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.
I always find myself coming back to Vivaldi. Extremely customizable browser. Yes, it’s chromium-based like so many others, but I like it a lot and it’s always gaining fun new features. I keep Firefox as a backup, but often have (relatively minor) performance issues with Firefox, particularly on Android.
Vivaldi is closed source though, so I personally distrust it more than I distrust Brave.
If Vivaldi was FOSS then that might change things, but it isn’t.
ETA: I felt I should mention I am a bit of a hypocrite here as my preferred Lemmy client (Boost) isn’t FOSS, but I am too used to Boost when I still used Reddit, so any other client just doesn’t feel right.
Vivaldi is closed source but still source available, so it can still be examined.
Just looked into it. If that closed source bit only has GUI stuff and has no tracking bits, which is what they claim, then it is probably alright. They mentioned something about community deobfuscation for theming based modding being alright with them (Which is really excellent! Props to the Vivaldi team for outright saying it’s chill to technically break their TOS for customization), so if the GUI code has been fully deobfuscated and no tracking things found in it I would probably trust it more than Brave.
Honestly, I don’t have a huge problem personally with closed source if I know it doesn’t have tracking stuff, but unfortunately companies have lots of incentive to lie and mislead about that.
If Chrome didn’t have a monopoly, and if I knew they didn’t have tracking stuff, I would very strongly consider switching from Firefox, because in my limited experience trying Vivaldi a while back, it is really great, and I love how customizable it is.
To each their own. Everyone is a hypocrite about something. 😉
I use Boost too! Good stuff.