It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
- it’s fucking Chromium
Go use some Firefox-derivative like Librewolf or Fennec, like a sane person.
Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features
Never used librewolf.
But it sounds like the conveniences you want are a compromise for fingerprinting.Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good.
The internet has been significantly ruined by large companies.
There is a loop where companies with the resources to create and maintain frameworks/tooling/whatever are large enough to help define “features” for browsers.
Browsers don’t make money, not really. To even be considered, they have to be able to run what the big companies are pushing.
All of this makes it very easy for smaller companies to deliver better websites. Or abuse the features big companies are pushing.It’s like: email was awesome, then spam emails happened. Websites were accessible, then SPAs happened. Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.
I don’t know what I am trying to say.
Other than browsers do not get the support they deserve to actually be decent unless they are backed by a company that wants to loss-lead them… Which has resulted in the web being pretty fuckedDon’t let perfect stand in the way of good.
Same can be said about fingerprinting protection.
Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.
Google’s quality has decreased, but other engines have improved, and LLM search summaries are really good (brave search is a good example of this)
I think LibreWolf enforces compromises I’m not willing to do, instead of using different techniques
I agree, I know why they do it and I can appreciate it, but it’s just not for me. I do not want my history and cookies cleared when I closed the browser, for instance. That is massively inconvenient and not really relevant to my “threat model.”
So I guess I wouldn’t say they are bad, but certainly not ideal for me.
What’s the problem with the defaults? I use pretty much the default settings with no issue
Forced English language, light mode, fixed window size or borders, cookies removed after closing, no history(? Not sure about this one)
Want those or just one of them? You have to remove ALL fingerprinting protections for some reasons. Might as well use Firefox then…
No, go use Google Chrome like everyone else.
LibreWolf doesn’t update itself on OSes other than Linux, it’s a security nightmare for an average person.
They also tried to get away with URL injection. Do not use Brave.
Basically the thing that turned the internet against Honey, but when a homophobic piece of shit does it it’s fine
Honey swapped the referal code when another reflink was clicked, brave only applied it’s own code when no referral was used. Not saying that it’s good but honey was purposefully robbing creators, often their own partners when brave only tried to make some money on the side.
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Just mentioned how I didn’t like people recommending this like last week and got “ok” as a response lol. Some people are just ignorant and don’t care.
ok
ok
Brave is just a shitty browser. Did not know they were anti-freedom kind of people. Makes browser no-no.
It’s laggy as shit on my iPad
It depends on what you are comparing it against
I did not know Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla and launched Brave because he was a homophobe who funded anti-LGBT+ campaigns 😬
I use Firefox. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s not that bad.
And if I didn’t, I’d use Vivaldi. Only reason I don’t is I do prefer open source whenever possible and, well, Firefox isn’t Chromium.
Firefox is the only browser that has mobile extensions, making it the only choice
That’s also a good point.
LibreWilf is a good choice if you don’t want the Mozilla crap. Just make sure to turn off the cookie clearing and resistFingerprinting then enable WebGL in the browser’s settings.
Yeah it kinda mystifies me that anyone is still recommending that shitty bigotware.
In the emulation scene, RetroArch is in a similar boat if I’m understanding things correctly. Awful maintainers, but people keep recommending it and supporting it. Sucks too, because there are even fewer alternatives there.
Whats going on with RetroArch? I havent really paid attention/kept up since I set up my last Raspberry Pi.
This website details various issues. I’d suggest looking at the Byuu page - as I understand it the RetroArch devs played a large role in the harrassments that were being done to the developer of Higan/bsnes, which eventually led to them killing themself.
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This is the page I’m referring to, where one of the main RA devs is shown saying a lot of really toxic things about byuu. It’s kind of hard to find any reliable info about the dramas, but there are various threads online where people bring up a number of dramas, like this thread.
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It’s also a chromium browser.
I have been using Brave for its out of the box ad and tracker blocking. I’d been uncomfortable with the new AI features and had always been skeptical of the crypto integration, but it wasn’t until this post that I realized it was appreciably worse than Firefox on those counts, nor how bad the people running it are.
Obviously, I’m now looking for other options. I’ve seen some good recs for desktop browsers elsewhere on this post, but what I’m not seeing is a lot of good mobile browser suggestions that will have the desired features. What would the folks here suggest for an e/OS browsing experience with similar or better privacy and ad blocking options? I know there’s Firefox, but A. With all the AI it keeps pushing, I’m sure there has to be better and B. I do also have mobile Firefox but have found it substantially less usable for my habit of browsing with a zillion tabs both non-incognito and incognito, so I mostly had only been it when I couldn’t get a video to play in Brave.
I am, obviously, willing to run de-Googled Chromium, but if something else is going to actually support 100+ tabs in a performant fashion I’d be happy to totally de-Chromium too.
I also use the shit out of profiles on Brave desktop, though mobile doesn’t support it. Do the Firefox forks like Waterfox have a similar option on desktop? Does another browser? I know it’s a feature Chrome has because I do sadly have to use Chrome for work, so I would expect at least the de-Googled Chromium-based ones would?
Firefox (and its forks) have an integrated profile manager, though it’s not always intuitive to figure out how to get to it. LibreWolf is the fork I seem to always go back to, and it has zero slop.
I use containers. Right-click on the new tab button and pick a container to open the tab in. There’s also an add-on that will do this automatically for you when you visit a specific website, so if you want every site to live in its own container, you can do that too.
Personally I just use its built-in cross-site cookie blocking, but multiple ways to do the same thing.
LibreWolf looks promising. No mobile app, but they recommend IronFox for that, so I just downloaded that to play with. Thanks!
Edit: mobile IronFox is looking pretty good so far. Made configuring privacy settings an option just out of the box, which I appreciate. Biggest problem right now is that I can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave.
LibreWolf
I had soooo many issues with LibreWolf, finally switched to waterfox. If this doesnt pan out, I quit the interweebs
I hope WaterFox pans out for you! Do you mind sharing the issues you had with LibreWolf?
LibreWolf is great once you get yourself onboarded. The onboarding royally sucks. You need to remember that by default LibreWolf is really locked down and it’s on the user to unlock the bits of it they can’t live without. For instance, by default LibreWolf clears its cookies every time you quit, which is great for privacy, but everything’s a tradeoff and that’s too much for me.
I’ve been using Vivaldi (chromium-based) for about three years now. It’s customizable and has been generally solid. Also has a couple of unique tab management features. Doesn’t have builtin ad blocking afaik. But for that I use adguard desktop and route all my traffic through it, which filters out ads regardless of which browser I’m in. On iOS I can recommend Orion by kagi. It’s the only other webkit browser besides Safari, runs light, and has decent builtin ad blocking
Vivaldi does have a built in adblocker but it’s not the best yet.
But it does come with a free tier of proton vpn. Great if you don’t need to use a vpn too often but need one in a pinch.
I wouldn’t trust anything Proton for security or privacy, but that’s a whole can of worms I’m not going to open right now.
Fair point, but as long as you’re not doing anything super illegal it should be okay. I only use the VPN service to torrent movies and tv shows.
Currently trying mobile IronFox. I’m liking the privacy options and how stuff like unlock origin is literally included in the setup process. Their dark mode is nice and they offer a lot of compatibility options.
Biggest downsides I’m seeing so far (I’ll see about keeping this updated as I go):
- Can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave, and I have looked extensively.
- No tab groups (not the end of the world, but it was a nice feature). EDIT: Looks like Collections does that! EDIT TWO: Not really good for Incognito mode though.
- Clears your browser history by default on close, which may be undesired behavior. (I personally tend to use incognito for most things and then transfer sites over to tabs in non-incognito (cognito?) modes if I want them available regularly, so for me this was undesired, but it was easy to turn off.)
- Brave had a built-in experimental dark mode to dark modify websites that I am not seeing in IronFox. I’m sure there are extensions that will do it for me, so I’ll go looking, but I just discovered so many sites I did not realize were light mode all along. Reading mode also does the trick for most articles.
Also 1. in Brave: Bookmarks and lists, Bookmark manager, three dot menu, Export Bookmarks, save the HTML file on your computer. Then in LibreWolf/IronFox/whatever: Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks, Import and Backup, Import Bookmarks from HTML, select that file.
I got the export step on my own, but I swear IronFox does not have the Manage Bookmarks option anywhere. Starting to think I’m just going to need to grab a Mozilla account, upload my bookmarks to LibreWolf on desktop, sync bookmarks, and pull them to IronFox that way.
There’s an add-on called Dark Reader which may help with number 4. I don’t know if IronFox supports extensions, but that’s the one you probably want.
Got it on both IronFox and LibreWolf. Not perfect, but neither was Brave dark mode. Probably going to have to disable LibreWolf’s anti-fingerprinting feature just so I can tell sites to use dark mode, though.
I use Vivaldi as a secondary browser, it’s not been too bad. Firefox is my primary, but I might go to a fork soon.
I have the habit of running Firefox on Android with thousands of tabs (before unloading them into a list on the desktop and cleaning them up). It does slow down somewhat, but not much.
FWIW I remember a former colleague who recommended it to me and his argument was about the cryptocurrency you “earn” from it.
I asked him if he could withdraw it. I asked him if he tried. He said not yet but he would. He came back to me few days later saying something along the line that “it’s not straightforward” which was a polite way to say he didn’t manage yet. He worked in IT.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s a scam or that one can’t use the crypto “earned” from it but at least back then, few years ago, some people were just riding on the hope, or even faith, that it would amount to something yet it seemed made in such a way to just hold.
So… not a scam but not exactly empowering users IMHO.
Could someone please recommend an alternative? 😓 I used DuckDuckGo for a while but I NEED something that supports extensions…
I currently use Waterfox which is a fork of Firefox
Firefox forks like Librewolf (or Ironfox for mobile) are good.
Also Vivaldi if you don’t mind proprietary.
I’m a pretty happy Vivaldi user. They have a No AI policy, it is infinitely customizable (you can put tabs any fucking where), has native ad and tracking blockers, you can use extensions, has a notes function w/markdown capability (which I find handy for having quick copypasta ready to go), a built-in mail client and RSS reader, synchs across devices…
You know…stuff.
Now add a kernel, a filesystem and a few more features and you have a full OS.
Dude, this is a browser. Anything beyond the notes feature is uneccessary bloat and can be outsourced to add-ons.
People keep reinventing Emacs.
Vivaldi is the one chromium browser that keeps pulling me towards the dark side. I used it for years before switching to firefox and if it wasn’t for the danger of the chromium monopoly I’d probably switch back to it
I’ve been using vanilla Firefox
Vivaldi is Chromium based but with a team that works towards reducing the privacy and usability impact of running something Chromium based. Retains support for adblockers etc, after Google severely limiting that functionality in Chrome itself. Supports Chrome extensions like usual - better than Chrome itself, now.
There is an inherent cost to internet freedom from using chromium browsers. It gives Google, which controls the back-end, leverage to redefine how the internet works. It’s not as though they haven’t already done it on multiple occasions.
People will say things like “some websites run better on Chrome” as though that’s a selling point and not a red flag.
I’m not saying no one should use it or develop on it, but you have to be okay with the real cost.
Especially with their mobile browser! They do a good job of actually keeping up with user feature requests and error reports.
Please try Zen browser. I can’t go back to any other browser since I switched
What’s so great about zen?
Its pretty chill.
It has a strong focus on workflow improvements. I love the way it handles pinned tabs where third party links open as a modal and you can reset the tab with a middle click. It also has very good workspace management and useful keybinds.
How does Zen handle blocking adds? I peeked at them but didn’t see anything like uBlock in the mod list. No proton mods there either, which is a tough sell for me.Usability looks awesome though. I’m tempted for that alone.
Edit: I just realized it’s a fork like WaterFox so it will just work. I did also learn there are some weird check ins with Google on that browser though, so maybe not the more security focused browser I’m looking for.
You have access to Firefox addons, can install ublock just fine. As for proton I’m not sure
I tried Zen, didn’t really like it, the UI was too unfamiliar and felt a smidge too opinionated for my taste.
That’s fair, it was based on a similar browser called Arc that had ambitions to reinvent browsing. That one was chromium based though and maintenance stopped when they wanted to create another AI powered browser. Then the Zen people recreated Arc as an open source browser based on Firefox. I was already used to Arc so Zen was familiar.
I think there are a lot of benefits to the way the UI is laid out, give it a try you without changing any defaults for a week or so, you might get hooked.
Zen’s not great on a multi-monitor setup, but I like it otherwise. Video playback has been improved a ton since I last tried it.
What is your issue with multi monitor setups? On my Mac and Linux machines I have no issues
Currently using Fennec on mine and I gotta say, it’s what firefox could’ve been if they actually cared. Smooth, quick, loaded with extensions, and easy.
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The Mullvad browser is a good choice. It’s built on the TOR browser, which is built on firefox. As for extensions, they are a privacy liability and most privacy-conscious browsers warn you not to use them.
Waterfox with uBlock origin
I don’t think an average person would listen to me if I instructed them to get rid of chrome and get Firefox and install couple extensions for privacy.
So, I just ask them to download brave and tell them it’s just chrome but better, It blocks all the annoying stuff on the internet and atleast they will stop using the hell of a pacifier that chrome is and move on.
Yes, it’s just Chrome but better - it also funds bigots!
Plonk.
It’s just Chrome if Chrome wasn’t made ass backwards basically.
And it funds bigots
just like Google but at way smaller scale
Yes, they both do.
Yeah exactly, Brave is for people who are scared of installing extensions but clicking a big install button on a site that runs an executable is perfectly fine
This makes me think that the people who install brave, are the people who, 15-20 years ago, would have a IE install that was half toolbars.
God…remember all the scammy toolbars for IE? and how they could take up half the damn screen on some peoples machines?
Well I’d argue that with the changes to Manifest, Brave is actually one of your stronger options if chrome is a must have.
If you don’t need chrome, Firefox (or a fork) with ublock is enough for most.
What extensions would you recommend for Firefox?
Just Ublock origin is more than enough, it’s pretty customisable too, Brave is for people who just wanna install and do nothing
Except when I install Brave I have to debloat it, holy bloat so is Firefox bloated - I usually get forks (Librewolf, Zen etc)
I just wish librewolf would release a mobile version 🤞🤞
I doubt they’ll ever release a mobile version, they’ll just recommend IronFox
Ublock Origin is the only mandatory extension i can think of.
Some other extensions I personally use are:
Gesturefy is useful if you want to control things with mouse gestures (holding right-click and then drawing a shape to activate commands)
NoScript for a little added security, with the cost of having to manually enable javascript on websites that literally can’t function without it.
Any extension that runs userscripts.
Dark Reader for websites that don’t offer a dark mode.
you can configure muBlock to do everything NoScript does at a lower computational cost on your local machine
I hate mouse so I use vimium ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ublock origin
I think a lot of pro-Brave people are astroturfers, or heavily influenced by astroturfers. They are definitely not a first choice by any privacy advocate worth their salt.
Also indians. A lot don’t actually care about the anti-lgbtqia side. They just hate big US tech.
I feel like I’m getting too old for the Internet. I still fondly remember the times where you could create a Geocities page and add it yourself to the Yahoo directory, and other netizens clicked through categories to get to your listing, instead of using a search engine.
But I digress. I’m finding myself browsing the www less over time, and I’m already limited to only a hadful of pages I visit regularly. For me personally, Vivaldi is the best choice for a desktop, and Brave is hands-down the best choice for my smartphone. But I appreciate that others may have different use cases.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s you used to get an email address and some webspace included in your internet subscription. I remember making a small personal website on the 15 MB of web space I got. The URL was a bit cumbersome http://www.my.isp/www/somesuperlonguserid/index.html but it worked fine.
These times are sadly over.
Remember when sites had webring links at the bottom? Before Google solved it (then destroyed it completely several years later), discoverability used to be a community effort.
Now you gave me an inspiration. I’m eorking with a few other parents to create a local, walled “Internet” for the kids in our estate, and webrings would be a fun feature to resurrect.
