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.
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.
Why not just use Firefox or it’s forks?
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.
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.
i honestly fidnt know all that. do vivaldi?
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.
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
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?
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.
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
- Don’t care.
- No it doesn’t.
- Don’t care.
- They’re a for-profit privacy centric company same as proton, mullvad, tuta, kagi, duckduckgo, nextcloud, adguard, threema, nextDNS, startmail, bitwarden, OsmAnd, organic maps, odysee, obsidian, onlyoffice, 1984 hosting, njalla, canonical, qubesOS, pfSense, fairphone…
If you reach 20 companies that aren’t ad-centric for-profit companies you can qualify for the false equivalency pro-league.
It’s up there with mental gymnastics in the bad-faith Olympics, a lofty achievement.
well. i’ll give you ad-guard , canonical is also making great strides towards ad-centric so that one too.
Nobody cares what you think. Go back to your cave
Yeah I don’t get the hate. I don’t use it personally but it seems like a much better choice than chrome
I agree. GrapheneOS uses chromium for Vanadium as it has far superior sandboxing to firefox, meaning it has more security. However vanadium doesn’t have adblocking.
So I use brave on mobile, with some settings tweaked recommended by privacyguides.org. Also brave uses chromium which is the only way to install grapheneOS in the first place, on desktop.
Also out of the mainstream browsers brave is far superior to all of them out of the box, even firefox, for those who arne’t into researching the perfect browser. It has in built adblocking and decent default settings. I use librewolf 99% of the time.
- Side note I did some research proton is owned 80% by the proton non for profit something which is pretty cool.
They added referrals to links you clicked. If there is one thing a browser should do its go to the link you click without modification.
Honesty your arguments against Brave are pretty weak
Brave > Chrome
Brave isn’t great for those who want a lot of private and control. However, it is way better for people to choose Brave over Chrome or Edge.
Sure it’s better, if you want to directly fund anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
May as well give money to the fucking Salvation Army.
It’s free and open source, you don’t have to fund anything. Just don’t enable adds/rewards and don’t pay for their VPN, AI, talk.
brave is chrome with a homophobic skin slapped onto it
Brave > Chrome
That’s not saying much.
Literally any mainstream browser is better than Chrome. Chrome is the worst browser in use today.
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
They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
a for-profit company partially funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, of Palantir fame. the same Palantir spying on Americans in order to allow nazis to round up immigrants and throw them into concentration camps. the same Peter Thiel that said democracy is not compatible with freedom.
The same one who wants to create the apocalypse and believes the anti-Christ is anyone who isn’t fascistic
It is really hard to say, I am using brave and have none of these issues on GNU/Linux. Brave is FOSS, has a built in adblocker, Tor private mode, fast, and brave shields. I prefer it over Firefox, because Firefox went down a path I did not like. I might switch to librewolf of GNU icecat someday.
I hereby award you the “worst troll of the day” prize.
I’m sorry, it’s funny to me that you stopped using Firefox because it “went down a dark path,” which is in some ways true, but went to Brave, which is like strolling through the deep wood at midnight.
Brave is better than Firefox though. Firefox defaults to the Google search engine and shows me sponsored ads. Brave does not do that, except the sponsored wallpapers. Oddly enough, your claim is not backed by anything.
Do we really want to go into this? Can’t you do your own research? Okay.
Brave has been known to rewrite ad links so they get the revenue from them. In addition to its AI features (which Firefox is also doing right now and is a point against them too) It has a built-in cryptocurrency wallet. Its dashboard has its own ads; sure they can be turned off, but you can also change Firefox’s search engine away from Google. Or here, how about, instead of just reiterating easily discovered facts, I could just link you to this article on the crappiness of Brave: ZDNet And, of course, there’s the issues with Brendan Eich.
Firefox definitely has problems, like those AI features and putting sponsored links in among the items on its home screen, but it never rewrote links to its own benefit, and it doesn’t support cryptocurrency.
Do you know you can opt out of the crypto crap? Do you also know that most of Firefox’s revenue comes from google? I would prefer a browser makes money off their own crypto than one that depends on another big tech.
Yes. It makes money off their own crypto. And funnels it to their anti-LGBTQ+ CEO. Who spends it to fund bigots.
Congratulations, you’re funding bigots.
Plonk.
Do you know you can set other search engine as default on firefox? Do you also know that the deal with google of using it as default search engine is the only thing keeping mozilla afloat? and that google is likely continuing funding them this way despite a dwindling user base because if firefox were to fail, oops, all chromium and incoming monopoly lawsuits?
I would prefer my web not being all chromium thus relying only on one big tech.
I’d like to hear more about #3 and #4. They seem to be a software company. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they can’t also be an advertising company (see Google).
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?
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.
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’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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Any recommendations for 3 requirements:
- Need android and Linux. Windows maybe, but don’t care much.
- Must be able to open local html files. This means no Firefox and derivatives as it can’t open local files on android.
- Must reliably sync at least bookmarks. I last switched from Vivaldi because their sync was busted for months.
Happy to try out anything
- Firefox
- Firefox can absolutely do that (see other replies)
- Firefox sync is reliable as fuck
Wanna get more advanced? Look at forks of Firefox like Zen or LibreWolf. But Firefox sounds like a good starting point.
any fork of Firefox satisfies these
- Must be able to open local html files. This means no Firefox and derivatives as it can’t open local files on android.
???
Hello, another infinity tab user. XD
I won’t talk about the 400 tabs I have in chrome tab groups
That looks like a webserver, not a file.
They want to be able to open an HTML file without spinning up a webserver first.
Well…Nvmd me.
Seems like my fileexplorer (mixplorer) does that automatically
Mixplorer:
Google Files:
Oh, that’s a pretty cool feature.
Mixplorer has a few of those.
A ton of storage integratioms (both local and cloud, data manipulation, abiloty to spin up on-demand servers (for ftp, smb, https/webdav, dlna) and many more things.)Very happy with it. Helps keeping me sane during file access between many other devices
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mixplorer.silver
