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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • 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.


  • I don’t think Brave can “hide” these infos. At most you could try to spoof them somehow to something else. If you would hide them, that inherently would make you stick out as well since the website would see that you’re hiding stuff :D

    You would have to make your Brave browser look exactly like the Tor browser from a websites point of view to blend in. No clue if that is actually possible. A website can read surprisingly a lot of system information from your browser.


  • So if you may change some configs, you mayyy be fingerprintable.

    You are fingerprintable either way unless you go all out. Going full on Arkenfox/Librewolf mode (with all settings enabled that decrease convenience) you can at most fool naive fingerprinting. For the more advanced one you need Tor.

    And even for naive fingerprinting, unless you use Tor or a VPN (which you would have to trust) your IP alone + the fact that you use FF (which a few % of people worldwide do) along with some other basic info about your PC will make you very unique.


  • Doesn’t that kinda defeat half of Tors purpose though? Tor works best when you have a large crowd that all looks the same. Using Brave or any other browsers makes you stick out like a sore thumb because most likely not many people do this. This is the reason why the Tor people recommend only ever using the Tor browser and also not install any other extensions onto it and so on.

    If you don’t care about that, that’s fine but then you don’t really need Tor either way.


  • If that was a prerequisite to use or trust open source software than most FOSS stuff would be worthless. It is not however. Many people like to use Linux but probably have not read the whole source code. Doesn’t matter, there’s plenty people that do and being open by nature is just more transparent. If they do something shady someone will most likely see it. With closed source software that is not the case.



  • The security aspect really. FF on Android has terrible security compare to Chromium and Mozilla is making really slow progress it seems. Fission is still not enabled on mobile despite being on desktop for years. And even then it seems the sandboxing on FF desktop is just not considered quite as robust as Chromiums. Doesn’t matter much though because on mobile FF has none of that.

    I still personally also use Mull but that is something to keep in mind. Brave has all of that because it has the Chromium base of course.



  • Stahlreck@feddit.chtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlPlease, do not use Brave.
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    1 year ago

    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.


  • I know it’s probably an unpopular view, but I’ve found it to be true a lot.

    It’s not. It’s the same reason why Linux is everywhere that isn’t specifically consumer oriented and front facing. Even most UIs that are designed to mimic Windows are made by tech nerds like us who just assume the users don’t know what they want. But they do, they’re used to what they know. That’s about it. It doesn’t help to say “the Windows UI is garbage anyway”, it just needs to work and feel familiar. I’m sure Linux could actually slowly take off if there was significant effort put into making it as straight forward as Windows on the front end but nobody really cares about that.