Please, do not use Brave.
Please, do not use Brave.
I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL's. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I'd say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don't mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
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Does this all matter though? Afaik the browser if fully open source, even the crypto stuff so all the shady stuff would be detected (and has as in your examples). Like all of the issues you linked at this point are years in the past. I don't use Brave personally but it being completely FOSS is a huge plus even if the company itself might be weird. On the other hand you have something like Vivaldi that looks like "the good guys" but you'll always have to trust them as well because they're not fully open source.
I use FF but you just cannot deny that using a Chromium based browser has many security advantages over Gecko, especially on mobile. I takes Mozilla seemingly years and years to implement security features like Chromium. They don't put the necessary priority behind this.
Using Chromium at all is supporting Google's dominance over the market. If you want to support a company that has taken advantage of its users, and committed actual crimes while doing so, be my guest. This post is a recommendation, not a rule.
Using Chromium at all is supporting Google’s dominance over the market
Of course it does but that is a moot point and a different discussion altogether. It doesn't change the fact that Brave is fully open source, even their shitty stuff and that it's better for privacy than using a proprietary browser like people here suggest. It also doesn't change that Chromium has a better security model than Gecko.
I personally right now prefer FF (Librewolf and Mull) for different reasons still. The Chromium dominance is...well it is what it is. Definitely not the reason why I use FF. It's a losing battle. FF has been losing users forever now. The few % market share it still has will not change that Google is going to "win". When the EU forces Apple to open up iOS for Chromium the last "wall" that is in the way of total Chromium dominance will fall. FF will not do anything about that except just exist until either too many websites break or someone does something about Google controlling Chromium. Until then I'll just choose whichever browser fits my needs in terms of FOSS, privacy but also features. Right now FF is good enough despite them lacking behind in security (severely even on mobile) and I'm happy to use it.