Brave … Worth it?

Everything else
1

So, I looked at Brave browser which seems to be a chromium with stuff removed. Anyone using it? Is it worth investing the time/effort for it?

…

Yeah, is that a good thing or does it join Mel’s film of the same name?

2

i was using it for a while but in the end dropped it because they have no mechanism to run self-hosted extensions (even chrome has that via enterprise policy) so they are entirely dependent on google for that.

i like making my own extensions and dealing with chrome web store as a small-time developer is about as fun as eating glass so this is particularly important to me.

also,

  • i think they built on latest blink code so sometimes you get bugs not in stable chrome versions
  • their cryptoshit is cringeworthy but you can easily disable it
  • built-in adblock is worse than ublock in every way
  • bookmark sync hardly works, settings/addon sync is nonexistant (chrome can sync settings even for self-hosted extensions, if they are written to use chrome.storage API)
  • on android, it’s one of the few browsers with a functioning adblock, but i would suggest bromide instead. less bloat, just works.
  • brave is obviously a more specific fingerprinting target

in the end, imo, unless you stop visiting websites entirely, it is largely pointless to obsess over privacy. just use whatever browser you want + ublock.

3

Of course, Brave does not support CentOS 7 which I have to use at work till we move to 8. Pha!

4

i wanted to suggest using appimage but apparently they don’t provide it.

i’m honestly not sure what is the target userbase for brave. nontechnical people who are scared for their nonexisting privacy for all the wrong reasons seems like a good bet.

5

I tried Brave for a bit after fox suggested it in another thread. I liked it and I found it to be really fast. I didn’t like the lack of extension support. I also didn’t really like their philosophy: hiding web site ads but serving their own and maybe giving some web sites a cut of that. I don’t know, seemed odd. If I were going to support a web site through ads I’d just whitelist that site and cut the middleman out.

I also tried Microsoft’s (New) Edge browser based on Chromium. I found it secretly hit Microsoft domains a lot, even with analytics set to the lowest possible setting. (FYI: Pi-hole on my network monitored and blocked most of this.)

In the end I switched back to Firefox and disabled Normandy (Mozilla’s “feature” for modifying the browser at their will.)

6

I use brave on my android devices, but use firefox with extensions on linux

7

I keep Brave installed for certain tasks, but for most of my daily browsing I’ve been using Vivaldi or Firefox. The Vivaldi devs make some baffling decisions sometimes (currently with the URL bar functionality), but I like a lot of the features it offers, like native support for tabs in a vertical column.