- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- privacy@lemmy.ml
https://privacytests.org rate Brave as the best browser.
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Unless someone wants to disagree with me
All the code is opensource and no one has ever raised a privacy alarm in a merged pull request. There’s nothing to fear
What hasn’t been said as explicitly yet: It being Chromium-based means there’s tons of implementation details that are bad, which will not be listed in any such comparison table.
For example, the Battery Status web standard was being abused, so Mozilla removed their implementation: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/battery-status-api-being-removed-from-firefox-due-to-privacy-concerns/
Chromium-based browsers continue to be standards-compliant in this regard.And this is still quite a high-level decision. As a software engineer, I can attest that we make tiny design decisions every single day. I’d much rather have those design decisions made under the helm of a non-profit, with privacy as one of their explicit goals, than under an ad corporation.
And Brave shipping that ad corp implementation with just a few superficial patches + privacy-extensions is what us experts call: Lipstick on a pig.
God this is the answer I wanted. I could never put it all into words like you did. This answer, I’m stealing it.
From the JDLR dept… notice how brave is listed first, and passes every test (except a very few)
This report just looks biased. Even if it is totally legitimate, and many users have pointed out how it isn’t , it looks biased.
It looks like every sales pitch for a product where they list everything their product does and how it’s better than the other things.
I vote librewolf
I agree it can look biased, until you check the initial of each browser.
What comes out ? They are listed by name.
No it isn’t. It’s just listed in alphabetical order. It’s not bias lol. People will see evil intent where just to confirm their own biases and beliefs.
Please forgive me, I’m going to keep asking this everywhere I can until hopefully get an answer.
I love librewolf and I want to use it, but I can’t get it to render the symbols that some websites use to make their UI work. I’ve tried downloading fonts but they’re all mapped to private use area. I think they need to be downloaded on a per website basis but librewolf seems to categorically refuse.
I really want to stop using brave and I honestly don’t want to figure out arkenfox.
Since LibreWolf is libre software, it’s likely that a user has freedom to tweak this maybe via about:config. You just need to ask this directly in the LibreWolf community.
I think I know what you’re talking about, though. Perhaps CSS @font-face is forbidden, because many sites use Google fonts, which allows them to track you.
If Tor Browser is acceptable, give it a try. While TB too has very strict font restrictions to avoid finger-printing (so that a remote site may not know which fonts your system already has), web fonts are allowed by default. It’s relatively harder to distinguish/track individual Tor users, since TB hides your real IP & by default cookies are per session only.
LibreWolf shows your real IP, so it’s understandable and reasonable that it wants to be more careful about fonts. Still a user should be given freedom to do whatever, at their own risk. That’s what free software is all about, after all. Just a thought…
I’m not sure I understand… The symbols?
Could you give an example?
Librewolf has stuff cranked down for a reason putting privacy before usability
And under misc. tests, neither Mullvad nor Tor are identified as being Tor enabled? Say what now?
it is not even true that “privacytests.org rate it as the best”, if you look close enough, librewolf is best rated, which is an amazing browser BTW.
Brave as a browser is fine for now.
But they’re crypto bros with concerning views and it’s just yet another chromium browser.
We really have an issue with the monoculture of web browsers.
Damn, it really is a monoculture! I knew about this problem for years, but this is the first time, I had someone call it out as ‘monoculture’. This is amazing, I’m stealing it!
The product isn’t all that bad, but the company behind it have proven they’re not trustworthy many times over.
Their search engine is great… Never used the browser though.
I’ve been trying out the engine for a few weeks now. At first I was impressed, and Goggles are a neat feature. But somehow the more I use it the more I realise how much I am going back to Bing or Google because Brave couldn’t show me even one useful result for a niche error or question. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but even using Reddit or forum Goggles sometimes it will show me only shitty article sites, more than Google does.
Recently tried moving from Chrome to Firefox, and found that on some websites, Firefox bogged down like I’d never seen it do on Chrome, to the point of making some sites like Mastodon Advanced Web interface, and Tumblr, unusable, no matter what I did. Downloaded Brave after seeing this post, imported all my settings, and both those above mentioned sites are behaving normally again, so until Google does something to break all chromium bases browsers I think I’ll be checking out Brave for a while, really wanted Firefox to work, but it just didn’t
Yeah, no such problem running Firefox here…
I suspect something else is going on there. I made that switch years ago and haven’t found a site that doesn’t play nice with Firefox in that time.
A sidebar on some service’s website wouldn’t scroll on Firefox and I got an arrogant response from the devs, basically “we test on Chrome and Safari, use a mainstream browser”. Too bad I didn’t know enough HTML back then to recreate the
divand report the issue to Mozilla.
Lol really? Working for me without any issues.
hopping on the bandwagon, firefox works fine for me on the mastodon advanced web interface. Maybe you could try waterfox or librewolf?
For further explanation of any point, please hit me up :)
- It is Chromium based
- It has used dubious methods in the past (replacing links with affiliate links, the whole ad/crypto thing, …)
- Brave’s business model relies on ads (I think)
- [This is a weak point, but at least in the privacy community, Brave isn’t super popular. It feels more geared towards the “hyped crypto early adopters”. [1] It might be “fine” for someone switching from Chrome (which is always a good thing) but going all the way would be a modded Firefox.]
TL;DR For most provacy concious Brave users, Brave is a step in their journey towards more privacy, and not the final destination.
[1] The “dumb AF tech youtubers” you mentioned in another post are typically the Brave hype crowd. This is not meant to discredit Brave; it’s just that a share of their users are this way.
I’ve been using Firefox for years, and recently switched over to Brave because it was able to provide a unique fingerprint result on EFF’s fingerprint tool. Even if I used the same plugins, Firefox had a unique fingerprint.
I ignore all the silly crypto and ad bs. Why should I use FF over Brave
FIngerprinting is not super easy. E.g. you might have a ‘unique’ fingerprint with FF but if it changes every time, than I would consider it actually a privacy feature. Did you have the same addons installed on BRave and FF while testing (as Addons play a part in Fingerprinting)? And finally: A lot of fingerprinting techniques can be blocked before they even start (no JS, …). I feel like your opinion is rather one-sided.
As to why FF> Brave: Basically the Chromium argument. Diverse engines are better for the health of the web.
My comment says I had the same plugins.
My comment says I used Firefox for years and now am trying brave. It cannot be less one sided.
Are you suggesting my Firefox fingerprint changes every time? Where is the info on that?
All good points but I’d like to point out that the first one is likely the biggest reason not to use it - it’s based on Chromium and continues to give Google/Chrome the browser market share to dictate the direction of the web.
Does anyone here use Cromite on Windows? If so, how did you “install” it?
I don’t use Brave simply because it’s too buggy. Half the websites I visit don’t load properly.
This isn’t an endorsement for brave, but the websites aren’t loading properly because they are full of the trash that brave blocks, not due to bugs in the browser.
That website is run by an employee of Brave, who rates the privacy of browsers based on their default settings (which Brave tends to perform best in). If browsers prompt the user to select their privacy settings on a first run, he scores them based as if the user had selected the worst privacy options.
If he actually spent a few minutes setting up each browser, as is always recommended within the privacy community, that table will look a lot different. But then Brave wouldn’t stand out as much…
That website is run by an employee of Brave
Like, for real? That’s kinda funny.
He’s launching a self-test tool, for anyone to use. It’s still unfinished (last time I checked), but tweaking some values doesn’t make a huge amount of difference. Where it does, he included a Browsers similar to those settings, pre applied (eg: Librewolf, Mullvad Browser). Plus by that logic you should also test Brave on Aggressive mode, which by default, is set to Standard.
almost nobody does that though. And after a certain amount of time even power users are like “yeah. f* it”. So default settings ARE important imo
They are, but when you explicitly have to go through the options you probably won’t select the weaker ones.
The owner being a homophobe would be reason enough for me even without the crypto/affiliate link scandals
The author of the site works for Brave. The results need to be taken with a grain of salt. Is is more private than Chrome? Absolutely. Is it the best browser for privacy? Ehhh…
People don’t like the creator of Brave because he’s supposedly anti-trans. He donated to some anti-trans political group iirc.
The browser also has some crypto stuff (web advertisment replacement, block chain based decentralized browser sync), and a lot of people hate crypto these days.
Personally I think it’s a good browser, the web needs advertising revenue to function and it’s solution to replacing web ads with optional browser ads that still pay the websites you visit seems like a decent solution. I respect the push to use a non-chromium browser, but personally I rely too much on browser tab groups to use anything Firefox based.
To anyone wondering about the whole “homophobe thing”, here is a (hopefully neutral? If you have different sources please share them as well!) wiki link to the drama.
I respect the push to use a non-chromium browser, but personally I rely too much on browser tab groups to use anything Firefox based.
Out of interest, are your needs not covered by Simple Tab Groups or Tree Style Tab? Both are monitored by Mozilla as “Recommended Extensions”.
I’ve tried both of those, tree style tabs kinda works, but isn’t ideal. It’s also not an option on mobile at all, and I prefer to use the same browser for mobile and desktop for tab sync/etc.
I used Firefox on desktop and mobile for a few months this past year, but never got as nice of a work flow going as I had with Brave. Then a Firefox update for mobile broke the browser for a week or two (crashed on launch, resetting app data/reinstalling didn’t help) and I went back to Brave, and realized how much I missed tab grouping and some other stuff.
I’m keeping Firefox installed, and I’d be happy to switch back someday if tab grouping gets ported over.
It wasn’t specifically anti-trans, it was donating to a cause looking to block same sex marriage as a whole, which obviously isn’t any better
