this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Privacy

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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 :)

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[–] No_Bark@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 hours ago

Both Firefox AND Brave have made questionable decisions>

Yes, but is incredibly disingenuous to equate those mistakes as the same. Firefox has never installed shit on a users computer without consent from the user. Brave has - you know, the same way malware would.

[–] SilliusMaximus@mander.xyz 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Even though I don't use chromium-based web browsers because of its monopoly, it would be nice if we could integrate brave shields into ungoogled chromium so people wouldn't have to deal with all bloat and surprises from Brave

[–] Biyoo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 18 hours ago

Brave is such a pain, always adding features nobody wants, trying everything they can to get a penny out of their users.

Firefox- yeah Mozilla is making questionable decisions. But it's the best we have.

[–] Peffse@lemmy.world 69 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No, after Brave installed a service level running VPN without my consent, and continued to reinstall it silently every background update even after removal, it's a bad browser. That's what malware does.

Comparing two companies with poor track records doesn't make them good companies when compared to each other.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Just pasting more info for those that were concerned, like me:

Issue. This was rolled back and only seemed to affect Windows.

(I don't use Brave as a daily driver, but it's my Chromium browser of choice when I need assess if a website is really broken, or if it's just misbehaving on Firefox.)

[–] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The issue with this is that it's a part of an overall picture - that Brave sees nothing wrong with violating users' boundaries. Brave 100% needs forks that would disable or remove weird non-consensual things added silently in updates, like what Librewolf is to Firefox, except Brave imo pushes the boundaries even more.

[–] ReakDuck@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 hours ago

There was a fork, from students which got silenced with legal letters because they named the fork Braver-Browser and its a copyright to copy the name.

[–] Peffse@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you are using Windows, double-check your services.msc to ensure that the VPN was disabled/removed. After I got tired of fighting, I uninstalled Brave and the uninstaller did not remove the VPN service. So I have my doubts the patch would remove it.

[–] 37x4H0nUPx0s@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

What's the name of the program I'm looking for?

I don't think I've had their VPN installed (I use FF, Librewolf and Mullvad 99.99% of the time), but I do have Brave installed as a 4th option and have only used it a few times, so I'd like to make sure their VPN wasn't installed at some point.

In Services, I only see three Brave entries. Two are for keeping it up to date, and the other provides elevated privileges.

Thanks

[–] Peffse@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

It was a few years back that I dumped Brave and had to perform the surgery to remove the service manually. I can't remember the name exactly, but this article says "Brave VPN Service" and "Brave VPN Wireguard Service". You sound like you don't have it installed.

[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 41 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] lev@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 hours ago

librewolf & tor browser combo is solid

[–] darkguyman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 day ago

Can't argue with that.

[–] unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de 33 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's pretty fair to dunk on Brave because it's Chromium. I don't want the biggest ad company in the world having the monopoly on how we see the Internet, and Brave perpetuates that.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Right? Why doesn't everybody see how obviously powerful it is to be THE main browser engine and thus how every single Chromium installation and further usage solidify the position of dominance, and thus to dictate the future of the Web (no less!) that it gives to a gigantic corporation? A corporation so big it is at risk of being split in pieces as it was ruled just literally weeks ago that Google had formed an illegal monopoly in its ad business?

Come on people, don't be fucking naive of course it's bad! Of course we SHOULD dunk on Brave and every other browsers doing the same!

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 17 points 1 day ago

firefox at minimum clears the very low bar of not exposing casual user to crypto

[–] coconut@programming.dev 18 points 1 day ago

People miss the fact that we can tell when one of them make a questionable decision which is what matters the most.

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just remember that Mozilla is a seperate entity to Firefox.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 2 points 2 hours ago

Yes it is a maxi pad absorbing all that Google money to ensure that firefox developers don't do anything Google doesn't like

Classic parasite Behavior

and nor

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