What's the use case for the Brave browser?
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Saw a meme with a small reference to the browser in the last thread I posted. Has me wondering, who is brave actually for? I tried it out a couple times many years ago, and it felt very sketchy (though that might be the cromium blood in its veins). From what I've seen its not popular in free software communities, nor with the general public, nor gamer's or any other subset of users, so whats the niche they're going after?
Brave appears to have the best privacy scorecard of all chromium-based browsers: https://privacytests.org/
Although Mullvad Browser is currently ranked higher (and Mullvad is all free software without any DRM, whereas Brave does allow DRM). But Mullvad is based on Firefox and Tor Browser, whereas Brave is based on chromium.
I know that the academic researchers love Brave for all its privacy features. There have been a few academic research articles written over the years extolling the benefits of Brave's approach to privacy.
I don't really put much stock in most of those privacytest things due to them only talking about modern web browsers despite the fact that more than a third of them are proprietary.
They exclude stuff like palemoon and other niche browsers and yet act like proprietary browsers are worth talking about.
The irony is... sad and pathetic.
The privacy tests in themselves don't look bad or wrong. Tor browser and Mullvad browser (which are both libre software as far as I can determine) are found to have the best privacy of all the browsers, which is as expected. I doubt that Pale Moon would perform as well, since excelling on privacy tests is not Pale Moon's goal.
However, you do have a point that privacytests.org may be biased - I found a note this morning on the bottom of the "About" page that the author is connected to Brave: "Several months after first publishing the website, I became an employee of Brave, where I contribute to Brave's browser privacy engineering efforts. I continue to run this website independently of my employer, however. There is no connection with Brave marketing efforts whatsoever."
It's interesting that he works on browser privacy engineering for Brave and yet he finds that Tor browser and Mullvad browser are better at privacy than Brave. You would think it would be the other way around.
I don't really put much stock in most of those privacytest things due to them only talking about modern web browsers despite the fact that more than a third of them are proprietary.
They exclude stuff like palemoon and other niche browsers and yet act like proprietary browsers are worth talking about.
The irony is... sad and pathetic.
Hopefully nobody! Brave is not only based on Chromium, a non-starter to begin with, but the browser is also filled with crypto nonsense and some advertisement service. Also Brave have been caught replacing links that a user types into the browser with referral links in the past, among other bad behavior. Plus, the CEO has engaged in objectionable behavior in the past.
All in all, Brave is not a browser to use considering the vastly more trustworthy options out there.
Any chromium based web browser is a red flag, ungoogled chromium included.
Why?
Because even if you make chromium libre like ungoogled chromium, there are still privacy issues that chromium has that are hard to fix.
Hyperbola devs spoke of this on their wiki. It still is up there I believe.
Librewolf, Mullvad are definitely better options, to Chromium based web browsers.
I think it's important that the harm of Chromium browsers be emphasized again; if extremely few people use non-Chromium browsers then companies are disincentivized from supporting anything else, which is horrific for the health of the web.
Hi,
Just a Brave Browser user passing by. I use it (when I am not using Tor Browser, I usually use Tor Browser unless I need to login somewhere without Tor) because it is more private than Firefox and Firefox is really not interested in fighting for its users or privacy anymore whatsoever, I am very disappointed in Mozilla (and I became very disappointed before the recent anti-user Mozilla's privacy policy changes!). For example, anti-fingerprinting on Brave is way better than on Firefox and Firefox devs just apparently don't care much that their users can be fingerprinted quite easily. Well, $500 million a year from Google can make minds spin, I guess... That's how much Mozilla gets just to not develop Firefox more intensively, at least that's my reading of it. The browser industry is captured and it is very bad, but I see no reason to use an inferior browser whose managers do not care about privacy (Brave does, actually). Maybe Ladybird Browser could fix things, I don't know. Also, firing Brave's founder from Firefox over nonsense was a big mistake by Mozilla, it was going downwards ever since.
Best!