This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Reminds me of a joke:
My dad always warned us about Septic Tank Steve, and that we should never pay him to do anything, and we should have listened. One day Steve came by and said if we gave him a nickel, he'd swim around in the septic tank. We thought that was hilarious, so we gave him a nickel, and he swam around the tank a while. Then he came and sat next to us on the porch and said "If you want me to leave, gimme $100."
Can we agree that Brave:
Is scummy.
Has a shady ceo, and a shady history.
Is possibly a security risk.
Is still orders of magnitude better than using Google Chrome.
And that:
This headline is both true and clickbait-ish.
You can turn these things off in Brave’s settings, for free.
That doesn’t make this feature not scummy.
Basically no one should be using Brave, but no one should be using Google Chrome either, yet here we are.
And the revolving door of “best unabandoned Chromium fork to use” (Helium for the moment, or Ungoogled Chromium if you don’t mind some broken features, just to name two), is buried under so much SEO that it’s legitimately difficult to research.
So… I’m not gonna go out of my way to flame Brave users. If they’re trying to do better than Chrome, good! Not-Google is good. They can pay for this I guess. I’m not installing Brave, though, I’m not recommending it, and this certainly isn’t making me want to.
use vivaldi if you want a chromium browser. its very customizable
Vivaldi concerns me a little, because I keep catching them trying to replace web addresses for major retailers with what appear to be affiliate links. For example, if I start typing the address for Amazon (I know, shitty company, but it's the first page that comes to mind) it will pop up an auto complete to click on. If I click it, I can see that I'm redirected to Amazon through what appears to be either an affiliate or a tracking link. However, if I type the address fully in the browser and don't use auto complete it takes me straight to Amazon, no redirecting or strange links popping up first. They do not disclose that they are doing this anywhere that I have found and I think it's shady as fuck. I don't have any extensions installed and it happens on multiple devices (phone, laptop, PC) and only on Vivaldi, so it's definitely the browser and not an untrustworthy extension or a compromised device.
Brave Origin's main feature isn't what it adds but what it removes: it scraps email aliases, Leo AI, the VPN tool, the Brave Wallet implementation, and Speedreader, just to name a few features. You can either download a browser with all of those disabled, or you can upgrade your Brave browser with a panel that lets you tweak what ones you want to keep.
The top comment on that site says you can already disable all of these features from within the settings. Is this true?
I don't mind paying a fee for a browser. It's a lot of development time and I use it a lot. But not like this, and not brave.
I donated to firefox and mozilla until i leanred about the payment of the CEO. I will die on the firefox hill but the company has to change.
I don't use Brave, and don't recommend it to people, but it seems like the $60 is intended as a donation/"vote-with-your-wallet on how we monetize" type product rather than something that is actually worth that much.
It doesn't change all of the OTHER problems with Brave, but it might be a step in the right direction when it comes to monetization? Pay once vs. LLM/crypto/injected ads
https://account.brave.com/?intent=checkout&product=origin
Brave Origin is a paid version of the browser for users who don't need all the features that support Brave as a business, but still want the privacy that only Brave offers. Origin users will continue to benefit from our industry-leading privacy, adblock, and speed (via Shields), as well as regular software updates, Chromium patches, and security and privacy improvements. Origin is available on desktop and mobile versions 1.91.x and above.
- Support our mission & open-source work
- Minimalist browser UI centered on Brave Shields
- Maintain core adblock, privacy, & speed
- One-time purchase can be activated multiple times across all your devices
