• Manu@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    44
    ·
    3 days ago

    I don’t usually take the software creator’s ideology into account if it works well on my computer. However, I stopped using Brave when I found out that it’s a company funded by Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir and one of the most toxic investors around today. The combination of Brendan Eich and Peter Thiel has now pushed me past the point where I can separate software from its creator’s ideology.

    • lepinkainen@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      3 days ago

      I don’t think “toxic” covers the kind of evil Peter Thiel.

      An actor with mildly spicy views on stuff is “toxic”.

      Thiel bought a fucking Vice President and got him to do a 180 on his views on Trump.

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        2 days ago

        Technically the order was:

        Buy

        180 on views

        Make him VP

        He didn’t really buy a ready-made VP, he groomed him.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        20
        ·
        3 days ago

        This is the guy that Epstein sent an email to saying:

        “Finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain.”

        3 days before Brexit vote. Peter Thiel is named over 2,200 times in the Epstein files, confirming their extensive correspondence.

        And Thiel did nothing but sabotage society for finding the next bargain. He’s a caricature super villain from James Bond, that should be at the bottom of a volcano somewhere not funding web browsers.

    • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 days ago

      Brave Browser: “Privacy Forward”

      Funded by Peter Thiel of Palantir, the most un-privacy corporation that ever pravacied.

      That math ain’t mathing for me.

      As others mentioned, Thiel is basically a cartoon supervillain. There’s definitely something more sinister at play that he’s trying to accomplish with this “privacy forward” web browser. Not sure exactly what it is, but I don’t trust it for a fucking second.

  • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    2 days ago

    BTW if you want to free yourself from Brendan Eich completely, you can’t. he made Javascript.

  • Dzheyk@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    3 days ago

    Just wanted to say thanks, this spurred me to swap over to Zen until I hear how that one is also terrible for me however far down the road.

    • bizarroland@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      51
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      4 days ago

      Well, I would recommend waterfox over firefox because waterfox has just straight up removed any AI stuff rather than giving you the option to opt out of it.

        • HellieSkellie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          21
          ·
          4 days ago

          ~ish, waterfox is reconfigured firefox. They have a single button sync on first launch to clone your firefox data over, it took me like 60 seconds to swap everything over. And you get a lot more than just removing AI from firefox, it’s essentially a preconfigured firefox. Removes a lot of telemetry and analytic stuff, strict-enforces better security protocols, prettier layout and stuff.

          It doesn’t really buy you any new functionality, but it’s way quicker to just use waterfox than it is to spend hours configuring the weird shit like private DNS in firefox.

        • jello@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          4 days ago

          I agree, but also Waterfox just generally has a more free/unmonitozed default and the AI stuff is just an example. It’s a one-time switch to Waterfox and it’ will forever turn off/on the stuff that you would otherwise have to do manually.

    • imjustmsk@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      14
      ·
      4 days ago

      You can maybe try Ladybird (most websites is kinds usable now I guess)

      • atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        25
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 days ago

        the lead developer for ladybird had a controversy regarding transphobia though

        while checking to see if anything happened regarding the controversy, i found that the same person that claimed that suggesting using gender neutral pronouns instead of assuming the reader was a man was advertising personal politics, the lead developer for ladybird, also complained about white men being actively discriminated against in tech and said he hopes “many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.” regarding the death of Charlie Kirk

        i was going to link sources for everything here, but this article has all of them already and its easier to have a single link

        • imjustmsk@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          6
          ·
          4 days ago

          Ohh yes, obviously not in the condition to daily drive, and you need to compile from source.

          • HellieSkellie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            ·
            4 days ago

            ight straight up what is the use case for ladybird? Who do you think is going to “try” it?

            It doesn’t work yet - there’s not really a reason to “use” it unless you’re going to try and develop it

    • jimmy90@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      7
      ·
      3 days ago

      i tell you what, i’ll keep an eye on the brave usage numbers and if they keep heading up because it’s such a great browser i’ll keep it under my hat

      deal?

  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    If you don’t use Firefox (or webkit) you want Google to control the entire web. Simple as that.

  • switcheroo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 days ago

    Yeah. I stopped using it when I heard about the bigotry. Fuck that. Easily replaceable garbage browser.

  • MrSulu@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    3 days ago

    I stopped using Brave for Peter Thiel reasons. Using Librespped, Mullvad browser, Zen browser and Helium. Helium isn’t fully finished, but looking amazing. I like options

  • Evotech@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    4 days ago

    Brave has ran a bunch of youtube ads. Like raid shadow legends style. That’s how I know it’s a shit browser

  • auzy1@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 days ago

    I liked the idea of the crypto thing they implemented originally, so I opened a wallet… Actually ended up costing me money. Never made ANY crypto from it

    Happy to stick to Firefox. Been using it since the original betas when they added proper theming and addons.

  • Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 days ago

    I need a Chromium-based Android browser for a few particular sites that don’t work in Waterfox. Whet do you nice folk recommend?

  • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    4 days ago

    Shocking number of people under-informed about browsers here.

    Brave just released a $60 paid (except on Linux Desktop) version without bloat. It worked barely OK in the first place, but didn’t obfuscate all of your browser fingerprint. It spoofed fonts, that was its major innovation.

    Only Tor truly anonymizes web traffic. This is not opinion, this is fact.

    LibreWolf, Mullvad, and hardened FF help, but they all give their own fingerprints. As does Vivaldi and Floorp.

    Personally, I cycle through all 7 of these. Only things tied to my name on stock FF. Everything else gets its own different browser private mode and VPN location.

    Use whatever you want, but understand that unless you’re on Tor or spreading your risk across multiple tools, it’s trivial for Google to triangulate you across the web.

    • adr1an@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      3 days ago

      Thanks. Very good comment, I agree… And yet…

      Ironically, not being on what most people are using (stock Chrome without extensions) is already a fingerprint. And tor browser, even if it is providing anonymity, is also a huge fingerprint on itself, by blocking all the fingerprinting stuff…

      The irony is lost the moment you come up with a proper threat model upon which you base the decisions of what security and privacy measures are going to be taken for a given online activity.

      I really liked (and used it for quite a while) that extension, Ad Nauseam, that would actually follow behind scenes all ads and shit…

      • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        3 days ago

        This is a bit like the “If you’re not doing anything, you have nothing to hide” argument. You’re thinking this is an all or nothing position, and it’s very much not. It depends on one’s threat model, but there’s two sides to the coin worth considering.

        First, that your entire life is open to anyone with money. Individuals so motivated can spend a couple grand and buy your advertising data and stalk you. Everything you think, every little whim, every random question, is used to build a profile on you that benefits someone else financially. All you get is free email and a mediocre browser from a billion-dollar company that derives an average of $1,600 from you a year if you’re in the US ? You can pay for those services for a tenth of that. So you’re 90% profit to Google.

        On the flip side, by giving up so much high-value data, that profile becomes active in real time. Even if you use ad blockers and don’t see the ads (which as a Chrome user, you no longer can do). You are an active target by companies. Not just you, everyone around you. Friends, family, coworkers. For some big ticket items, advertisers will target anyone connected to your profile. So your parents, your kids, your neighbors, might start to get ads about a cruise. Not for them, but for you, since it looks like you might be a good mark for a cruise. These companies manipulate people around you to be the ads, so that when you bring up “we’re thinking about doing a cruise” at some point, everyone around you jumps in with the same “oh, well I’ve heard that XYZ Cruise company is good.”

        You trust a company that much to manipulate you and everyone around you without bias? With your best interests in mind? You want to cede your agency as a human to real-time auctions?

        Personally, this is fundamentally abhorrent to me. And I understand that other people are fine with this. However, I’d rather leave a small and bland trail of a few occasional and useless crumbs, and then leave “redacted” as a middle finger because that deprives Google and Meta of using me as a revenue source. The nice part is that even partially masking your footprint and traffic, it’s enough to break the real-time value of you as an individual. So not only does every little bit help, every little bit has effects to protect you and your family.

      • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 days ago

        i2p is a separate network entirely, and part of that is routing your traffic to someone else’s connection. So your exit node is someone else’s laptop or server. And you’re letting other people doing who knows what else use your connection as an exit node. Which, for me, is an absolute deal breaker. I don’t trust other people online to let them use my connection.