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.
If you absolutely need a Chromium browser (if you’re a privacy advocate, I don’t understand why. Using a Chromium browser means Google can do whatever they want with web standards), use Vivaldi or something.
bruh
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, the Brave defenders in this section… holy moly.
Some folks simply cannot admit they made a questionable choice. They picked it and use it, so everyone else must be wrong.
I’ve met people like this in real life.
Use chromium build from source ? It’s the least if you want something chrome based. https://chromium.woolyss.com/
If not, use firefox. It’s still good for everyday task.
It’s because no-one knows any alternatives.
If one wants a Chrome-based browser that isn’t Chrome, Brave is the highest-profile one by orders of magnitude. Next is a bunch of high-SEO scamware before honest projects like Vivaldi or Helium are even a whisper.
…So I don’t really blame folks for using Brave. They aren’t omniscient, and an honest effort to avoid Chrome is still a positive.
I had no idea about any of this. Have been using brave on android for a few weeks and very happy with it. What would you recommend instead?
I really like vivaldi
A Firefox fork.
Firefox Focus, Ironfox, or others recommended here. I will note that Waterfox was always quite slow on an android device of mine.
Just keep using it, if it works for you. Every company that makes browsers is a bit shit around the edges, there’s no perfect, pure, wholesome browser. Just use what you want. If you like edge for android, use that. If you want to use vim, use that too.
Congratulations on missing the point.
It grinds your gears that people don’t do what you want, doesn’t it?
Have you tried letting people use whatever the fuck browser they want?
Netscape Navigator on Windows Mobile Works for me.
I’ve been using Iceraven with uBlock and it’s been pretty great so far. I use Obtainium to keep it updated directly from the repo.
Yeah, I used Brave for a few years. I made like $10-$40, but the popup ads were super annoying, especially as someone who uses 3 ad blockers. Not to mention the other issues… Not Worth It.
In recent history I’ve used Chrome -> Brave -> Firefox -> LibreWolf -> Floorp -> Midori… So far Midori is good but still testing.
The minute I see that malware junk, I immediately uninstall it.
I’m surprised to read the whole thread and nobody mentioned that TorBrowser is the goat for daily anonymous browsing.
That you’re even suggesting this tells me that you don’t use tor regularly. Many clearnet sites dont want to be accessed through tor and will just block you. If you encounter any recaptchas thats basically a dead end. The time from opening the browser to having a fully loaded site is minutes.
If you don’t plan on doing serious crimes and your not an opposition leader in a totalitarian state, tor is not a good default browser.
I missed that part
The time from opening the browser to having a fully loaded site is minutes.
I think it depends on the region. To me, full browser restart with reconnect is maybe 10 seconds tops, usually less. I use Tor Browser as a default one on my phone, and it opens random links quite okay.
For me, the main issue is exit node blocking, then I need to restart the browser 1-2 times.
You are correct that Tor is not as convenient. I use Tor Regularly but I use another browsers if I need to login. Sometimes I have to restart Tor Browser because of blocks.
Tor is ridiculously slow for daily use.
It worth okay for me.
I thought people gave up on Tor years ago when it was revealed that it wasnt as anonymous as people expected due to the number of entry and exit nodes controlled by governments and spy agencies.
The NSA wasn’t able to break Tor fundamentally, even with spanning numerous exit nodes to intercept traffic, and high-scale traffic correlation between enter and exit nodes
“We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption
Do we trust a 12 year old article sourced from the government to be honest about current/past capabilities? Genuinely asking.
This question is unironically very deep. As it’s privacy we’re talking, you decide what to trust on your own.
My understanding is that Tor provides anonymity for my threat model (ad-tech corporations).
But trust need to be placed somewhere. Do we trust Mozilla? All their emploees? Do we trust OSS? Does anybody actually review open-source code? What about supply chain attacks?
I am, a nobody, was personally invited to a Contagious Interview (a person, pretending to be a client for consulting was trying to place a rootkit on my machine via GitHub repo).
What about AI-assistet coding that actively tries to eliminate security gates?
In this case I would. Its from the Snowden leaks and from the government for the government, never intended for our public eyes.
Also if you don’t fully trust tor, just add another layer (e.g. VPN). If the government dissuades you from secure open infrastructure and gets you to use closed ones, they have won because companies can always be forced to comply. Algorithms on the other hand, can’t.
who and what is your threat model? as @macros@feddit.org pointed out this article was probably rather accurate.
if you just want to browse anonymously - it is likely, that even the biggest tech corpos can’t de-anonymise you.
if you do small time crime, like buying and selling contraband - likely law enforcement would try to catch you in the real world. you have more vertices and vulnerabilities there, different enforcement agencies are experienced exploiting these.
if you paint a big ass target on your back and get the interest of the CIA or similar - you are probably fucked one way or the other. they may have the ability to de-anonymise you. but if you listen to people that did get caught or do the catching (e.g: darknet diaries), most of the times it is a small mistake. if you only ever play defence, that is enough to loose the game. but what are your options if your adversary is a national agency?
You should never use TOR as a daily driver.
Why not? If more people use onion router the network only becomes better.
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.
Did I miss what you’re talking about? It just mentions Xbox SDKs being proprietary, which I couldn’t care less about. Apologies if I missed what you mentioned
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.
Thanks for the context.
I used retro arch a decade ago, and when setting up a emulation pi last year the consensus seemed to be batocera. No idea if its better, but it’s as easy to use as I remembered and my kids are still enjoying it, so not too unstable.
Batocera is a relatively minimalist Linux distro for emulation specifically. It’s one example that kind of highlights the problem I’m referring to. All of these retro software stacks still use RetroArch to varying degrees, and depend on it. Even alternative frontends like Emulation Station are just built on top of the same libraries. Or as another example, for most game systems, RetroAchievements only currently work on RetroArch.
Interesting, TIL.
My only issue with batocera is that GameCube was broken out of the box and I haven’t had the time to figure out how to fix it
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.
Is there anything else with ad blocker for iOS?
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.
As far as I remember, there is some browser with a feature of stripping tracking id from the URL, that is modification, but I find it good (if I can opt in, and if the feature is visible enough to know what to try if it doesn’t work)
And you chose to do that or it was a feature that was advertised to you. Adding referral IDs to links you click so the browser company gets money is not comparable to that at all.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that was crappy, just that not any modification of links is bad
I would argue that if you know your browser is stripping tracking info for links then the link you clicked on doesn’t have tracking information.
I mean I’m open to other mobile browsers if you have suggestions. On my actual PC I use Mullvad and Librewolf.
Edit: ironfox was heavily recommended and have installed in. Seems good to me so far. I appreciate your guys suggestions.
