shared and no link to any article.. or any description whatsoever.
Firefox can do this too so it should work with librewolf too, no?
I use and heavily recommend Waterfox. Less bullshit, more privacy.
Than librewolf? how exactly?
I heard chromium is easier to work with than gecko.
I heard the same - over a decade ago.
Not disagreeing with you, although that information might be outdated. But the fact that you don't see, e.g. , applications that use gecko to embed web content, speaks volumes. I get the feeling that their codebase is very monolithic.
I would really like to hear from a current or former contributor though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191006213746/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko
It seems they cancelled support for embedding gecko.
As a previously paying, licensed Opera user I believe it was one of the reasons they went with chromium. Even Vivaldi (which is the true Opera) uses chromium. Giving up PWA support is another mistake.
On the chromium side, there is the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) which is used absolutely everywhere. Not sure about gecko situation though, but at least their JavaScript engine, SpiderMonkey, also has quite widespread use. I don't think I've seen projects not related with Mozilla/Firefox that use gecko though, but perhaps it's because I never look hard enough. It's usually either WebKit or CEF.
I believe libxul is their approach to having gecko as a separate library for others to use.
If someone can explain to me why librewolf refuses to display the specialized font characters that most websites use for necessary navigation symbols, I'll go back to using it. But all of my research suggests it was a problem only I was having, and it genuinely made some websites unusable.
Everyone knows the only safe way to browse is to scrape webpages and print the content to your terminal.
Firefox users: Another Chromium drama? People never learn
I groaned hearing Louis Rossmann recommending Brave during one of his videos about Youtube ads. Firefox uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock would be a better recommendation.
or just librewolf \ Mull that comes with uBO already installed, if he don't want to let his users (that are probably techie, so idk why) install add-ons by themselves. Otherwise, I can't find a single reason of using brave lol
Brave provides a good balance between features and privacy for normal users.
I think many users will be uncomfortable with Mull and especially Librewolf.
(I personally use Mull but since it's limited in functionality I sometimes have to switch to a more fully featured browser, that browser being Brave.)
I really have no idea why they're limited in functionalities I think the only website that didn't work for me on mull is instagram (fuck it anyway). And librewolf portable solved the no updates for me (although there is an addon for letting u know about updates), while letting me back up my data more easily
Looks neat, but it still depends on Firefox so I don't mind supporting Firefox which is our last bastion against a Chrome monopoly.
As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
As a web developer you should really take a look at Firefox developer eidition. It comes with very nice features for web developers and you are always at the edge of new things FF will support so you see things that will come soon to the rest of the Firefox users.
Normally I would agree with you, but I often need to use the Postman Interceptor extension which is only on Chromium browsers
Workflow differs from person to person. Not sure what that extension does or why it's needed, but I guess you are use to it.
Check out ungoogled-chromium. It needs some extra work to get extensions (and probably drm stuff) to work, but has good defaults otherwise.
Actually, it does have extensions. You can download them through app store in both iOS and Mac OS.
But it is more limited compared with chromium and firefox environment, and most known extensions in those don't exist for safari, although there are usually alternatives with other names
I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
If you want you can just use Vivaldi like any other browser, I would think, what is there that needs to be set up that doesn't in other browsers?
I have changed the homepage on brave plenty of times.
I'm an ex website designer/dev and only tinker with websites these days. But I was doing this shit back in the days when HTML 4.01 was new. Anyways it was usual to use a bunch of tricks to get multiple different browsers (including different versions) to render the same or similar enough. I had to have a bunch of different browsers installed to test them all on because emulation wasn't a thing yet either.
I think the last serious development I did was a few years ago but as browsers have become better at adhering to standards and rendering more consistently, I haven't had the need to use anywhere near the amount of tricks and hacks as I used to. I've personally had little issue with browser compatibility.
Has something happened in the last few years to change that?
Firefox performs as well as chrome 99.8% of the time. The problem is chromium keep implementing things that haven't gone through the spec process fully yet. This causes the following situation:
The other browsers don't implement half baked privacy violating features which Google decides will be a new web API despite objections. Developers build features on their sites using that half baked crap. Users try to use the new features on Firefox and kick off about "Firefox specific bugs" because they haven't implemented non standard APIs.
Safari is its own kettle of fish though and causes a lot of drama. Recently they've caught up a lot in terms of support for most standard features developers want. However there's a big issue with supporting iOS Safari - it's version is tied to the iOS version of the phone. So users with older phones will be stuck forever on older versions of Safari with breaking bugs for things like flexbox. If you're in a market with lots of older phones then you have to spend a lot of time ensuring you support that older browser version. iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
Thank you for this explanation! I was so confused by people saying Firefox causes problems because my experience and AFAIK, Firefox adheres to standards the most. I always had the easiest time with Firefox and always built sites using Firefox then tricks to make other browsers work the same. Maybe it's because as a designer/dev I have always been more particular about sticking to standards.
sigh And here I thought after how many decades of standards, we would be past this shit by now. <insert rant about monopolising big corps forcing their moneygrubbing crap on people>
Any chromium based browser will force manifest v3 on you though, keep that in mind.
One point for Brave, is that they have specifically said they will continue to support Manifest v2 in their browser.
That's nice. still not worth it tho lol
I used to do QA for a Web portal, and issues with Firefox not scaling .svg files properly was driving me up the wall. There were more obscure issues, but this one was so basic that I couldn't believe we still had to have a separate code for Firefox browsers.
Arc has been pretty good for me so far. But the challenge will be at what point they stop stuffing it with new ideas, and will that be before it turns into a bloated mess. Edge is a great example of this.
Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information
Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.
It’s quirky, for sure. The easel feature isn’t at all integrated which I find odd.
I refuse to use Chrome and I use Firefox for work since 99% of my time is on that.
Got any alternatives to use?
If Brave redirecting users to use their affiliate links without consent didn't make people stop using it, I doubt this will.
On Firefox. But I do like Brave Search over something like DDG, their AI summarizer is quite good.
I think Librewolf is a much better option. BUT, I'm glad that at least Brave is taking a stance against Google. (the enemy of my enemy sort of thing). I hope all these firms are sued into following the proper copyright though.
I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives...
Your post just links to its own icon. Did you have an article to link to instead?
I'm assuming it's this article.
If this is accurate that's troubling
Gracias
De nada.
I apologize. I included an image in the submission and it seems it hijacked the URL. I've edited the submission to include the link.
i have that issue too, sometimes. it's either image or link. maybe you are not supposed to use both fields at the same time?
To me Firefox is the best browser.
I use Chrome because I'm lazy to move, I have my stuff synced in there and I use it also with my phone (Google Pixel). But lately I'm considering Firefox more and more. At least I now have it installed in my phone and specifically use it for some stuff.
I made the move, there are mild inconveniences, but you can export your passwords, bookmarks, et al. from chrome to firefox, you can even set firefox as your primary source for app password suggestions on android. The biggest win is having UBlock Origin on my phone browser.
Hey there, I'm here to encourage to move your stuff over to Firefox. If you have your password synched with Chrome's built-in password manager, also take this opportunity to export your passwords to another password manager such as Bitwarden or KeePassXC. There are mobile versions available and they also work in apps other than browsers. Looking forward to seeing you on Firefox! :D
Just the Multi-Account containers are worth switching. That thing is a godsend if you need to use multiple accounts for one service. And to have your work stuff separate from your personal stuff. And to avoid tracking across sites.
It takes a little while to get everything moved over and working the way you want to, but for me it's the superior browser. I get better performance especially on older devices and there are a lot of core things like bookmark handling that are better on Firefox.
Didn't they do some shady stuff before too? I was pretty confused why some people still recommended it
They got their start redirecting ads to sponsored ads. I've never understood the love for that browser.
The browser is highly performant, contains (nearly) all necessary (usability and privacy) features and is suitable for beginners.
The search has a nice interface that is usable without javascript, has an onion site and should be low on telemetry. It also (in my opinion) has the best search results after Google. And these search results are Brave's own results, not just resold Bing results; so they're actually bringing real competition to the search engine market.
I know people advertise a lot of good things for Brave. But I've never seen them. It's installed in my system, it's what I spin up to enter shady websites (don't ask), because it works well with ad based hidden link providers. But it's not that performant, vanilla Brave is way slower than riced up Firefox on my system. It shows sponsored ads, it straight tells you that it might collect data, it's bloated with buttons and crypto bullshit. I just don't see what any of the shills are talking about, and it sells your activity on the browser to AI trainers because their search engine is just that, a meta search engine crawler, sorry but it's just like any other browser.
It started with widgets showing crypto currency markets.
I immediately noped the hell off it.
TL;DR: Brave Software has their HQ in California and they are they're stealing data and selling it and giving "rights" to other people. Lawsuits are probably already being filed by multiple companies come monday.
And it's not in an "our AI 'read' the page and is making their own", it's straight up taking entire sentences and almost entire paragraphs from places like wikipedia and selling them as original data without attribution(which is required by the license used by wikimedia/pedia)
no..? on every bit of info theres a source button next to it which links you to the original article, similar to what bing chat does.
brave search, not the browser.
LOL, about half the points in the article are struck through now. Yet another "journalist" who doesn't understand how anything works getting angry how they way they imagine it works.
That's some quality reporting "stackdiary".
Yea within no time Brave will become evil as hell because the CEO is a silicon valley bro. They just waiting for more people to adapt their product and services.
The were evil since they started with all the cryptobullshit.
You must be evil to enter the crytoworld
Another case of shitification lol
I can't and won't ever understand why people keep recommending Brave. This is not even the second or third shady shit they pull off.
I was a big Brave supporter back in 2019-2020 when it seemed to have a lot of momentum behind it. But they squandered any goodwill they had with their crypto add-ons and rewards
Every single one of these Brave "scandals" are so irrelevant and meaningless. I was hoping the reddit hive mind wouldn't be brought over to lemmy, but here we are.
This article, especially after the update from Brave, seems like a huge nothing-burger. Just another excuse for the Firefox Fanatics crowd to rag on Brave and circlejerk each other about how good Firefox is.
The article isn't even about Brave Browser, and it has nothing to do with user data. The website owner is mad that Brave Search is crawling their site and using data in their "Summarizer" feature. I thought Firefox users were supposed to be against the Google internet monopoly, but apparently when it comes to one of the only companies with their own independent and actually decent search engine, they don't seem to care anymore because of stupid "Firefox good brave bad" browser wars nonsense.
Why is everyone mixing search engines and browsers here? This is specifically about the search engine and the problems that api of the search engine has with respecting copyright laws. I use their search engine and dont use their browser
I tried Brave for a couple days but I kept getting notifications from it that were ads. Brave had to go.
Been using brave for a few years on mobile and desktop.
They uses to give away BAT, but they have refined their system to not give any unless you spend hours jumping through hoops and linking shoddy Chinese financial apps and crypto wallets.
I still use it for the privacy, but after reading this I will likely switch back to firefox or another chrome based browser.
That's pretty dumb. Brave is looking for any and every monetisation opportunity. Can't blame them, with competition having free browsers, but it doesn't exactly make them trustworthy.
Someone please make a fork of Brave without the nonsense?
I never liked Brave. I don't care for the crypto crap they add onto their browser
Did nobody read the article? The author is crying that Brave implemented a summary feature so users don't have to read through entire paragraphs to get to the actual content. Of course, he goes on and on about copyright and OpenAI, nothing really about user data.
Firefox forever.
So few browsers left that support privacy
I never really liked brave to begin with, I feel safer implementing my privacy myself, and I think gecko just can do it better.
Sometimes in some websites I would have unexpected behaviours with firefox. In a government website, some features would straight up not work.
Maybe things changed in the last few years, but there you go why I tend to stick with chromium based browsers
I’ve seen this and it’s disappointing, but I’d sooner stop using the website than I would Firefox.
On the contrary however the certificate authority I use only grants certificates to Firefox or Safari browsers.. so there’s that.
My hack is to use Firefox, install uBlock Origin and TURN OFF Firefox's "Enhanced Tracking Protection" completely. And I always change cookie settings based on the site, otherwise I reject all cookies.
This works better even though FF says it's protection & uBO work together fine.
Check out the extension ‘cookie autodelete’. Enables you to set safe sites and will automatically delete all the other cookies when you navigate away from a page of close the browser. It’s real simple to configure and works a treat. It’s also available for chromium browsers. (I use it in Edge for work purposes)
Damn. Who knew that Brendan Eich was a shady pos.
seem like a good place to shill my blog about switching browser and search engine. I recommend Librewolf on desktop and Mull on android tho. view this privacy comparison. For search engine, use StartPage, Whoogle (privacy frontend for Google) or SearXNG (search engine aggregator)
Librewolf is king, it's baeicalky Firefox with a little hardening and good defaults!
As I user, how does this impact me?
Websites become less profitable and need to show more ads to survive.
That's why I use AdNauseam (a fork of uBlock but with a nicer philosophy).
And Brave blocks ads. The circle closes itself.
Seriously though, internet seems to me to be like a shopping mall and websites tend to be store fronts in the past few years. Search engines have to survive too and tend to be the mall directory. If it wasn't for the fediverse I'd hardly visit any websites. If you have any suggestions on how I and others could improve our browsing experience, I would be grateful.
Aw man I just started using Brave on my Android phone and really enjoy using it's AdBlock features and forced dark mode on pages that don't support it yet.
I tried Firefox and they didn't have an option to force dark mode on webpages without me having to turn this in in developer mode which breaks other apps I use.
There's a Dark Reader extension that will do that for you, if you have fdroid I'd also recommend grabbing Fennec instead which deblobs Firefox, changes some bad defaults, and enables about:config
Or Mull over fennec...
... Looks like it's time to switch browsers again. Anyone got any suggestions? Preferably a Chromium-based privacy-focused browser without any crypto-related bells and whistles. And it has to be able to sync between Android and desktop.
I'm geniunely asking, what are the alternatives that are fast, have builtin sync, and can block ads on android? I've tried firefox, and while it's gotten better on desktop, in my experience it struggles to play youtube videos on mobile, and the ui is basically unusable on a tablet/foldable.
Use Firefox for browsing the interwebs and something like NewPipe app for YouTube?
What issues are you having with tablet?
You could try Firefox Nightly and enable addons if they're are any that could improve things for you.
Since the transition to GeckoView the tablet ui is just scaled up mobile ui, with no tab-bar and no desktop sites by default. For some reason mozilla has marked it as a feature request instead of a bug (which I argue it is, as it used to have those features, as do all of the competing browsers), and successfully have been ignoring for 3 years (here's the discussion on mozilla connect, but there used to be a github issue before that).
As for youtube, I need a browser to use https://chatreplay.stream/ . For everything else of course there are NewPipe, ReVanced, and LibreTube
Try Kiwi Browser and Yandex Browser.
Enthusiasts don't like to hear it, but Edge, which is Chromium, has a built in adblocker which can be adjusted to also block safe ads.
It has a genuinely good sync with an account that nearly everyone has. The only reason to dislike Edge post-Chromium is the company Microsoft, but it's IMO the best Chromium browser, for both Windows/Android.
happy firefox user for over 5 years now, glad i will never use chromium trash like this
Switch to librewolf
never used that "Brave" and never will
Vivaldi ftw. The only Chromium browser I trust and use.
Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?
Firefox with uBlock Origin has been working well for me, for ads at least. I haven't looked too much into blocking trackers but I think Firefox has some ability to do that
Yeah it has some and if it doesnt work Extensions can help out. As it uses still the v2 manifest. It is just straight up better to use firefox ( or their "children" like librefox ( a bit hardend firefox browser ). It doesnt depending on chromium, its not a big Corporate that is super greedy.
What about a search engine though?
DuckDuckGo
I used to use it but switched to brave after reading that DDG lied about tracking.
Any others? (and not the one that requires a subscription, thanks)
Startpage supposedly uses Google's search engine without tracking your ip.
Not heard of them, will check it out, thanks!
E: a quick look tells me it doesn't work with VPN, so that's a no from me...
That's strange, I use Mullvad VPN and Startpage is my main search engine and It's only given me trouble once. They made me fill a captcha and wait a while in order to be able to use it again, but it was just an our at most.
DDG also curates/censors/biases the results though.
And even if the company thinks it's for a good reason, they've set themselves a precedent and now we don't know what else they could be curating, censoring or biasing in their search results.
tbf I didn't know about the agreement no longer being relevant, but yeah, like you say it's a grey area and weakens the trust at least some.
If I don't find any better alternative I guess its back to the duck I go...
I think that topic got really heated back then. DDG is far more transparent than any other companies and also did a statement regarding this. Besides that it’s still the most private search engine next to Searxng. And SearXNG is less convenient.
That’s also the reason why it is still used within the Tor browser for example.
This is the golden combo in my opinion. uBlock Origin is an excellent adblocker and it works best with Firefox. The built-in privacy features of Firefox are also decent, even when left at the default settings.
uBlock Origin for blocking advertisements everywhere, works with YouTube too. SponsorBlock for automatically skipping parts of YouTube videos with sponsored advertising.
Libre Wolf with uBlock preinstalled could be what you need.
I use Vivaldi + AdNauseam (though they have a built-in adblocker which I have disabled.)
I’m not using their browser in part because of all the problems of the past, but the search engine is actually really good. In my case it’s better than DDG and bing.
i also use brave search a lot, switched after ddg downranked russian search results and the microsoft tracking scandal. but now i am reconsidering. besides searX, what are the best privacy focused search engines atm?
I just recently tried a few different ones because I want to get away from Brave Search. But they either had poor search results or some firm of censoring/altering search results. So I would also love to know if there's some search engine or there that can produce good results without bias i.e. actually just give me the relevant results I am searching for.
If you're willing to pay, Kagi seems to do a decent job.
So I just wrote out a whole big long thing about how I tested multiple searches and Kagi served up the best results out of them all. But apparently my comment didn't stick :/
Anyway, I would love to use Kagi but it would be incredibly expensive for us. The family plan wouldn't work because I use more than 2,000 searches in a month and with the exchange rate, the unlimited plan comes out at $40, plus whatever plan my spouse used or another $30 if the rest of the fam wanted to use it.
What I would love to see is if ISPs picked up Kagi. They make a deal for discounted plans from Kagi which they then offer to customers as an addon to their internet plan. Kagi gets more money coming in and regularly and people get to use Kagi at an affordable rate.
At the moment, Kagi is just another service providing privacy and usefulness only to those who can afford it. The poor (and ignorant) still have to content to be the product and give up privacy :(
I read their pricing info and I get where they're coming from, but it is expensive for an average user. Maybe if people adopt it, prices will come down? I have no problem with people making money on good ideas... but I also get that it gets expensive to pay for all these services. Between Proton, Tresorit, and my other services... I pay a fair bit for the extra protection.
If you sign up with a masked address then they only have that. You can likely sign up for more than once if you're needing a new pool of searches, though obviously paying for searches might out you.
I did a bit of comparison... they're at LEAST using Google and Bing, probably a couple more. I tested with searches I'd already done outside of Kagi and it identified most of the relevant results I'd had to ID across multiple engines before. I do think the price is ah, pricey though, and I'd want more info before I used it for sensitive stuff.
I am trialling Qwant for a few weeks now after I had to restore a backup for my phone, it's a European privacy oriented search engine. I like it a lot so far, seems to do better than Brave for me. I do miss the option of adding "!g" at the end of a search term to fall back to Google. That is really nice in Brave Search.
I did not like Duckduckgo at all even though I tried it for a few weeks.
I like Brave. Should I stop? 😋 Guess I should look a Vivaldi again
I would use firefox but more and more websites require a specific browser technology or even a specific browser.
I use Firefox with arkenfox's user.js on my laptop. For android I use bromite, and update it via F-Droid.
Don't use Bromite, it's outdated. If you have to use chromium based browser use Mulch instead. but for Android I find Mull (ff based) great.
I Just noticed that the latest release is in 2022.... Mull seems like a pretty good browser though. Thanks for the recommendation!
So glad Puffin killed itself... Why does everything good have to go away?
I like chromium. It's there no way I can enjoy the best of both worlds?
honestly; there are no browers left that produce fast, good results that also respect your privacy. Its a compromise with every option these days. I've given up and went with bing on firefox because it gives good results
Vivaldi is so much better without crypto.
I am not useng Brave much as of recently, except for maybe mobile because of UWP apps. Firefox has become really fast in recent versions, and even when I have 8 extensions on, it still opens pages in a breeze. And it is more customizable than most of the other browsers. I do however like DDG Browser's minimalism and use of WebKit, so if I want a very minimal browser with barely any extras whatsoever that respects my privacy, I go to DDG Browser.
What’s wrong with Firefox + uBlock Origin?
Firefox Focus?
from my experience & tests brave is better for blocking fingerprinting without having a bunch of exensions. witch the extensions themselves would make browsers more unique and identifyable
Oh man this is awesome thank you so much!!
Dammit now I have no good choice for a browser on Android. https://divestos.org/pages/browsers https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Edit: OK, I think I'll use this from now on, basicially the continuation of Bromite: https://github.com/uazo/bromite-buildtools
FF add blockers kept failing me, got sick of it and switches brave a while ago, use it on my phone and tablet too. It works for me. Because Google won't sell my data, I'm not that worried about what brave is doing.
finally this fucking, shady and useless brave shits out of the jar
I've been using Brave for over a year now and really like it. Nearly all the functionality of Chrome with none of the privacy issues.
I went from Chrome to FireFox back to Chrome and now to Brave. Brave has actually made me miss Firefox a bit. I'm going to stick with Brave a bit though, I like the Tor functionality and the Wallet function feels useless. I'm not too sure how secure having a copy of your COLD Wallet is on your browser. Additionally, I've been looking into Nord VPN that I also completely passed over the integrated VPN functionality as well.
F me. Other comments, in particular about the dev, making me hurl.
Only used its Private mode tho. Never went into its crypto shit.
If only Firefox [LibreWolf] wasn't so dogshit when I open multiple Youtube tabs on Private mode, then I'll migrate my tabs there.
Edit: seems people here never tried doing that on ther LibreWolf smh. Don't worry, I'll change my mind when LW's private mode don't give me the problem anymore.