Firefox keeps adding stuff I don’t want, Chrome keeps removing stuff I do want.
I wish there was a browser that just does what I want, and lets me turn off the stuff I don’t want.
I use FOSS browser on frim f-droid. Federated SearxNG engine.
A good chunk of websites are just broken with Firefox and their not even broken in obvious ways. Some times they fail to load, sometimes they render weirdly, sometimes their just unresponsive. I use Firefox as my main browser but I always have something chromium based as my backup for when a website I wanna use just doesn’t work. A lot of the time I don’t even think to use it and assume the site would be broken on chromium as well but nope. Its almost always Firefox:/.
Firefox was borked on my machine when I started using Brave. Still using it on other machines though
Ive browser hopped a bit, Im currently on brave because it has a good vertical tabs integration and works decently well. Having to use another browser because a page won’t load correctly is infuriating to me. After reading the comments here, I’d like to switch. I’m guessing Firefox is my best option huh?
Vivaldi is nice. Created by the Opera creators. Cookie removal, antitracking, etc out of the box.
I was browser hopping a bunch lately. Stayed on Zen or a while but confusing it for multiple devices was a pain and there was always a new update that broke a mod, so I kept looking. Somehow I landed on edge, mostly due to how it did vertical tabs. But then I recently found out that standard Firefox pretty much does them just like that now, so I’m on that now.
I was also on edge for a while exclusively for the vertical tabs, initially it was actually a decent experience if you stripped out bing. Now I’m on brave because it’s fine and it has good compatibility.
Somewhere along the line Brave tricked people into thinking they weren’t owned by a couple of really bigoted dudes.
In fairness Brian Bondy might be a good dude, but Brendan Eich sucks.
Do you have a source that resumes everything bad about Brave in one neat package ? I am tired of searching for sources everywhere and not finding everything I need each time someone ask me about it
I have Firefox but gave Brave a shot too. Works fine for me. I’ll use anything that gets around YouTube ads.
Try vivaldi. Much less fuckery than Brave
No idea it’s been plain to me is Brave is kind of dodgy to the point I’ve never even tried it.
I got my dad to try Firefox and he said it drained his phone battery like no tomorrow, so now he uses brave because it doesn’t
I’ve been using Firefox for years on my phone with no such problems, so I can’t exactly verify what he’s saying
It’s possible dad was lying.
cause most people just google a chrome alternative. they dont do research. brave gives them a surafce level adblocking, and they feel fine with it.
Doesn’t Firefox still have brand recognition though? I’d have thought even people who answer “google” to “what browser do you use” would have heard of firefox, and therefore looked it up rather than using the neurons to ask, “what alternative browsers are there?”
You’re assuming people know things about the tech field. Very few do. I mean, those of us that do recognize the name Firefox. But someone who heard from a friend that Google went on trial for bad monopoly practices and wants to deGooglefy has no idea what’s available or what any of it means.
I use FF on android, but on my (ancient) desktop, it just runs like shit, while any of the chromium variants “just work”.
Because vanilla Firefox has to be tinkered with to get the best out of it and the average user is not able to do it
As a user of Firefox from 1-3 and quantum to current… What exactly are you tinkering with? Install ublock and be done.
Dude I use firefox as main browser too, I’m not saying that brave is better, read my comment again.
What I’m saying is that you and I are not the average user. Our moms are the average user, our brother that got a DUI last friday is the average user, our anti-vax aunt is the average user…
Any more so than vanilla Chrome?
No, in fact the <u>average</u> user doesn’t tinker with Chrome either
In what way?
I switched recently to Librewolf, but as a long time Firefox user (of which Librewolf is a fork anyway) it didn’t seem unusable out of the box. There are some settings for privacy and studies etc you mght want to change, but they are all very obvious in the GUI preferences.
I did personally go into about:config to set a few things, like not allowing searches from the address bar because I’m weird, but what makes Firefox no good for the average user?
The typical conversation I have is:
- Hey, how don’t you have ads on Youtube?
- Well, its easy: you install Firefox and then…
and that’s where I loose most of the people, that extra step.
Me and you can go down on the
about:configall day long to dissect every aspect of privacy we care about. For the other 90% of people, even just going to Mozilla extensions manager and downloading u-Block Origin is too much.Bear-proof trash can theorem…
Don’t extra step
" how come you don’t have YouTube ads??"
“Firefox”
Later they come to you “but i still have ads!” THEN ya hit them with config
Config is just to add ublock. I’d hardly call that config.
deleted by creator
Been using duckduck go for a while now, can recommend.
Brave falls under “security theatre” and is absolutely useless
And run by a homophobic crypto bro.
Who also inflicted Javascript upon the world, the incompetent piece of shit.
I won’t say that’s worse than the homophobia because I don’t want to seem dismissive about oppression of queer folks, but it sure as Hell isn’t better, either!
Attacking his politics is valid, and that does make me uneasy about using Brave. I’m curious where the security theater accusation comes from. Brave strikes a nice balance imo. If I wanted true security I would use Tor, but honestly that would add so much friction I would probably quit the internet.
Attacking JavaScript is a stupid argument. So many people just pile on JavaScript. I bet a lot of the same people are into FOSS and self hosting. If you write your app in 100% JavaScript without a backend, it can run on almost every operating system. Think about that for a second. We have the ultimate cross platform language. Yes it’s grown out of something that was originally messy, but a lot of work has been done to make it better.
Don’t attack JavaScript, attack the bad parts of JavaScript like type coercion. Yes, you can probably blame Brendan Eich for that part. Attack the businesses that are enshitifying everything.
I’m curious where the security theater accusation comes from
Closed source ad-block that allows “unobtrusive” ads by default. They also ran a scheme a few years ago that replaced ads on web pages with their own and paid users tiny amounts of cryptocurrency for viewing them.
All this is marketed by them as browsing securely
We could have had Scheme or Python (both of which are also cross-platform, BTW) embedded in the browser instead. And yes, Netscape was seriously considering those two specific languages before Eich oozed into the situation and fucked it all up.
Javascript did not “need” to happen. The only reasons it exists are Not-Invented-Here and Dunning-Kruger Syndromes (specifically, Netscape wanting something new and vaguely Algol-like that they could name to glom onto the Java hype at the time, and Eich having the inexperience and hubris to think he could hack together a half-assed design in a week and it would somehow turn out okay).
Yes it’s grown out of something that was originally messy, but a lot of work has been done to make it better.
Yeah, no shit! Literally millions upon millions of man-hours, probably! Do you have any concept at all of how much better the Web could have been if all that effort had been put towards something actually useful instead of working around Eich’s mistakes?!
I can’t speak to Scheme as I haven’t spent more than a few days using it. Python has a lot of strengths but also a lot of weaknesses. JavaScript has had to evolve with 100% backwards compatibility. The python you enjoy today would have had to evolve differently if it was the language of the browser.
Look I’m kinda young. Not that young, but too young for Netscape. You clearly lived through more of the history than I did. But imo, the thing ruining the internet isn’t JavaScript, it’s late stage capitalism and greedy companies. You could have Python or Scheme or whatever and late stage capitalism would still have ruined it.
If you feel so strongly that JavaScript is the issue, why don’t you invest your time in helping Webassebly grow? Imo that’s more useful than complaining about JavaScript.
Source(s) for this?
Not my work, it is from a saved comment by @cannedtuna@lemmy.world in a now deleted post.
This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t want to however, here is a summary of the key points:
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- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
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- Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.
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- Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
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2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
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- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
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- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
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- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
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- Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.
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2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
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- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
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- Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
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- The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
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- Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.
Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.
So you seem pretty well versed in the topic and I’ve been using Brave for a very long time. But what chromium alternative would you recommend that tries to accomplish what Brave clearly isn’t doing well? I’m open to switching but also not really interested in Firefox.
I would not switch to a chromium-based browser at all. For lots of reasons, but if I had to pick one it would be to avoid creating a dominant browser and ceding control over web standards to a single entity the way MS used IE to do what they wanted and force everyone else to comply.
Those were dark times. I was still being forced to make sites IE5 compatible in 2015 — official support ended in 2005.
In the rare instance that I need a chromium browser, I use chromium. But there are very few websites for which I need it and I think I have found alternatives for them all.
Vivaldi has built in ad and tracking blocker and a much better UI.
Kind of. It’s still not nearly as effective as Firefox with uBlock and a few other extensions. The downside is that some sites are just broken on Firefox, and blocking ads, etc. makes a relative few sites unusable. Which, yeah, 99.999% of the time I’m fine with. Until it’s something I need to do for my day job.
I can’t answer that question but I’ve always wondered why anyone switches to Brave. I installed it a few years ago because I heard it was privacy focused and it immediately hit me with a bunch of shit about crypto and rewards or something. I uninstalled it immediately.
Because it is still Chromium based and it means it is fast on Android, plus it comes packed with an adblocker by default which works wonders in closed out systems like iOS, also as many browsers (not all of them) it supports account syncing which it is always a nice plus (I can use a good working version of Brave in all the systems and keep a good flow for example).
I main Firefox in pretty much all the systems, but the Android app is missing a lot of features like tab management, and the iOS client just sucks (Brave works better there despite being Safari based too).
It does respect your privacy but it comes with bloatware. You can actually remove them pretty easily
“Respect” for you as the user means you shouldn’t have to do stuff like that in the first place.
Eh, gotta make money somehow. I prefer this over selling out to google
it only makes money until people don’t actually remove the bloatware. so if it does make money, that’s telling something
I installed it. Crypto stuff is off by default. Ad blocking built in. Multiple 3rd party testing shows it blocks virtually all tracking/fingerprinting.
Firefox/Chrome - you need all kinds of addons and pihole type setups to do the same thing. God forbid you want to use it off your own network, you need additional tools. All these tools break with updates, whether they are the browsers or addons/tools themselves. Brave has never once broken its adblock/privacy settings in the years I’ve used it.
Most of us on here are privacy focused, and want the average user to be that way too. Brave is a one click setup, nothing else needed solution. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is the owner a piece of shit? Hell yes. Does it allow the average user to take ownership of their privacy in an easy and non-technical way? Yes. Perfect is the enemy of good. I will gladly jump ship once another turnkey solution comes along that is as easy and privacy centric that Brave is.
Firefox/Chrome - you need all kinds of addons and pihole type setups to do the same thing.
bullshit
you need a single addon, ublock origin. enable additional builtin blocklists according to taste.
you can have additional addons for additional functionality. does brave have libredirect built in? does it block and redirect google AMP sites by default? does it have a feature to only delete cookies regularly for specific sites?and let’s not forget the elephant in the room: ublock is not working anymore in chrome! google made it so that you can only use the inferior lite version, that can only load much much fewer filtering rules into the browser.
I don’t know if brave kept supporting mv2 extensions, but if they do, I guarantee to you that it won’t be that way for long. it has been relatively easy sailing so far because google did not actually remove support, but it will be lots of work when finally google does remove it, and they’ll be needing to patch it in for every new versionpihole is not used for firefox, and that’s never been its use case. It’s for everything else that uses the internet, but cannot have something like ublock origin: various software, windows itself, android and apps there, smart home and iot garbage.
Honestly this statement of yours proves to me that you don’t know what you’re talking about.All these tools break with updates, whether they are the browsers or addons/tools themselves.
I have no idea what you are talking about. anyone else?
About the addons and stuff breaking, I constantly see posts about this adblock isn’t working because Chrome broke something, this addon is no longer updated, google broke this so that addon doesn’t work. That’s the issue with using 3rd party tools, you have to rely on the tool AND browser to work together, and not break with updates or changes. You also have to trust both the browser AND the tool to keep your info safe and private.
Brave hasn’t had even a hiccup in it’s adblocking/privacy features with all the changes Chrome is implementing, due to how Brave is built. I just want a browser with strong, baked in privacy and adblocking that works out of the box. Brave is that solution at this time.
By the way, you seem focused on Firefox, I’m not attacking Firefox, I’m calling out every browser that needs addons to create a more secure and private browsing experience.
About the addons and stuff breaking, I constantly see posts about this adblock isn’t working because Chrome broke something, this addon is no longer updated, google broke this so that addon doesn’t work.
well yeah, google has intentionally broken all effective content blockers. that’s the fault of chrome. firefox is fine.
firefox will never be able to add built in support for adblocking. reasons include that websites would not just happily drop support for firefox, but some would even put in work to block it entirely! a 3rd party fork can do that, but the main thing can’t because of what will follow.
By the way, you seem focused on Firefox, I’m not attacking Firefox,
I’m not focused on firefox, I’m against anything chrome. firefox is not good, its the least bad, but in my eyes there’s a large difference between it and chromium. we need more engines.
I’m calling out every browser that needs addons to create a more secure and private browsing experience.
I think having this built in is a very dangerous move for a browser that wants to become popular, and does not want to be blocked by sites.
if all you want is to not need to install anything manually, librewolf has ublock preinstalled.
but I’m not confident about the content blocking abilities of brave. I get that it hides ads, but is that’s all it does, or does it also block the resources from loading, tracking scripts from operating? because ublock origin is very effective with that, with its large toolset, if the blocklists utilize them
Like I stated earlier, 3rd party testing places Brave at the top of almost any fingerprinting/ad blocking/tracking/privacy metrics tested. It might not be the product you like, that’s fine, but you can’t deny the testing that proves it works.
I don’t hate on Firefox, far from it. I think it’s great for those who don’t mind extra layers of tinkering/having control on how the browser uses it’s privacy functions. Firefox, unfortunately, isn’t 100% web compatible, and almost every fox user has some form of Chromium as a backup. The discussion about web standards ignoring Chromiuim alternatives are valid, but I feel that’s an entirely different discussion.
I think it’s great for those who don’t mind extra layers of tinkering/having control on how the browser uses it’s privacy functions.
except that you don’t need to tinker. firefox is simply just not doing anything risky, anything that could easily break websites.
you want ublock? install that 1 addon. that’s not any more tinkering than setting a dark theme, or the language.Firefox, unfortunately, isn’t 100% web compatible,
that’s funny because that’s not how I know. as I know, firefox is more up to spec than chrome, but chrome often has its odd nonstandard behaviours which web devs take as standards simply because that’s the most popular browser, and developing for its quirks is easier than developing for standards and also supporting its quirk at the same time
Tinkering - I remember when the ad blocking addons stopped working due to a Google change. Everyone hopped on the webs to see what to do next. Edits and tricks to make Firefox look like Google to the web page, which was needed to make it work again. I was just over here with Brave carrying on like nothing happened.
Firefox compatibility- Even users in this post say they have a backup browser when Firefox doesn’t work.
Look, I’m not here evangelizing an imperfect browser. I’m also not sitting here arguing anyone’s choice in browsers. I use what works for me. I just wanted to clarify some statements made that weren’t correct. The Firefox vs anything else debate is as loaded as Linux vs anything else. Everyone argues and claims their software package is the end all be all when it just doesn’t fit 100% of use cases. I use what works for me. When a better alternative comes along, I will gladly look at it.
I tried to install Brave and it almost nuked my PC. Completely jammed up. I uninstalled it immediately.
Yeah so true!! I installed it, and it launched an attack to overheat and destroy my CPU. Thankfully I reacted quick enough, and unplugged my computer quickly. However when I turned it back on, all my files were gone. It was cryptomining without my consent. Absolutely crazy!
/s?
