Only reason I use it is because it’s seemingly the only browser on iOS that blocks YouTube ads, and allows for background play without paying for Premium.
If anyone knows how to do the same via Firefox (iOS), I’m all ears!
There’s a Safari extension in the App Store called vinegar that can do those things. AdGuard is another Safari extension that works well as an adblocker.
Honestly, I'm fine with Google being the default search engine (since they pay a lot for the priviledge and it's trivial to remove). What I acrually have a problem with is Firefox using Google Firebase for analytics and Google whatever for "safe search" queries, etc. These are a lot more hidden, which I find borderline malicious. With the search engine you at least get the notification of "fuck I'm on Google" whenever you search for something, so it doesn't do all that much harm since it's very opaque, unlike having to refer people to ffprofiles to purge google completely.
On that note - if you want to get rid of Google from Firefox as much as possible visit ffprofiles. It has it all nicely explained. You just tick some boxes and apply the profile as per the ~5-step instructions. You'll be done in less than 20 minutes.
Haven't found anything on Android to replace it with, and on Desktop swapped to it after Chrome Manifest V3.
I work as a web dev, and after the install I just disabled the wallet etc, and am left with a browser with native quick dark mode toggle, built in support for ublock lists, and otherwise familiar Chrome experience, with full extension support and foldable device support.
Firefox has certain UI/UX choices I dislike, and they are behind in implementing lots of features (that are rarely an issue to non devs).
CEOs don't just make money on ads, they also make money on users that use their apps. Every download or ping then Brendan Eich can go to investors & say that he now has more potential to make them money, so they give him investments in return, which then he can pocket a few million & when/if Trump tries to get legislation passed to ban gay marriage, then Eich is going to likely be helping fund getting that passed again.
I find this weird, as I've seen trans and lqbtq ads in brave befofe disabling ads. I checked Eich out now, is the whole controversy really just due a 1000$ donation to a christian group (which had anti gay agendas among other things)?
I'm honestly just a bit baffled, might be I'm just very out of the loop.
The money was for the campaign for Prop 8 itself, not some organization that he had no clue what it was going for. Plus, despite claiming he regrets it, he then has continued to defend his antigay position on social media.
CEO's get money from people using their products, and Google's CEO spends a lot of that money lobbying in order to push the government further right. It's not a tough thing to follow. "Support" isn't about whether or not you agree with them, it's about whether or not you help fund their actions when you have other options that wouldn't.
I feel you. I use Firefox on Android (technically Mull), and it's generally pretty good. It does seem like some sites don't work properly on mobile Firefox that work fine on desktop, but I haven't looked into why (and I'm guessing it's those missing features you're talking about).
I'm blaming a browser that hasn't implemented as many standards as it's competitors, and choosing therefore to use a free car that runs well on said roads.
Websites would use more things more liberally if support didn't lag behind. Used to be that Safari was the new IE9 in that aspect, but Firefox has gradually been getting behind past few years.
How many of these "lacking features" are actually standardized? Of course some draft under development by Google will only work in the latest version of Chrome. It might not even work in future versions of Chrome, since it's not standardized.
If you built something that requires such a feature, it's you who is choosing to write code that is incompatible with the standards and only works on a particular browser version. You can't blame others for that.
DivestOS is discontinued, and together with it Mull. It won't receive further updates including security updates. Based on F-Droid there is a known vulnerability. It is recommended to cease usage of Mull ASAP. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2025-01/
In a perfect world the UI would be customizable to the extent that I feel at home and don't need to unlearn and relearn patterns ingrained in my brain. For me those patterns are very relevant as I work in the field and every time the tools force me to spend more time working around them instead of with them, lead to loss of efficiency.
Extension support exists in some Chrome based browsers, too. Kiwi Browser also comes to mind.
Remote debugging is also important to me, and even though you can install Chrome dev tools in Firefox, it doesn't work with remote debugging.
It "working for you and not against you" in this case is mostly down to just getting used to it. It's the same issue people have switching to Linux. Linux is the better and easier option, but if you expect it to work exactly like Windows then you'll have a bad time. If you attempt to learn how it works then it's great.
Firefox is fairly customizable, but most of that's hidden and you need to do some searching online and digging. You can also use something like Floorp.
Personally I really want to use one browser across all my systems so I can get tab and bookmark syncing. But Firefox is just so bad on both Android and iPad OS.
On my phone, I try and do the "framed" daily game. You start typing your guess and it pops up autocomplete suggestions. Except if I'm on Android on my phone, where I start typing and nothing happens. Even the letter I typed doesn't appear in the text box. The browser just completely freezes. On every other browser I've tried, including Firefox on desktop, it works perfectly. It also seems to have worse touch targets than other browsers. If I go to a poorly-mobile-optimised site in other browsers on Android, such as Lemmy's web UI, somehow other browsers are just really good at knowing what I was trying to click on. I can quite easily tap a small button or link that's near other buttons or links, and I manage to get the right one. In Firefox that doesn't happen. Much more often if I try that, the wrong link gets clicked, and I have to go back and pinch to zoom before carefully clicking what I wanted.
The iPad OS experience is not as fundamentally broken as that, but is instead just…clumsy. On some sites I'll scroll and elements of the page will move about or images will resize, in ways they don't on other browsers. More than once it has caused me to click something I didn't intend because it moved into the place that what I wanted was previously.
I really want to like Firefox. On desktop it's a particularly good experience, being able to install real extensions without Chrome's restrictions, while not shoving AI slop down your throat like Edge does these days. But it's just so very hard to fully commit when the experience on my phone is so poor.
Brave? The browser that hides ads and substitutes their own? The one that keeps you private from Google AdSense so they can sell your data themselves? The one that keeps their Chromium build lean, so that you don’t notice the crypto miner running along side of it?
The fucking PayPal Honey of browsers? When the fuck did they ever look good? They’re like the “Banzai Buddy” of the HTML5 era
I thought it was common knowledge; he donated to some anti-LGBTQ political campaigns in the US which ultimately lead him to resign from Mozilla and start up his own browser. Which is good enough reason in my opinion to avoid it regardless of what ever else might be good about Brave.
I have been using Brave for the last year and I did like it as a mobile browser. But today I noticed that when I was searching about abortion and etopic pregnancy (fact checking a really dumb article) that all of a sudden their AI crap was throwing "no results available" errors. I checked some other left leaning topics and sure enough it no longer gives you AI results. So I immediately uninstalled that shit from my phone because fuck them.
The same Brave founded by the anti-LGBTQ+ & anti-DEI CEO that doesn't believe that gay people should have the same rights as straight people? Color me shocked!
I think anyone who is already using Firefox knows very well why they wouldn't want to use Brave 🤷 (My main reasons were being a Chromium browser and having unwanted crypto features included.)
Edit: Oh yes, and the CEO's homophobia is not helping either...
The real good:
Baked in Youtube ad-blocking with a full dev team playing keep up with youtube
Better at anti-fingerprinting
Built-in mediocre TOR support.
The real bad:
They will sell your data.
They will sell your data from their VPN
The rest of their bad is optional. Don't use them for search and don't use their crypto.
If you're going to use them, at least keep a fully equivalently outfitted copy of firefox, you don't want to get stuck if they finally decide to turn full evil.
Yeah this is the brave experience. Free and open source product that behaves as advertised... from a company that acts like they're perpetually on the brink of fucking you over. Really hope this doesn't happen, brave's approach to antifingerprinting is actually quite interesting and completely different to what we see in the firefox-based hardened browsers.
I honestly really like what they do with the fingerprinting. But it's just a straight trade. Now amazon can't follow me directly, but Brave will certainly sell Amazon the info that I shopped at Home Depot looking for discontinued air filters :)
FF fingerprinting with UO and privacy badger are by no means bad, they are actually quite acceptable.
What does privacy badger do that isn't covered by UO? Is it worth it to install privacy badger if I already use a browser like librewolf that nukes all data every time it's restarted?
It's EFF's tracker blocker. All they have is their name, so I have a lot of trust in them. I use it in concert with chrome and firefox based browsers. In FF it tightens up the tracking a bit. Doesn't eat much ram/time.
I don't know much about brave except that its chromium based and apparently removes web ads as its main feature. Why are they running ads? Why do I keep getting this browser recommended? How the fuck do they make money to be able to target me with this info? Something is off and I don't like it. I feel like the pressure to use brave isnt coming to me organically so I'm staying clear of it. I just have a bad feeling and I'll trust my gut on this.
And it's just bad to say, for example, about other person or country. Like some candidate for president in other liberal country will say "yes, we have issues, but hey, at least we are not like shitty Texas where abortion mostly illegal, so vote for us!"
It appeared for me as well. As the second result, under "Limited-time events", first result was Firefox. What followed below in the "More results" were the rest of the Firefox variants.
Probably not, but it's free marketing. Some will get it. Some will think about it. Next time they see Firefox, some will add two and two together. The rest will be lost.
Guess you're outside the EU or something? Cause it looks different over here, Firefox isn't mentioned here. Also they're at 4.9 instead of 4.7 for some reason.
Either way, fuck brave.
True. It's also there when you look for chrome and other browsers. (Except Vivaldi and opera which have also bought ad space) That's how buying ads works. Fucked up, but nothing new, unfortunately.
Yeah, probably. This morning when I searched for Firefox, I did get a brave ad, as you and others have said. Altho there was nothing anti-firefox in their ad. Now when I search for Firefox I actually get a Firefox ad.
Firefox is my main browser, but I occasionally need a Chromium browser for technical reasons. I had been using Brave - note the past tense there. Any suggestions for my new secondary browser?
Secureblue's Trivalent browser looks promising. Currently the only way to install it outside of secureblue is COPR on Fedora, but I'm sure there will soon be packages in the AUR, Gentoo, Nix, etc.
With a similar use case, after messing around with Brave, then Ungoogled Chromium for a few years, I just reinstalled Google Chrome last month. I literally only need it for making sure webdesign stuff I do works okay in Chrome, and for the extremely rare websites I come across that refuses to work in Firefox 🤷 I didn't change any settings or install even an adblocker, to make sure I'm testing as close to the "vanilla" experience as possible. I also don't log into any accounts with it, so I don't really care if Google sees what I do for that 2-3 page visits / month.
How is it more private, when the browser is the one handling your data to show you ads, on top of the websites trying to do the same. So, extra ads? Wtf.
Librewolf stopped showing my bookmarks bar randomly and never came back no matter what I tried... Switched to waterfox after a while of dealing with no bar.
Waterfox is actually a decent choice. Definitely change the search engine but that's about it. There is always hardening but that is for people who probably want Librewolf.
Sadly. It is still in beta though, so it's still possible for a mobile version in the future. There's a few discussions on the github asking about mobile support (no responses).
At the moment, our team does not have the time or resources to develop Android or iOS versions of Zen Browser. Additionally, we believe that Zen’s unique features, particularly its design around vertical tabs, do not translate well to the mobile form factor. As such, we do not currently have plans to develop a mobile version of Zen Browser.
Android app person here. They used that title in an A/B test to see if it would help them get more installs for when people searched "Firefox". That is why 1. They picked the words "fire" and "fox", and 2. Why you're not seeing it.
After installing Brave I was getting some kind of failed login popup in my GNOME desktop environment. Uninstalled it and the popup disappeared. It gave me the heeby jeebies about Brave.
Yeah, it tries to use the keyring to store passwords every time you launch it even if you turned off password saving, the same applies to chrome and chromium browsers in general plus most password managers, tho not always. I tried to troubleshoot it, most forums online suggested to remove gnome key-rings if you are not using them but it kept reinstalling it. This plus brave being slower on mobile made me switch to firefox
I use Brave for solely one purpose that I hope to see in Firefox one day. It’s the only app I’ve found that lets you locally download a web video and play it natively on CarPlay. I rarely use it, but it’s handy when I need it.
As of the last time I looked into it, there were no video players that worked natively in CarPlay. If you long press on a video in Brave, you can add it to your “Brave Playlist.” If you set the playlist to download locally, you can play it in the Brave app in CarPlay.
I tried a fair few browsers for android. Iceraven, Fulguris, Fennec, and Mull. I settled on Fulguris, because it was no frills with custom adblock lists and a good built in darkmode.
However, Fulguris became a headache because any app that required a browser portal login wouldn't recognize it.
So I moved to Mull. Then Mull dropped the project. Mull, Iceraven, and Fennec are basically the same idea as Firefox derivatives.
I use a free, massive coverage, open source icon pack called Delta and between Iceraven and Fennec I liked the Fennec icon more.
The targeted advertising happens locally in your browser. It doesn't upload your data to anywhere, so I don't see how that's relevant for privacy.
Similarly, I find it hard to imagine that they'd be able to personally identify a person from what they send in telemetry (see about:telemetry). I guess, if you install an add-on called "I'm Seymour Skinner from Springfield, USA", then they could, but even then, worst-case they know when you use the browser...
Braves like the only browser that works for some piracy sites, the rest (with extensions) you get a ton of ads, broken sitesx or get stuck at some link shorteners. Vfx med specifically I tried every browser. For regular browsing I like firefox but annoyingly enough brave handles video a lot better never crashing, youtube is always fast with hella tabs, I'm just used to and stuck with firefox because I have so many tabs/windows open rnow
The same apps that have access to more of your data (because they're not sandboxed in a browser), use electron (ships a browser) and include trackers that one can't simply block with an extension?
"Forget the fox!"
... "Contains ads"
No, I don't think I will.
It's on Chromium so I will not use them
Only reason I use it is because it’s seemingly the only browser on iOS that blocks YouTube ads, and allows for background play without paying for Premium.
If anyone knows how to do the same via Firefox (iOS), I’m all ears!
Orion Browser can use Firefox extensions on iOS.
Is this the one?
Yep!
There’s a Safari extension in the App Store called vinegar that can do those things. AdGuard is another Safari extension that works well as an adblocker.
These two are exactly what I use on iOS also
Thanks, I’ll check them out!
Based on the description, this is the one you’re referring to?
Wait is this extension not available on iOS? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-background-play-fix/
No extension on iOS because apple prohibits browser engines from being distributed in their apps. Every browser there is a reskin of Safari
Eww, man apple is sleezy.
no extensions on ios
unfortunately firefox numbers are still going down, the manufest v3 bounce never really happened
I don't know why anyone ever installed Brave
I think it's more, "may contain ads, if you opt-in to earning BAT."
Make it
So the browser itself is like an ad
The ads were the propagandas we met along the way!
If there is a product that offers you to earn money, it's value is decreasing.
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Vanilla Firefox is not clean either. It
Though, these are trivial to disable and even come pre-done on the linux distro I'm using to writ this comment.
Honestly, I'm fine with Google being the default search engine (since they pay a lot for the priviledge and it's trivial to remove). What I acrually have a problem with is Firefox using Google Firebase for analytics and Google whatever for "safe search" queries, etc. These are a lot more hidden, which I find borderline malicious. With the search engine you at least get the notification of "fuck I'm on Google" whenever you search for something, so it doesn't do all that much harm since it's very opaque, unlike having to refer people to ffprofiles to purge google completely.
On that note - if you want to get rid of Google from Firefox as much as possible visit ffprofiles. It has it all nicely explained. You just tick some boxes and apply the profile as per the ~5-step instructions. You'll be done in less than 20 minutes.
Haven't found anything on Android to replace it with, and on Desktop swapped to it after Chrome Manifest V3.
I work as a web dev, and after the install I just disabled the wallet etc, and am left with a browser with native quick dark mode toggle, built in support for ublock lists, and otherwise familiar Chrome experience, with full extension support and foldable device support.
Firefox has certain UI/UX choices I dislike, and they are behind in implementing lots of features (that are rarely an issue to non devs).
Cromite. Every time you use Brave you help promote their right-wing CEO known for donating money to ban gay marriage.
Could you explain how that logic works? I don't support their CEOs points of views by simply browsing the web with the app.
I can understand how mentioning this, I would, but I was compelled to reply to your question.
Edit: Naos question*
Edit 2: I don't see Cromite in the app store, and have near zero will for tinkering/manual updating after a days work in tech.
CEOs don't just make money on ads, they also make money on users that use their apps. Every download or ping then Brendan Eich can go to investors & say that he now has more potential to make them money, so they give him investments in return, which then he can pocket a few million & when/if Trump tries to get legislation passed to ban gay marriage, then Eich is going to likely be helping fund getting that passed again.
https://github.com/uazo/cromite
I find this weird, as I've seen trans and lqbtq ads in brave befofe disabling ads. I checked Eich out now, is the whole controversy really just due a 1000$ donation to a christian group (which had anti gay agendas among other things)?
I'm honestly just a bit baffled, might be I'm just very out of the loop.
The money was for the campaign for Prop 8 itself, not some organization that he had no clue what it was going for. Plus, despite claiming he regrets it, he then has continued to defend his antigay position on social media.
CEO's get money from people using their products, and Google's CEO spends a lot of that money lobbying in order to push the government further right. It's not a tough thing to follow. "Support" isn't about whether or not you agree with them, it's about whether or not you help fund their actions when you have other options that wouldn't.
CEOs* get money
Just a small rec: Obtainium has been great for managing git sources (how I get my Cromite), I don't think I really needed any dev experience at all.
A small pain is that some repo owners only publish source code, but you know, that's just how it goes
Vivaldi is working nice as my Chrome stand-in.
No extension support sadly, I still have it as my secondary on desktop.
I feel you. I use Firefox on Android (technically Mull), and it's generally pretty good. It does seem like some sites don't work properly on mobile Firefox that work fine on desktop, but I haven't looked into why (and I'm guessing it's those missing features you're talking about).
Im guessing the website hasn't been optimized for mobile.
You're blaming your car for the roadwork.
I'm blaming a browser that hasn't implemented as many standards as it's competitors, and choosing therefore to use a free car that runs well on said roads.
Which standards exactly?
And do the websites in question follow those too?
Websites would use more things more liberally if support didn't lag behind. Used to be that Safari was the new IE9 in that aspect, but Firefox has gradually been getting behind past few years.
https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+135%2Cedge+131%2Csafari+18.3%2Cfirefox+137&compareCats=all
How many of these "lacking features" are actually standardized? Of course some draft under development by Google will only work in the latest version of Chrome. It might not even work in future versions of Chrome, since it's not standardized.
If you built something that requires such a feature, it's you who is choosing to write code that is incompatible with the standards and only works on a particular browser version. You can't blame others for that.
I'm sorry. I don't think you understand the relationship between a browser and a websites settings.
If a website is not made to be compatible with a certain browser, that is the websites fault. Not the browser.
That link is a wall of checkboxes with no explanation, btw.
(Also, not touching Chrome. Pretty sorry for you that you're defending it so much.)
DivestOS is discontinued, and together with it Mull. It won't receive further updates including security updates. Based on F-Droid there is a known vulnerability. It is recommended to cease usage of Mull ASAP.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2025-01/
Dang, good to know, thanks. I mostly used it because it was available on F-Droid.
Yeah, I probably did. I just took care of it, not sure why I totally spaced it.
Are Firefox's UX choices bad, or do you just want it to be another copy of Chrome and refuse to learn something new?
The fact that Firefox on Android actually supports extensions is more than enough reason for me to choose it over a chromium version.
In a perfect world the UI would be customizable to the extent that I feel at home and don't need to unlearn and relearn patterns ingrained in my brain. For me those patterns are very relevant as I work in the field and every time the tools force me to spend more time working around them instead of with them, lead to loss of efficiency.
Extension support exists in some Chrome based browsers, too. Kiwi Browser also comes to mind.
Remote debugging is also important to me, and even though you can install Chrome dev tools in Firefox, it doesn't work with remote debugging.
It "working for you and not against you" in this case is mostly down to just getting used to it. It's the same issue people have switching to Linux. Linux is the better and easier option, but if you expect it to work exactly like Windows then you'll have a bad time. If you attempt to learn how it works then it's great.
Firefox is fairly customizable, but most of that's hidden and you need to do some searching online and digging. You can also use something like Floorp.
I dabble in web development.
I use ungoogled chromium for that. LibreWolf for most other things.
If a website works in Chrome, it might not work in Firefox. If a website works in Firefox, it'll work in Chrome.
Develop on Firefox.
That's daft.
Develop wherever you like the dev tools, test everywhere.
Personally I really want to use one browser across all my systems so I can get tab and bookmark syncing. But Firefox is just so bad on both Android and iPad OS.
On my phone, I try and do the "framed" daily game. You start typing your guess and it pops up autocomplete suggestions. Except if I'm on Android on my phone, where I start typing and nothing happens. Even the letter I typed doesn't appear in the text box. The browser just completely freezes. On every other browser I've tried, including Firefox on desktop, it works perfectly. It also seems to have worse touch targets than other browsers. If I go to a poorly-mobile-optimised site in other browsers on Android, such as Lemmy's web UI, somehow other browsers are just really good at knowing what I was trying to click on. I can quite easily tap a small button or link that's near other buttons or links, and I manage to get the right one. In Firefox that doesn't happen. Much more often if I try that, the wrong link gets clicked, and I have to go back and pinch to zoom before carefully clicking what I wanted.
The iPad OS experience is not as fundamentally broken as that, but is instead just…clumsy. On some sites I'll scroll and elements of the page will move about or images will resize, in ways they don't on other browsers. More than once it has caused me to click something I didn't intend because it moved into the place that what I wanted was previously.
I really want to like Firefox. On desktop it's a particularly good experience, being able to install real extensions without Chrome's restrictions, while not shoving AI slop down your throat like Edge does these days. But it's just so very hard to fully commit when the experience on my phone is so poor.
Just tried framed out of curiosity, it works fine on my Pixel 9.
Brave? The browser that hides ads and substitutes their own? The one that keeps you private from Google AdSense so they can sell your data themselves? The one that keeps their Chromium build lean, so that you don’t notice the crypto miner running along side of it?
The fucking PayPal Honey of browsers? When the fuck did they ever look good? They’re like the “Banzai Buddy” of the HTML5 era
CEO is a bigot, too.
No elaboration on that ?
I thought it was common knowledge; he donated to some anti-LGBTQ political campaigns in the US which ultimately lead him to resign from Mozilla and start up his own browser. Which is good enough reason in my opinion to avoid it regardless of what ever else might be good about Brave.
Thanks for elaborating & you were kind enough to inform (unlike the fascist guttrotten clowns who disliked)
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/mozilla-boss-brendan-eich-quits-in-row-over-his-opposition-to-gay-marriage-9237701.html
I have been using Brave for the last year and I did like it as a mobile browser. But today I noticed that when I was searching about abortion and etopic pregnancy (fact checking a really dumb article) that all of a sudden their AI crap was throwing "no results available" errors. I checked some other left leaning topics and sure enough it no longer gives you AI results. So I immediately uninstalled that shit from my phone because fuck them.
Is not having AI results really a bad thing?
Not at all. I never wanted to see AI and it kept turning itself back on this was just the final push for me to uninstall it.
I'm guessing it's more about the clear bias on display, wherein certain topics are suppressed
Given the ceo this shouldn’t come as a shock.
Brave has never had a good look.
Fuck Brave, it's based on Chromium and contains crypto BS.
The same Brave founded by the anti-LGBTQ+ & anti-DEI CEO that doesn't believe that gay people should have the same rights as straight people? Color me shocked!
Yep, Brave is the butt-hurt edgelord of browsers.
And they made a donation to an anti gay marraige org on mozillas behalf.
Incorrect, he was CEO in 2014
I think anyone who is already using Firefox knows very well why they wouldn't want to use Brave 🤷 (My main reasons were being a Chromium browser and having unwanted crypto features included.)
Edit: Oh yes, and the CEO's homophobia is not helping either...
Do you have a source for the edit, please?
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/mozilla-boss-brendan-eich-quits-in-row-over-his-opposition-to-gay-marriage-9237701.html
Thanks
Tor Browser is available on iOS :) should be able to hide mostly everything lol
Not very professional.
It's not the 90s and they are not rivaling fast food chains.
It's technically correct with all of these but extremely disingenuous.
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Well, actually it should be:
Firefox does block trackers by default, but apparently that's "limited protection", according to who the fuck knows, so it gets the ❌.
Points 1 and 2 are absolutely on FF. You can also set it to private by default. This is not a factual graphic.
on Fx*
Firefox started blocking YouTube ads without plugins?
Grandma isn't going to go into security settings. I really with FF would just make it the default on install.
Everything in that list can easily be made the same, but they're not the same without some basic knowledge of wanting it.
Grandma isn't going to use Brave either.
Nor is she going to click on ads to "earn" crypto coins.
Out of the ling of things I will never trust, free VPN is near the top of the list
The real good: Baked in Youtube ad-blocking with a full dev team playing keep up with youtube Better at anti-fingerprinting Built-in mediocre TOR support.
The real bad: They will sell your data. They will sell your data from their VPN
The rest of their bad is optional. Don't use them for search and don't use their crypto.
If you're going to use them, at least keep a fully equivalently outfitted copy of firefox, you don't want to get stuck if they finally decide to turn full evil.
Yeah this is the brave experience. Free and open source product that behaves as advertised... from a company that acts like they're perpetually on the brink of fucking you over. Really hope this doesn't happen, brave's approach to antifingerprinting is actually quite interesting and completely different to what we see in the firefox-based hardened browsers.
I honestly really like what they do with the fingerprinting. But it's just a straight trade. Now amazon can't follow me directly, but Brave will certainly sell Amazon the info that I shopped at Home Depot looking for discontinued air filters :)
FF fingerprinting with UO and privacy badger are by no means bad, they are actually quite acceptable.
What does privacy badger do that isn't covered by UO? Is it worth it to install privacy badger if I already use a browser like librewolf that nukes all data every time it's restarted?
It's EFF's tracker blocker. All they have is their name, so I have a lot of trust in them. I use it in concert with chrome and firefox based browsers. In FF it tightens up the tracking a bit. Doesn't eat much ram/time.
Brave? You mean "browser for bigots"?
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/mozilla-boss-brendan-eich-quits-in-row-over-his-opposition-to-gay-marriage-9237701.html
Two of the reasons I'd never use it. The other is not wanting to support the Google monopoly.
i had no idea...
"Fire the Fox" would have been a better slogan
Daily reminder that Brave uses Chromium, an open source project where all the commits are approved or denied by Google devs.
I don't know much about brave except that its chromium based and apparently removes web ads as its main feature. Why are they running ads? Why do I keep getting this browser recommended? How the fuck do they make money to be able to target me with this info? Something is off and I don't like it. I feel like the pressure to use brave isnt coming to me organically so I'm staying clear of it. I just have a bad feeling and I'll trust my gut on this.
Because they "reward" people with crypto for watching ads so a lot of cryptobro assholes have financial interest in the browser getting more popular.
Also the CEO is homophobic and right-wing so it speaks to a lot of loud assholes.
Its full of crypto bullshit as well, and they add their own ads too some pages that they pay you to watch (in a useless crypto)
Well, they threatened students for creating a fork. So yeah, they are dead to me
They block all ads except their own.
https://brave.com/brave-ads/
Broke one of the golden rules of advertising (at least the advertising lessons I learned from an old advertising guy I knew a long time ago)
Never mention your competition in your advertising .... because every time you do, you've given them free advertising.
And it's just bad to say, for example, about other person or country. Like some candidate for president in other liberal country will say "yes, we have issues, but hey, at least we are not like shitty Texas where abortion mostly illegal, so vote for us!"
Forget the Lion
Hahahhaah. If they are so desperate they are trying to knock off the 10 or so users on Firefox they must really be in dire straights.
?
Iirc, it only comes up if you search for firefox. They could have changed it.
Confirmed. They definitely paid to advertise under "Firefox" searches.
Confirmed
Out of interest, does anything similar come up for chrome? The common enemy of both.
I got the same result, searching for Firefox on Play store
Yup, third confirmation that this shows up as a "limited time event" which I suspect is an ad in playstore if you search for firefox.
It appeared for me as well. As the second result, under "Limited-time events", first result was Firefox. What followed below in the "More results" were the rest of the Firefox variants.
This is after searching Firefox on the Apple App Store, same as searching for brave.
I think its just on the play store.
Meh, they can shoot at Firefox if they want, but it's actually pretty good marketing for the Fox.
I think many people will still not understand what does the "fox" means in the title
Probably not, but it's free marketing. Some will get it. Some will think about it. Next time they see Firefox, some will add two and two together. The rest will be lost.
I ditched this crap years ago. Fuck this Trojan horse.
I never liked or trusted Brave for what it claims it fights for
Guess you're outside the EU or something? Cause it looks different over here, Firefox isn't mentioned here. Also they're at 4.9 instead of 4.7 for some reason. Either way, fuck brave.
when you search firefox on the play store, there's a brave ad
True. It's also there when you look for chrome and other browsers. (Except Vivaldi and opera which have also bought ad space) That's how buying ads works. Fucked up, but nothing new, unfortunately.
no, I'm in Ireland. You have to search for "firefox" for it to come up, but they could have changed it.
Yeah, probably. This morning when I searched for Firefox, I did get a brave ad, as you and others have said. Altho there was nothing anti-firefox in their ad. Now when I search for Firefox I actually get a Firefox ad.
Firefox is my main browser, but I occasionally need a Chromium browser for technical reasons. I had been using Brave - note the past tense there. Any suggestions for my new secondary browser?
Ungoogled Chromium flatpak
I've been using Vivaldi
Secureblue's Trivalent browser looks promising. Currently the only way to install it outside of secureblue is COPR on Fedora, but I'm sure there will soon be packages in the AUR, Gentoo, Nix, etc.
Other good options are Cromite, Thorium and Ungoogled Chromium
Fedora works for me, thanks for the pointer
Here's the COPR repo: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/secureblue/trivalent/
I've been using thorium as my secondary browser and it's been very good. That's the one I recommend.
With a similar use case, after messing around with Brave, then Ungoogled Chromium for a few years, I just reinstalled Google Chrome last month. I literally only need it for making sure webdesign stuff I do works okay in Chrome, and for the extremely rare websites I come across that refuses to work in Firefox 🤷 I didn't change any settings or install even an adblocker, to make sure I'm testing as close to the "vanilla" experience as possible. I also don't log into any accounts with it, so I don't really care if Google sees what I do for that 2-3 page visits / month.
Ecosia is not bad and they plant trees whenever you do a search:)
Get yourself a naked chromium from their github. That's what I do. Least amount of bloat this way.
Use Ungoogled Chromium instead
How is it more private, when the browser is the one handling your data to show you ads, on top of the websites trying to do the same. So, extra ads? Wtf.
Brave is also just essentially rebranded Chromium funded by an anti-LGBTQ+ & anti-DEI right-wing CEO.
Right on!
Brave comes with built in ad blocking.
Desperate much??
Oh wow! I need to install this ultra bloated version of Chromium.
If you're gonna get a browser with a brave-like experience, might as well get a Firefox based one like Zen.
How about no
Either Firefox with Arkenfox userjs or Librewolf
I’ve never heard of Arkenfox userjs. Thank you for that.
Why not?
Librewolf stopped showing my bookmarks bar randomly and never came back no matter what I tried... Switched to waterfox after a while of dealing with no bar.
Waterfox is actually a decent choice. Definitely change the search engine but that's about it. There is always hardening but that is for people who probably want Librewolf.
Looks like that is desktop only
Sadly. It is still in beta though, so it's still possible for a mobile version in the future. There's a few discussions on the github asking about mobile support (no responses).
Source
That's exactly what I was thinking, there's nothing in Zen that would add any value to Firefox on mobile.
Android app person here. They used that title in an A/B test to see if it would help them get more installs for when people searched "Firefox". That is why 1. They picked the words "fire" and "fox", and 2. Why you're not seeing it.
After installing Brave I was getting some kind of failed login popup in my GNOME desktop environment. Uninstalled it and the popup disappeared. It gave me the heeby jeebies about Brave.
Not to defend Brave, but this sounds like it was just a pop-up for the Gnome key wallet or something like that.
Yeah, it tries to use the keyring to store passwords every time you launch it even if you turned off password saving, the same applies to chrome and chromium browsers in general plus most password managers, tho not always. I tried to troubleshoot it, most forums online suggested to remove gnome key-rings if you are not using them but it kept reinstalling it. This plus brave being slower on mobile made me switch to firefox
Ah so that's what it was!
Sure, I just found it too annoying and the easiest solution was to uninstall Brave.
Fox around and find out
I tried it a few years ago. Ditched it because it's just another chromium browser.
Firefox has been my main for about 6 years now.
I fell for it because Al Swiegerts book: "Automate the boring stuff" used it in the webscrape sample.
After that I just kept using it. And felt justified in my choice when I realized the only other browsers left are chrome and Safari.
I just learned that Safari is a fork on Konquorer. So, that's interesting.
Personally I never even considered installing it because of its stupid name.
I use Brave for solely one purpose that I hope to see in Firefox one day. It’s the only app I’ve found that lets you locally download a web video and play it natively on CarPlay. I rarely use it, but it’s handy when I need it.
Do you often watch videos while driving? Or am I missing something?
Like I said, I’ve rarely used it. It’s a niche need, but Brave was the only app that did it when I wanted it.
I don't get it, is Brave the player? There are no other video players that work in the car?
As of the last time I looked into it, there were no video players that worked natively in CarPlay. If you long press on a video in Brave, you can add it to your “Brave Playlist.” If you set the playlist to download locally, you can play it in the Brave app in CarPlay.
Carplay is an apple thing, so they should be speaking about some ios limitation
lol
I'm not seeing this
it comes up as an ad if you search for "firefox"
I did that. Brave is like 19th on the results list and there's no "forget the fox" in the app name.
Fennec for the phone, Qutebrowser for the desktop. Life is good.
Just curious, why Fennec for phones?
I tried a fair few browsers for android. Iceraven, Fulguris, Fennec, and Mull. I settled on Fulguris, because it was no frills with custom adblock lists and a good built in darkmode.
However, Fulguris became a headache because any app that required a browser portal login wouldn't recognize it.
So I moved to Mull. Then Mull dropped the project. Mull, Iceraven, and Fennec are basically the same idea as Firefox derivatives.
I use a free, massive coverage, open source icon pack called Delta and between Iceraven and Fennec I liked the Fennec icon more.
One feels there is an allegory for "too stupid to be afraid" buried in here.
This post needs to get to 666 upvotes and stay there.
too late
It's at 666 for me.
its at 672 here, and 667 on lemmy.ml
Time to remove our upvotes. 😂
I downvote your upvote!
Seems rather desperate 🙃
It honestly might be true
Firefox and Brave both suck a bit in terms of privacy. They could be worse but they also could be way better.
The main problem is the telemetry and targeted advertising.
However, it also could have a bit better defaults from a fingerprinting resistance perspective.
The targeted advertising happens locally in your browser. It doesn't upload your data to anywhere, so I don't see how that's relevant for privacy.
Similarly, I find it hard to imagine that they'd be able to personally identify a person from what they send in telemetry (see
about:telemetry). I guess, if you install an add-on called "I'm Seymour Skinner from Springfield, USA", then they could, but even then, worst-case they know when you use the browser...I dont like brave for other reasons, but this is definitely a good look. Tor Browser has to patch a lot of issues to make Firefox safe
What makes you think that there wouldn't be even more problems in a Chromium-based browser?
For example: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/doc/TorButtonChrome
To my knowledge, the Tor-mode in Brave is generally considered actively misleading, because it does not provide the protections of Tor.
Its safe without tors changes, those are to make it anonymous, which neither brave nor chrome do.
Braves like the only browser that works for some piracy sites, the rest (with extensions) you get a ton of ads, broken sitesx or get stuck at some link shorteners. Vfx med specifically I tried every browser. For regular browsing I like firefox but annoyingly enough brave handles video a lot better never crashing, youtube is always fast with hella tabs, I'm just used to and stuck with firefox because I have so many tabs/windows open rnow
All web browsers are shit, Firefox and Brave included.
Never thought I would see a version of "all lives matter" but applied to web browsers
I went from using a web browser for everything, to trying to find native apps for everything.
The same apps that have access to more of your data (because they're not sandboxed in a browser), use electron (ships a browser) and include trackers that one can't simply block with an extension?
I meant, like email and lemmy desktop clients.