I’ve seen a lot of people on the community say that brave is bad and has made quite a lot of questionable decisions. But Firefox itself also has made equally bad decisions. Mozilla has faced ongoing criticism regarding their default settings, their approach toward users, the high compensation of their CEO at over $3 million USD annually, and their investments in various companies that may not align directly with their core mission. Additionally, there have been instances where Firefox has implemented a temporary, one-time tracker that transmits certain data to Google during the initial installation on Windows or Mac systems. Brave has also undoubtedly made such decisions as well but the point here is that Both Firefox AND Brave have made questionable decisions and to specifically dunk on brave just because it’s chromium is unfair in my opinion. That’s all, thanks for reading my post :)
No.
Brave is factually bad. It’s a failed attempt at monetization of users seeking some form of privacy in browsing. From the entire crypto integration with BAT tokens to the weird VPN stuff and more; it’s clear that the company who makes the browser is pivoting rapidly and iterating the software to make money from somewhere, somehow.
Brave does treat it’s users like a product, and the company has made privacy-impacting decisions. They are very clearly a for-profit company with a well known CEO who operates on a for-profit basis only and never on a non-profit basis. You cannot say that Brave is operated on a non-profit basis. The entire concept of the Brave browser itself is to enable monetization methods that users and privacy advocates clearly want to see depreciated.
Mozilla on the other hand; has only recently begun to take some weird steps. Given that their exclusive contract with Google is likely to be dissolved in courts; they are simply stuck in a financially challenging situation. At no point has Mozilla or Firefox actually done anything actively hostile to privacy or users. While Mozilla does make mistakes; nothing notably wrong that they’ve done has actively been anything but a simple mistake. They have not yet crossed the threshold into malicious profit motive as of yet. Although many privacy enthusiasts are watching Mozilla very closely for any sign of them crossing that line right now.
It has done some hostile things, such as having quite a bit of telemetry in it before hardening, or silently adding an ad attribution system. That’s why I would rather use a fork for a primary browser. What Brave has done is still more intrusive, though.
False.
The ad attribution system was proposed but never implemented due to user outcry.
Some telemetry has been a part of Firefox for quite some time now; but it has always been privacy respecting and they self-host all of it. In general you can easily turn most, if not all of it off. The telemetry thing has been around since before they even started seriously fast-cadence releases. Some of my memories of this date back to the Firefox 34 days even. None of the telemetry collected is mandatory, and it can be shut off in preferences as well as through advanced config; which is what most forks do if they don’t specifically rip the code out. You should read their source code sometime; it’s quite interesting.
I will however agree that Brave is way more intrusive than any misstep made by Mozilla in developing Firefox.
Yeah, absolutely agree that the two browsers’ actions don’t even compare. But I wouldn’t be defending FF either - for example, to my understanding, the PPA did make it into an actual update, and telemetry is not even all turned off by the basic toggles in the settings, with more being in about:config (part of the reason why hardening user.js exist).