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cause most people just google a chrome alternative. they dont do research. brave gives them a surafce level adblocking, and they feel fine with it.
Doesn’t Firefox still have brand recognition though? I’d have thought even people who answer “google” to “what browser do you use” would have heard of firefox, and therefore looked it up rather than using the neurons to ask, “what alternative browsers are there?”
Because vanilla Firefox has to be tinkered with to get the best out of it and the average user is not able to do it
Any more so than vanilla Chrome?
No, in fact the <u>average</u> user doesn’t tinker with Chrome either
In what way?
I switched recently to Librewolf, but as a long time Firefox user (of which Librewolf is a fork anyway) it didn’t seem unusable out of the box. There are some settings for privacy and studies etc you mght want to change, but they are all very obvious in the GUI preferences.
I did personally go into about:config to set a few things, like not allowing searches from the address bar because I’m weird, but what makes Firefox no good for the average user?
The typical conversation I have is:
- Hey, how don’t you have ads on Youtube?
- Well, its easy: you install Firefox and then…
and that’s where I loose most of the people, that extra step.
Me and you can go down on the
about:configall day long to dissect every aspect of privacy we care about. For the other 90% of people, even just going to Mozilla extensions manager and downloading u-Block Origin is too much.Bear-proof trash can theorem…
Well reading comments here has me going to download Vivaldi to replace Brave.
Thank y’all!
How vivaldi isn’t more popular with tech users that want to use chromium totally eludes me. The browser is super moddeable and the devs have so far been nothing but super open and correct to their community. I don’t think there’s been a single vivaldi “scandal” of note. It literally opera before that went down the drain, and is a better browser on top.
The whole “it’s not open source” mantra has also been thoroughly addressed.
Also don’t get me started on the brave love. It feels astroturfed. I do not get how you can genuinely shill that browser…
I choose Brave instead of Vivaldi in Android as a second browser just because of 1 feature:
Vivaldi won’t force dark mode in all the websites WHEN the device is in dark mode only, it includes a toggle to on or off only and it doesn’t care if the device is light or dark.
I use automatic light/dark mode and Brave and Firefox (with the Dark Reader extension) works well with this.
Also the Vivaldi team is aware of this lacking feature since years ago but they can’t seem to fix it somehow… That’s fine by me, I can work my way without it.
You literally ignored the whole comment section, you madlad.
Brave falls under “security theatre” and is absolutely useless
And run by a homophobic crypto bro.
Who also inflicted Javascript upon the world, the incompetent piece of shit.
I won’t say that’s worse than the homophobia because I don’t want to seem dismissive about oppression of queer folks, but it sure as Hell isn’t better, either!
Attacking his politics is valid, and that does make me uneasy about using Brave. I’m curious where the security theater accusation comes from. Brave strikes a nice balance imo. If I wanted true security I would use Tor, but honestly that would add so much friction I would probably quit the internet.
Attacking JavaScript is a stupid argument. So many people just pile on JavaScript. I bet a lot of the same people are into FOSS and self hosting. If you write your app in 100% JavaScript without a backend, it can run on almost every operating system. Think about that for a second. We have the ultimate cross platform language. Yes it’s grown out of something that was originally messy, but a lot of work has been done to make it better.
Don’t attack JavaScript, attack the bad parts of JavaScript like type coercion. Yes, you can probably blame Brendan Eich for that part. Attack the businesses that are enshitifying everything.
We could have had Scheme or Python (both of which are also cross-platform, BTW) embedded in the browser instead. And yes, Netscape was seriously considering those two specific languages before Eich oozed into the situation and fucked it all up.
Javascript did not “need” to happen. The only reasons it exists are Not-Invented-Here and Dunning-Kruger Syndromes (specifically, Netscape wanting something new and vaguely Algol-like that they could name to glom onto the Java hype at the time, and Eich having the inexperience and hubris to think he could hack together a half-assed design in a week and it would somehow turn out okay).
Yes it’s grown out of something that was originally messy, but a lot of work has been done to make it better.
Yeah, no shit! Literally millions upon millions of man-hours, probably! Do you have any concept at all of how much better the Web could have been if all that effort had been put towards something actually useful instead of working around Eich’s mistakes?!
I can’t speak to Scheme as I haven’t spent more than a few days using it. Python has a lot of strengths but also a lot of weaknesses. JavaScript has had to evolve with 100% backwards compatibility. The python you enjoy today would have had to evolve differently if it was the language of the browser.
Look I’m kinda young. Not that young, but too young for Netscape. You clearly lived through more of the history than I did. But imo, the thing ruining the internet isn’t JavaScript, it’s late stage capitalism and greedy companies. You could have Python or Scheme or whatever and late stage capitalism would still have ruined it.
If you feel so strongly that JavaScript is the issue, why don’t you invest your time in helping Webassebly grow? Imo that’s more useful than complaining about JavaScript.
Source(s) for this?
Not my work, it is from a saved comment by @cannedtuna@lemmy.world in a now deleted post.
This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t want to however, here is a summary of the key points:
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- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
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- Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.
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- Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
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2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
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- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
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- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
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- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
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- Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.
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2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
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- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
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- Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
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- The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
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- Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.
Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.
So you seem pretty well versed in the topic and I’ve been using Brave for a very long time. But what chromium alternative would you recommend that tries to accomplish what Brave clearly isn’t doing well? I’m open to switching but also not really interested in Firefox.
I would not switch to a chromium-based browser at all. For lots of reasons, but if I had to pick one it would be to avoid creating a dominant browser and ceding control over web standards to a single entity the way MS used IE to do what they wanted and force everyone else to comply.
Those were dark times. I was still being forced to make sites IE5 compatible in 2015 — official support ended in 2005.
In the rare instance that I need a chromium browser, I use chromium. But there are very few websites for which I need it and I think I have found alternatives for them all.
Vivaldi has built in ad and tracking blocker and a much better UI.
Kind of. It’s still not nearly as effective as Firefox with uBlock and a few other extensions. The downside is that some sites are just broken on Firefox, and blocking ads, etc. makes a relative few sites unusable. Which, yeah, 99.999% of the time I’m fine with. Until it’s something I need to do for my day job.
I can’t answer that question but I’ve always wondered why anyone switches to Brave. I installed it a few years ago because I heard it was privacy focused and it immediately hit me with a bunch of shit about crypto and rewards or something. I uninstalled it immediately.
Because it is still Chromium based and it means it is fast on Android, plus it comes packed with an adblocker by default which works wonders in closed out systems like iOS, also as many browsers (not all of them) it supports account syncing which it is always a nice plus (I can use a good working version of Brave in all the systems and keep a good flow for example).
I main Firefox in pretty much all the systems, but the Android app is missing a lot of features like tab management, and the iOS client just sucks (Brave works better there despite being Safari based too).
It does respect your privacy but it comes with bloatware. You can actually remove them pretty easily
“Respect” for you as the user means you shouldn’t have to do stuff like that in the first place.
Eh, gotta make money somehow. I prefer this over selling out to google
it only makes money until people don’t actually remove the bloatware. so if it does make money, that’s telling something
I installed it. Crypto stuff is off by default. Ad blocking built in. Multiple 3rd party testing shows it blocks virtually all tracking/fingerprinting.
Firefox/Chrome - you need all kinds of addons and pihole type setups to do the same thing. God forbid you want to use it off your own network, you need additional tools. All these tools break with updates, whether they are the browsers or addons/tools themselves. Brave has never once broken its adblock/privacy settings in the years I’ve used it.
Most of us on here are privacy focused, and want the average user to be that way too. Brave is a one click setup, nothing else needed solution. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is the owner a piece of shit? Hell yes. Does it allow the average user to take ownership of their privacy in an easy and non-technical way? Yes. Perfect is the enemy of good. I will gladly jump ship once another turnkey solution comes along that is as easy and privacy centric that Brave is.
Firefox/Chrome - you need all kinds of addons and pihole type setups to do the same thing.
bullshit
you need a single addon, ublock origin. enable additional builtin blocklists according to taste.
you can have additional addons for additional functionality. does brave have libredirect built in? does it block and redirect google AMP sites by default? does it have a feature to only delete cookies regularly for specific sites?and let’s not forget the elephant in the room: ublock is not working anymore in chrome! google made it so that you can only use the inferior lite version, that can only load much much fewer filtering rules into the browser.
I don’t know if brave kept supporting mv2 extensions, but if they do, I guarantee to you that it won’t be that way for long. it has been relatively easy sailing so far because google did not actually remove support, but it will be lots of work when finally google does remove it, and they’ll be needing to patch it in for every new versionpihole is not used for firefox, and that’s never been its use case. It’s for everything else that uses the internet, but cannot have something like ublock origin: various software, windows itself, android and apps there, smart home and iot garbage.
Honestly this statement of yours proves to me that you don’t know what you’re talking about.All these tools break with updates, whether they are the browsers or addons/tools themselves.
I have no idea what you are talking about. anyone else?
About the addons and stuff breaking, I constantly see posts about this adblock isn’t working because Chrome broke something, this addon is no longer updated, google broke this so that addon doesn’t work. That’s the issue with using 3rd party tools, you have to rely on the tool AND browser to work together, and not break with updates or changes. You also have to trust both the browser AND the tool to keep your info safe and private.
Brave hasn’t had even a hiccup in it’s adblocking/privacy features with all the changes Chrome is implementing, due to how Brave is built. I just want a browser with strong, baked in privacy and adblocking that works out of the box. Brave is that solution at this time.
By the way, you seem focused on Firefox, I’m not attacking Firefox, I’m calling out every browser that needs addons to create a more secure and private browsing experience.
About the addons and stuff breaking, I constantly see posts about this adblock isn’t working because Chrome broke something, this addon is no longer updated, google broke this so that addon doesn’t work.
well yeah, google has intentionally broken all effective content blockers. that’s the fault of chrome. firefox is fine.
firefox will never be able to add built in support for adblocking. reasons include that websites would not just happily drop support for firefox, but some would even put in work to block it entirely! a 3rd party fork can do that, but the main thing can’t because of what will follow.
By the way, you seem focused on Firefox, I’m not attacking Firefox,
I’m not focused on firefox, I’m against anything chrome. firefox is not good, its the least bad, but in my eyes there’s a large difference between it and chromium. we need more engines.
I’m calling out every browser that needs addons to create a more secure and private browsing experience.
I think having this built in is a very dangerous move for a browser that wants to become popular, and does not want to be blocked by sites.
if all you want is to not need to install anything manually, librewolf has ublock preinstalled.
but I’m not confident about the content blocking abilities of brave. I get that it hides ads, but is that’s all it does, or does it also block the resources from loading, tracking scripts from operating? because ublock origin is very effective with that, with its large toolset, if the blocklists utilize them
Like I stated earlier, 3rd party testing places Brave at the top of almost any fingerprinting/ad blocking/tracking/privacy metrics tested. It might not be the product you like, that’s fine, but you can’t deny the testing that proves it works.
I don’t hate on Firefox, far from it. I think it’s great for those who don’t mind extra layers of tinkering/having control on how the browser uses it’s privacy functions. Firefox, unfortunately, isn’t 100% web compatible, and almost every fox user has some form of Chromium as a backup. The discussion about web standards ignoring Chromiuim alternatives are valid, but I feel that’s an entirely different discussion.
I think it’s great for those who don’t mind extra layers of tinkering/having control on how the browser uses it’s privacy functions.
except that you don’t need to tinker. firefox is simply just not doing anything risky, anything that could easily break websites.
you want ublock? install that 1 addon. that’s not any more tinkering than setting a dark theme, or the language.Firefox, unfortunately, isn’t 100% web compatible,
that’s funny because that’s not how I know. as I know, firefox is more up to spec than chrome, but chrome often has its odd nonstandard behaviours which web devs take as standards simply because that’s the most popular browser, and developing for its quirks is easier than developing for standards and also supporting its quirk at the same time
Tinkering - I remember when the ad blocking addons stopped working due to a Google change. Everyone hopped on the webs to see what to do next. Edits and tricks to make Firefox look like Google to the web page, which was needed to make it work again. I was just over here with Brave carrying on like nothing happened.
Firefox compatibility- Even users in this post say they have a backup browser when Firefox doesn’t work.
Look, I’m not here evangelizing an imperfect browser. I’m also not sitting here arguing anyone’s choice in browsers. I use what works for me. I just wanted to clarify some statements made that weren’t correct. The Firefox vs anything else debate is as loaded as Linux vs anything else. Everyone argues and claims their software package is the end all be all when it just doesn’t fit 100% of use cases. I use what works for me. When a better alternative comes along, I will gladly look at it.
I tried to install Brave and it almost nuked my PC. Completely jammed up. I uninstalled it immediately.
Yeah so true!! I installed it, and it launched an attack to overheat and destroy my CPU. Thankfully I reacted quick enough, and unplugged my computer quickly. However when I turned it back on, all my files were gone. It was cryptomining without my consent. Absolutely crazy!
/s?
I wanted to try Brave a couple of years ago. I ran the installer, and it was one of those pieces of shit installers that just goes ahead and installs without any input from the user, dumping god knows what onto your system, and it puts everything in some obscure AppData subdirectory that can’t be deduced without right-clicking the desktop shortcut. I uninstalled it without even launching it once.
If a user is 50/50 on whether or not they just installed malware, you might wanna check your programming practices.
SCNR if they were able to make good decisions, they would never have switched to chrome anyway. /s
tbh, i don’t get all the mozilla/firefox hate. even “the linux project” missed the mark by a mile with his firefox critique.
whatever mozilla does, it’s not even half as evil as google
We learned that from politics in general. Vote for the lesser evil, not for the optimal choice, as there is none, sadly.
Firefox is my main browser but there’s a few specific things that only work in chromium.
People will use whatever works for them.Other than MS Teams, which is garbage by default, I have yet to find anything that’s not working in Firefox.
The only times I’ve ever run into stuff not working were:
- The GrapheneOS installer bc it uses web USB
- Sites that decide Firefox isn’t good enough (glares at Pearson), though I just use a user agent switcher and suddenly the site works
I run 2 browsers as well, with about 90% of my use on Firefox
I have found that simply being willing to use multiple browsers solves a lot of problems for me
Firefox still doesn’t have tab groups on mobile
You got downvoted but it is true, it doesn’t while other browsers do, and block ads which is a nice plus.
Firefox offers extension support and that is a reason to forgive it a lot of lacks… But we shouldn’t be conformist about the fact that the Android/iOS client needs a lot of work.
I want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile, but Firefox doesn’t support ad-blocking on iOS.
Maybe the problem is not Firefox here, but Apple.
Apple does not allow other browsers than Safari on iOS. All other browsers are just reskins of Safari.Apple does not allow other browsers than Safari on iOS. All other browsers are just reskins of Safari.
And yet only Brave blocks ads effortlessly…
Of course it is an Apple issue in the core, but unless Firefox includes a proper ad blocking frautre (no add-ons needed because that’s unlikely to happen in iOS) is also a Firefox issue, and I I’d say the main reason why it loses market when competing against Brave in such a closed environment.
Imo builtin AdBlockers is much worse than addons. You have no free choice, have to trust that the devs will provide updates regularly and accurately (in contrast to just switching to another AdBlocker when eg. uBlock breaks), and are fucked once they decide it’s too much work/Google pays them a nice sum to not block them/they decide to just replace the ads instead of removing them.
Addons on iOS, just as on Android, are very much needed and an actual solution to a whole plethora of problems, that no browser on its own could ever solve.
Yes, I don’t think anyone thinks otherwise, but built in adblockers are better than DNS adblockers, which consecutively are better than nothing lol (also you could pair both I guess and get an improved experience).
The problem is absolutely Apple but a guy’s still gotta block his ads somehow
Extricating yourself from the Apple ecosystem can be tough for some people.
/yes, I use Android
Pihole.
That’s not a great suggestion for the stated use case of a mobile device which, presumably, will be leaving the pihole’s network frequently.
Tailscale, zerotier, or any other VPN server on your home network can keep your mobile device on your pihole network regardless of physical location.
This is not something the average person does, or is even technically capable of doing.
I’m going to reject that criticism in this particular case. PiHole is a significantly more complex setup than Tailscale or ZeroTier. While I agree that it is beyond expectations for the “average person”, so is PiHole.
An OpenVPN server on a dynamic IP address is not that far beyond the skillset of the average PiHole user, especially if they are using an open source router with OpenVPN and DDNS preinstalled.
Tailscale or ZeroTier are well within the capabilities of a PiHole user.
Adguard dns
This doesn’t solve your same browser issue, but just fyi the browser “Orion” on iOS supports full browser extensions. Its developed by the company that runs the Kagi search engine
I thought all browsers on iOS were just wrappers for the same engine (webkit?), so they really can’t do much there.
Yes but multiple browsers managed to support ad-block on iOS, including Safari.
Firefox seems to be the ONLY browser without ad-block support on iOS.
Both Vivaldi and Brave have working adblockers on iOS while Firefox does not. This is not WebKit’s fault, shouldn’t be an issue for Firefox mobile developers to implement.
Also simply compatibility, some sites just don’t work (or dont work well) on Firefox or librewolf, thats one key reason I go back to brave for a lot of things.
I genuinely have not seen a site that doesn’t work on Firefox in years. Probably five or more. Can you think of an example off the top of your head?
Several sites/web apps I use for work. And my bank is another one that immediately comes to mind.
Same here, I’ve been using it for years both on mobile and desktop, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to open chrome for a specific website
They won’t make it compatible if they don’t have Firefox users.
Agreed, but I also have work to do. On my personal PC at home I use librewolf, as for most casual browsing its fine.
But the question was why do people use brave over Firefox and my answer simply is cos it doesn’t have the functionality i need. I dunno about your boss but if I say to mine “I didn’t do my job cos my browser of choice doesn’t work” I don’t reckon I’ll stay employed for long.
Fair enough.
Name and shame them. Send them a complaint.
Relatedly, does anyone know if there’s a public list of sites that don’t work (properly or at all) in Firefox somewhere? A quick (non-Google) web search doesn’t seem to turn one up. If I was working at Mozilla, that would be the kind of database I might be interested in making a public resource. And I don’t mean as part of the Bug Tracker, though links between the two for legitimate problems could be useful, I guess.
Something with a very basic interface that has an offending site name, how it doesn’t work, perhaps why, and what, if anything, Mozilla can do about it. In short simple sentences. One per offending site in 16pt text. And a search feature for when it runs to the hundreds.
It could be something like: [favicon/logo] example.com - Outright states that it will not support Firefox. Mozilla cannot do anything about this. Complain to Example Inc. [favicon/logo] example.net - interface is buggy in Firefox. Site misuses web standards in a way incompatible with Firefox’s renderer. We are looking into this. <Link to bug tracker here> [favicon/logo] example.org - interface does not load. Site uses non-standard Google-only CSS properties. We are looking into this, but you could also contact The Example Organisation to ask them to review their CSS. etc.
I’ve not had any problems with the handful of sites I use, at least not outside of something caused by browser security or add-ons which I eventually figured out how to fix.
That said, I’ve probably forgotten a handful I just straight up refused to visit again when they didn’t work and now they’re not in my regular rotation any more, so I don’t notice.
Conversely, no browser but Firefox supports ad blocking (and other) addons on Android.
Brave, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet all support ad-blocking on Android, as far as I remember.
But it is not addon support
There are no ads in my Firefox. Is it because of DNS?
Perhaps if you tell us which DNS you are using.
Pihole
I’ve always preferred to choose from the options offered by my Distro’s repository. I might not install that -exact- version (prefer to install where I can easily back things up).
I have Brave alongside my Librewolf installation because of Chromecast. Yes, II know, crazy to have Google shit in your house but it just works and I at least have TechnitiumDNS.
I tried out Firefox on my phone a year or two ago. I had a number of issues, including accessing secure pages for work. I have little doubt that it wasn’t Firefox at fault so much as it was narrow testing by website developers, but the end result was problems for me regardless of who was at fault, so I switched back to Chrome.
Because Brave is by default what Firefox is when you install Librewolf instead - and more. And you can refuse to see that and be wrong about it, I don’t care. I use Librewolf because I want to, I still think it’s not the better browser.
