The better option would be to not use spyware as an operating system.
Do you consider any form of telemetry “spyware”?
how the hell do you not?
Honestly it largely is.
Personally I like sharing crash reports, but even then, the user should be able to turn that off if you like.
Telemetry should be 100% opt-in.
In this thread something I see a lot on lemmy is happening. Maybe someone can give me a hint on how that happens. The post itself is 90% upvotes, while the comment section is really anti-Brave (for good reasons). Do most upvotes come from people scrolling through without looking at the comment section and those with an opinion on the topic dive into it?
The post itself is reasonable quality and informative so I find it upvote worthy. If a post is low quality or a shit post then I downvote.
To me the karma system is about quality. Not an “I agree/disagree” button.
For comments I only down vote obvious trolls, bigots/racism etc.
I think you should not downvote a post you have a negative opinion about. If the post is worth to discuss then why should I not upvote the post and then say that I disagree in the comments. If we all down vote those posts nobody will see it (apart of those who sort by controversial) and there will be no discussion.
If the software in question is bad, then I’d like to reduce visibility of the post while explaining why in the comments.
Brave is connected to the BAT pay-to-surf scam. Its CEO donates to homophobic causes.
It seems to me most people simply upvote the post to reward OP for bringing things up, exposing etc. Comments serve opinions on the topic itself, but upvote/downvote is more for if it’s good according to community rules and if the topic itself is interesting.
I’ve noticed this on political posts too, among others and I’ve wondered the same thing.
Most people never bother to read anything beyond the title of the post. Let alone click the link to the article.
Now, i don’t know how everyone sees up/down votes. But I always thought that content and comments that is relevant and promotes discussion is good. And comments that aren’t are bad.
Rather than a measure of others opinions.
people just scroll around up voting headlines that they think sound good or support their identity
I try to counter this by randomly downvoting everything
All I have to say is I hope this catches on with other browsers.
Linux blocks that “feature” too…
What feature?? Recall? That’s Windows 11-specific and hasn’t even launched yet??
This is about the Smart App Control feature in Win11 that takes screenshots periodically to check for “malicious activity”. its basically a glorified keylogger built into the OS. Firefox should really follow suit and block this too.
Holy shit, what a comment!
This is about the Smart App Control
It’s not, it’s about Recall.
that takes screenshots periodically to check for “malicious activity”
It doesn’t. Smar App Control does code validation and reputation check. Recall makes screenshots, OCR’s them and keeps them in an encrypted vault for the user to interact with.
built into the OS
It’s not, you can turn both off at any time.
its basically a glorified keylogger
It’s not, it fundamentally is NOT, because it doesn’t log any keystrokes. SAC isn’t even in the picture here, while Recall literally only makes screenshots, runs OCR and encrypts that.
Fuck me, where do you people get this bullshit from? It used to be “oh no, Microsoft will be making screenshots of your activity and sending them to their servers” not so long ago which, while still bullshit, was at least in the same ballpark as what Recall does.
Now you’re throwing SAC into the mix somehow?
I still have literally thousands of clients that use Windows and want support… for these kinds of things. Firefox has recently stopped working on a few things and Brave works better for me right now. It’s not convenience when FF doesn’t work…
But I digress, Win 11 here and Brave. My choices, for lots of reasons. Lots of linux boxes as well though. Each to their own and all thatBrave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC
As does Linux.
You use Linux? Here take this you’ve earned it 🍪
What if they always decline cookies? Or is this cookie one of those necessary ones?
OK, you need to explain to me how tf does Linux block something that works only on Windows.
No Windows, no such Windows “features”.
Well, you certainly need to be in a specific state of mind for this to make any sense…
yeah, no, i’m not using your shitty browser.
It’s probably the best chromium browser out there
Firefox has done shit too
sadly we don’t have a lot of choice, but they’re one of the least worse
Firefox has done shit too
Firefox has injected my URLs with affiliate codes?
Nope, but it put a closed source Mr Robot plugin without asking anyone
Just don’t use Chromium unless you for some reason absolutely have to. Mozilla is just another corporation, but they’re not exactly threatening to monopolise the internet. Google is, and using Chromium directly aids in their effort to do so.
It’s not that bad. Sure, having more choice is good, but it’s not as life threatening as you make it seem
Using android and stock ROMs is a bigger problem
I think it’s a compounding issue, primarily of Google products just kind of being the “default.”
Google pays to be the primary search engine in Firefox, on iOS, and sets themselves as the default on their operating systems. They, wherever possible also set their browser as default. Yes, Chromium is open source, but they have the ultimate final say, and no one seems to have the interest in forking it. This puts Google in a similar position that Microsoft was in in the 90s and early 00s, where they can essentially hijack the web and force their ideas through whether others want to or not.
We saw this with Google forcing Manifest v3, all Chromium-based browsers essentially just had to follow suit. That was just Manifest v3 however, who’s to say what else they’ll do?
Then there’s my tinfoil hat worry that Google essentially being the window to the web for so many people, on an OS, browser, and discoverability level is just overall a cause for worry. That’s not even considering their communications and media platforms.
I’m pretty sure if Firefox/Mozilla decides to change their policy on something, most forks of firefox will have no choice but follow the same path
afaik all firefox forks are really small, just like chromium forks
Mozilla might not have as much conflicting interests though, I’ll admit
But it’s funded by an unrepentant homophobe! How can you pass on that?!
An unrepentant homophobe who accused people who dislike him for his homophobic views/actions as being closed-minded and bigoted for disliking him over it.
You can’t make this shit up
Sometimes bad people do good things.
They haven’t blocked the windows feature, they’re using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.
Exactly, how do you even fight with the OS except just making it bit hard for them lol. You have to tell the OS what pixels to put in the screen, there’s literally no way you can hide things from the OS if they want to know.
People, ynless they are at work, can choose to use Linux any time. I will personally assist if needed.
then people can complained it on Brave Github or their official forum and it will be fixed by their team
My point was that brave’s solution, like Signal’s, is dependent on microsoft playing fair. If microsoft decides they don’t want brave, signal, or anyone else using DRM to interfere with their screen scraping chatbot, there is not going to be an easy way to fix it.
No way they’d do that though, because then they’d have the mouse and the other members of the content mafia breathing down their necks.
Unfortunately that would involve using the Brave browser, which is an antifeature in itself.
Can you elaborate? I don’t use it.
They shit on it because just like Mozilla, they made some shit decision by making some shady partnerships, and because the CEO is transphobic/homophobic/can’t remember
Apart from the usual bullshit and antifeatures it has, it’s still a great browser choice, just like Firefox
“Just like Mozilla”.
Let’s compare.
Mozilla: installed a closed-source plugin once, and then apologised for it.
Brave CEO: actively supports homophobic organisations, donates money to them, injects affiliate links to stores, whenever given a microphone will say something bigoted and homophobic.
Yeah, it’s totally the same exact issue with both browsers!
Brave: injected affiliate links once, then apologised for it too. Developped a search engine to be less dependent on big companies
Mozilla is spending money like crazy, just like Wikipedia, has little to no democratic system which makes people fork the stuff they make, and prefer to use the money from donation to buy trips all over the world to educate about privacy and shit while they proceed to keep adding more telemetry and BS in firefox
They also make it close to impossible to install plugins outside their plugins website, which I’ve heard has some strict rules and take a lot of time to approve stuff. Closed garden bullshit again
“Feature”
A device that surreptitiously gathers information on a target is called a bug, not a feature.
So, you’re saying that browsing history, in literally any browser on the market, is a bug not a feature?
surreptitiously
Oh, wait, I actually missed that! How is something that you need to purposefully turn on “surreptitious”? Like… Holy fuck, people, this is supposed to be the community of tech-literate people, so maybe stop fear-mongering in read about Recall a bit? It’s opt-in, it’s limited to a (as of now) extremely small number of NPU-carrying devices, it’s offline.
If you don’t like it, just don’t fucking turn it on.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature we don’t like 🤣
Well, not really, a bug is unintentional. Even calling it a design flaw is a stretch, it’s a feature that isn’t for your benefit.“Bug” also means “listening device.”
If it was intentional double entendre then I retract my comment, but used in the context of “bugs and features” there’s a contextual implication.
It was wordplay, yes.
I retract.
More like malware
yup. how do people continue using Winblows :/
It’s actually super simple: even though the community is called “Technology”, there’s A LOT of tech-illiterate fear mongering going on here. People behave like Microsoft is trying to spy on them, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Recall is:
- only available on devices with an NPU.
- local only, nothing goes out to the Internet (hence the NPU requirement).
- opt-in - you need to turn it on yourself.
There’s nothing malicious about it. Functionality is questionable, but acting like it’s malware is just showing ignorance.
Brave 🤮
I mean Mozilla’s Firefox is 🤮 too… there’s no perfect browser
nothing is perfect, except the horseshoe crab. however both librewolf and cromite are great with ublock, and ltsc windows has no copilot since companies use that edition.
Windows 🤮
“feature” 🤮
Truffle Shuffle 🤮
Kirby vacuuming blended spinach 🤮
Wait, what?
Brave’s CEO is a homophobic Trump supporter. No thanks.
That’s not even the worst thing about him. He also invented JavaScript.
That’s it, brave is getting uninstalled from my PC NOW.
He invented JavaScript, so definitely don’t use that either. For real. JavaScript sucks.
JS is difficult to avoid. Brave is easy to avoid, just use another browser.
I used to hate JS but barley had used it. Now I use it on a daily base and hate it even more.
Does he run/have power over JavaScript right now?
No, not directly. Not any more than your average tech leader who goes to conferences and discusses it.
Oh wait hey you’re on my instance. Cool! We’re such small one lol
😁 It’s an elite club.
“It’s a small club and you
ain’tin it”—Warren Bullgates Lincolnham
Ah, you beat me to it.
I need a better option then. What can yall suggest?
Firefox
Mozilla also has many problems
Sure I use that too but you should have at least one chromium based browser for certain features though.
I personally haven’t had to use a chromium browser for anything yet since my swith to Firefox. Only to test a render bug in chromium that Google hasn’t bothered to fix in over 9 years for a case that works correctly in every other browser.
Why should you? What are there certain feauture?
Yes some tools do not work with Firefox. It‘s a niche but I‘ve run into it a few times just recently. For example with a gamepad enabler tool where Firefox simply won‘t be able to see your USB input.
I use LibreWolf (FireFox fork) + Ungoogled Chromium
This is my setup, and I never actually use ungoogled chromium.
If I have some kind of issue that I need to work around immediately rather then figure out, I usually just open Firefox and try that.
Vivaldi? (Sort of continuation of Opera, run by it’s former CTO.)
Vivaldi is OK, but I would replace it with something else. It’s a pretty busy UI and I have had issues with it freezing in Fedora 42 KDE.
Thorium.
He could be next husband of Ivanka Trump - I don’t care
If he provide good service for me - browser which fits my needs. I would even send him money every day
“I’ll support fascism as long as it’s convenient for me”
No. “I will support a good service and not mingle with politics”
If fascism was a passive philosophy that didn’t hurt anyone then you might have a point. But as you can see recently it’s extremely dangerous and ruins lives.
You may not want to mingle with politics, but it doesn’t have the same view.
Yep, everything is politics whether we like it or not.
That’s the logic of as long as it benefits ME I don’t care and I support them no matter what they do. This same logic has been applied to all the shitty things done in history like slavery, war and so forth, and the reason the world is the way it is.
Do you know all the personal histories of all the people related to all the services you use?
Of course that’s not possible, the issue here is being aware and not caring and in some cases supporting it for convenience and selfishness.
How does me using brave browser supports fascism?
In my country, one of the most successful supermarkets is run by a fascist and he uses part of his fortune to finance our local fascist party, which is gaining strength every year by the way. Do we support fascism by buying in that supermarket? What if we suddenly started to boycott the supermarket to hell?
My point is that they earn profits by using their services and in today’s society money is power. And from where the CEO got his power? From the millions of people with the mindset of “if it benefits me I don’t care”.
What does that have to do with the browser? Last I checked, browsers aren’t transphobic.
You do you, but I personally refuse to make product choices based on the person who makes it. Brave is the least bad chromium browser, so I use it as a backup to my main Gecko-based browser. I’m not a fan of Mozilla either, but that’s irrelevant since I pick my software based on what it does, not based on the management of the company that builds it.
Brave is the least bad chromium browser
It’s pretty sleazy. Ungoogled Chromium or Vivaldi are probably less sleazy, if at all.
The only two there that bother me are the affiliate code thing (reminds me of the Honey drama) and installing extra software without consent. The first was a bad call and probably related with how their ad replacement stuff works (if anything, they should merely axe affiliate links; Firefox has that as an option), and this"solution" to the latter is pretty odd to me:
reinstall the browser without admin rights
Why would a browser need admin rights in the first place? I haven’t used Windows in well over a decade, so I don’t think that particular one would be an issue for me.
The rest can be grouped as:
- bugs - bug fixes generally don’t get prioritized until enough users complain; I would be very picky if I was an at risk person (activist or whatever) and would probably only use Tor browser
- opt-in services
- their marketing department
My options for chromium browsers are:
- something with ineffective ad blocking
- Opera - I used it before it became a chromium browser, then it went downhill; not FOSS
- Brave, with all its warts
Since ad blocking and FOSS are my prerequisites, Brave basically wins by default.
Vivaldi is not open source, so for me it doesn’t count as a valid option.
I‘m not even pro Brave but all that ad stuff is opt-in so it doesn‘t matter as long as you don‘t want to see ads. The arguments in this thread are starting to just loop in circles. Essentially using Brave is fine if you stick to the default. There‘s no sleazy stuff if you don‘t enable it and the CEO also doesn‘t make a dime from you if that‘s something you‘re concerned about. You could of course use a different chromium browser if you want but it‘s virtually the same thing.
I would not choose to use a product made by people I disagree with but leaving that aside:
Is it the least bad? Why not degoogled chrome? Or chromium? Even vivaldi seems like a better choice.
Ad blocking mostly. That’s literally all I need in a chromium browser, because I only use it on a handful of sites that don’t work properly in Firefox.
Chromium is also okay, but no ad blocker. I have that installed as well in the really unlikely case that the ad blocker gets in the way.
99% of my browsing is on a Firefox browser, and 99% of the rest is on Brave. I use it so infrequently the “time saved” metric is a merely seconds.
Actually, I consider Brave the best (or the least bed…) browser on the market. Period. The fact that it isn’t made by Mozilla is a plus for me.
I don’t like Mozilla either, but here are my priorities in a web browser:
- FOSS
- Privacy tools - includes ad blocking; I’d actually be okay with ads if they didn’t track me
- Promotes open web standards - rendering engine diversity is critical here, I don’t want a repeat of the IE era
- Security
- Performance
Firefox ticks all of them, and my issues with Mozilla as an org don’t really come into play. I use a fork on my phone, but I use Firefox on my laptop and desktop because I trust the binaries coming from my Linux distribution maintainers (part of 4).
Good for you. I actively refuse to use it or any of its derivatives to avoid endorsing Mozilla by giving them market share. Additionally, I find that Brave just performs better (and needs one extension less to be functional).
I care a lot about rendering engine diversity, and Firefox is the largest non-chromium browser, so I use it. It’s fast enough for me, and my handful of extensions gives me what I need.
Again, good for you.
Brave also ticks all of them?
at this point, Firefox’s development is not very much more open than Chromium’s
It doesn’t tick #3, hence why I use a Firefox browser as my main. If they had their own rendering engine, I would consider it as my main. But for now, it’s my backup in case I need a website that doesn’t work on Firefox (i.e. they use something Chrome-specific).
