I Recommend Against Brave
thelibre.newsThere seems to be a strong belief here that it isn't reasonable to use OSS software written by people with alternative political opinions. That is silly. People who write software have really diverse and frequently deviant political positions that are too variable to audit.
The people who are making choices and citing the one time Eich gave $1,000 to a political cause totally unrelated to his OSS contributions are just misguided (especially since the vote outcome suggests it was a mainstream Californian position). Spend your outrage on something relevant. That attitude is doomed to irrelevance because nobody is ever going to be ideologically pure enough. There'll be people who have already failed the test, people who are going to fail the test in the future and people who nothing is known about their private life.
"This man has opinions that are roughly held by half of California!" is not the criticism to lead with. I imagine a remarkable amount of software would fail this test.
The largest part of the article is about other/valid reasons not to use Brave though, as reflected in the table of content:
2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads
2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign
2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
2020 — Brave puts ads in user's home screens
2021 — Brave ships an insecure Tor feature
2023 — Brave hides their crawlers to websites
2024 — So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
Who knew. The website isn't very accessible to people who brows with JavaScript disabled. I've said my politically neutral piece so now I get on to the more opinionated stuff - you know what that list says to me? It says Brave is actually putting an effort in to competing with Google and they're making the occasional mistake. It looks pretty healthy.
Maybe if Mozilla wasn't so sedated by Google cash they'd be trying things that might disrupt Google's search dominance. There is an amazing germ of an idea in Brave where they push the cost of ownership of a browser from $0 down into the negatives to where you get paid as a user to use Brave. That is a very interesting idea; I'd like a chunk of that advertising money and I think a lot of other people might too.
Brave might not carry the idea to its eventual destination, but there are interesting thoughts there which is more than anything I've heard out of Firefox in the last decade.
Just that Mozilla sucks doesn't mean alternatives can't be worse.
Aka the fallacy of the excluded middle or whataboutism as applied to the browser landscape.
Not to speak of the irony to disable JavaScript yet advocate in favor of a Chromium-derived browser and the approach of wholesale-integrating an ossified and unmaintainable (for anyone except state actors) O/S-like artifact to render text, video, run JavaScript, and everything in between.
The way out is and always has been to restrict web tech to actual document retrieval and viewing rather than project the web into a (non-) solution to unrelated issues such as failure of the software market, piracy, and revisionist 1980s F/OSS and portability agendas, and to take away browsers and web standards from ad monopolies.
Works fine with me with JS disabled. Even works in text mode links and lynx browsers (lynx was more readable).
The table of content doesn't show up.
Indeed! I saw the individual section titles and thought that's what you all were talking about.
Well said. This is basically a cancel culture post. If you combine Internet outrage with niche nitpicking, it will be impossible to use any software. I can understand that people wouldn't want to support someone like Musk due to his highly partisan and vocal advocacy, but this is different.
I agree with you that you shouldnt oust people because of minor discrepancies but on the other side, you absolutely should draw the line somewhere.
The problem that any minority with hateful opposition has, that its subtle in the beginning until enough people normalized it, which is what trump is doing right now. And since you cant look into peoples heads, whether they are able to reason freely or distorted by emotions / biases, you have to measure by proxy.
This is the conflict line you have to draw, and its difficult, yes, but since the overton window moves fast, its needed more then ever. And i guess the mozilla insiders had the best position to observe these little telling moments.
Yep. I also draw the line if you are hateful against minorities. I don't care what you think inside your heads or what are you afraid of. But if you make the effort to make the lifes of people already in danger and suffering even worse, that definitely needs to be called out.
The arc of him resigning from Mozilla and founding Brave definitely is context that needs to be mentioned. Personally, I feel $1,000 isn’t much to be donating, especially as he would have been decently wealthy going from Netscape pre-IPO and pre-AOL, through to co-founding Mozilla and staying on for 15 years. But Mozilla employees saw it differently, he was forced out, and that’s all part of the story of why Brave exists.
The ways they’ve acted a bit on the sketchy side are perfectly reasonable to call out, even if the writing here is a bit thin. Some are sloppy bugs that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen (.onion DNS leakage), but the rest were intentional decisions (replacing ads, soliciting donations in creators’ names, affiliate injection).
I feel it’s quite difficult to recommend anyone ever use a browser other than the main 4 (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari), because of things like this. All of those have had between 16 and 30 years of experience poured into them, full-time engineers working deep in the JS/layout/etc engines, and they have a fat budget to keep it all going. Startups like Brave, Browser Company, etc. don’t quite have such resources, are very reliant on the benevolence of Google/Mozilla/Apple, and need to keep watching their back to make sure they’re still profitable. Completely FOSS community projects like Ungoogled Chromium, Librewolf, and Zen don’t tend to have any security experience on the team, or any auditing going on, nor the funding to hire for any of those skills. It doesn’t feel responsible to tell someone to download one of these browsers and then go and log into their email, bank, government accounts, etc. on it. As much as we want projects like this to succeed and beat the Google/Apple-centric monoculture we’re stuck with.
I think Mozilla’s past decade would have been very different if he were able to stay as CEO. He’s clearly managed Brave as a startup well enough that it’s still in operation - now imagine what he could have done with those Google billions. There wouldn’t be any need for BAT or new tab sponsored links or injection of affiliate links (this all may change soon of course). But in the current situation, there are some legitimate concerns with how Brave operates or did so in the past, which aren’t likely to be fixed because they require it to work this way to be profitable.
> Personally, I feel $1,000 isn’t much to be donating, especially as he would have been decently wealthy going from Netscape pre-IPO and pre-AOL,
Plus thousands to Tom McClintock, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, to list only the contributions listed in the article.
> As much as we want projects like this to succeed and beat the Google/Apple-centric monoculture we’re stuck with.
I've never heard even a whisper of Mozilla looking for sovereign tech funding.
You would surely think European countries want a way for their citizens to access email, bank, government accounts, etc. without US control, right?
My assumption is they want to be in charge of things, without some foreign government getting involved and saying that "no personal data collection" and "no AI".
I was calling out the $1,000 specifically because that’s what the poster above me mentioned, and I remember that coming up very often back when his CEO stint happened. But, yes, not the only donation he’s made.
And I’m sure Mozilla is furiously looking around for new funding sources right now, governments could be of interest, but I expect them to be very careful about letting money influence the product. They know their independence is a key feature, and Google has so far allowed them to remain independent aside from default search engine choice.
While I'm pointing out to both of you that criticizing "[t]he people who are making choices and citing the one time Eich gave $1,000 to a political cause" sounds like a deliberate strawman when the linked-to criticism lists three different donations.
And yeah, I don't want to work for someone who likes paleoconservative Pat Buchanan enough to give him money.
As for "They know their independence is a key feature", the question is, what sort of independence?
Like, how much do they value their independence to do user-based profiling, if a sov. tech fund says that's completely forbidden.
Should we respect that sort of independence?
> And yeah, I don't want to work for someone who likes paleoconservative Pat Buchanan enough to give him money.
How many people have you worked for? You've probably already violated this principle. His views aren't exactly fringe and he's reasonably popular. Eich was giving him money because his position was reasonably popular position in the US tech scene.
The Bush family ended up disgracing itself so there is a great argument that Buchanan should have been president when he stood against Bush in the 1992 primary.
There is a reason I am self-employed, and have been since the 1990s.
When there is easy freedom to change jobs, as there had been in tech for decades, then tech workers can be picky about their employer.
I guess the author led with this to pad their critique, feeling that "we do scammy things with your referral links and we take cash in your name" wasn't enough.
Which says a lot more about them than it says about Brave.
When I use Brave it's so I don't have to see ads.
That simple feature seems to be overlooked in a pile of stuff most people won't care about. This doesn't read like a neutral article.
You are 100% correct. The ad blocker works very well alongside uBLock Origin so I don't see ads on YouTube, Twitch or practically anywhere.
I'm not aware of a good alternative right now. I used to use Firefox but the performance was abysmal on Linux, and they blew up the android experience - might be fixed now. There's no built in ad block and something about the sync has always given me pause. Chrome obviously has no ad blocking built in, now they're removing the best extension ad blocking, and I very much dislike how they tie it to your Google account. Safari only works on macos.
So if I want to recommend a browser to people that has easy ad blocking, is very likely to work on their device, and is fast and works as expected, then it's Brave. It could be Edge if only MS could bring themselves to not fill it with gumph nobody wants to see.
Everything on the list is pretty much who cares tbh. I don't like the founders political position but I probably don't like a lot of CEOs political positions if I knew about them. The other things are all mistakes, bugs, or stupid ideas in the crypto features that I would guess only a tiny tiny percentage of Brave users even turn on. And even then... creators being up in arms about overwritten affiliate links, cry me a river. As an Internet user, fuck affiliate links, just another way to track me and an incentive to try and persuade me to buy shit.
He was one of the first to get the full Swisher treatment