The Brave web browser has carved out a niche over the past few years as an alternative to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and other mainstream web browsers. Some of that has come from its marketing as a privacy-preserving web browser, and it has also been repeatedly evangelized by cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse.
Do not use Brave. It’s a Chrome skin from a slimy company peddling crypto schemes, building an ad network, hijacking the URLS you type to get affiliate money, ran by a homophobe. There are so many better and less sleazy alternatives.
Use those instead.
I prefer not to use browsers based on the blink engine. But then again, most of my browsing is in the terminal anways.
I find the discourse around Brendon very distasteful. We encounter people with different political views in our lives and we should still strive to work together. As far as I know from the story he made a donation. That doesn’t make him a homophobe, no really it doesn’t. It’s the complete opposite to my own view where marriage shouldn’t be something officiated by the state at all. Prop 8 passed but that doesn’t mean 52% of those voters are homophobic. Some will be of course but the majority just hold what some of us consider outdated views on marriage. It is not a hateful position.
Brendon was ousted from Mozilla and since then they’ve had a leadership who care more about paying themselves a fat cheque than about Firefox. So you have one person who held a political belief you disagreed with who cared about the product and never (to my knowledge) made company decisions that were harmful to the groups he is supposedly biased against. Or you have someone who pays lip service to whatever and runs the organisation into the ground while paying themselves millions and does layoffs, causing real harm.
> It is not a hateful position.
You might want to run this by someone who was actually affected by it. Prop 8 wasn’t about the abstract institution of marriage so much as it was about things like hospital visitation rights, taxes, and health insurance. The religious right wing knows that these are important mechanisms of social control. Eich is a wealthy, politically active homophobe who donated because he believes queer peoples’ public existence is ungodly and should be hidden. His opinions weren’t just a thing happening in his own head – they did real world harm. You should talk to people for whom this issue has real and serious consequences. You will learn things that will likely change your mind.
The incompetence of mozilla’s leadership has no bearings on the issue either. And it doesn’t change how scummy Brave is as a corporate entity.
Sorry but I don’t believe you. California has had civil unions way before the whole same-sex marriage debacle, and it has (at least to my knowledge) provided same-sex couples the same rights as people in normal wedlock. According to Wikipedia hospital visitation rights were actually one of the very first privileges that civil union guaranteed.
Maybe stop listening to political lobbyists. Both sides always lie.
Wait, then what was the reason for wanting marriage to be legal?
I understand the cultural aspect, wanting to have someone as a spouse instead of a partner. I understand that in at least some places civil unions were unable to adopt but married couples could. Both reasons are valid.
Other than that, all I could find was it looks like there is the issue where a civil marriage can be 100% the same as a marriage in one state, but then the rules can change by moving to another state where the distinction between the two can be VERY different. A marriage removes that from being an issue.
California provided civil unions, but California law recognized same-sex marraige from other jurisdictions, so even if same-sex couples couldn’t get married under state law, if they were married in jurisdictions that allowed it, California would continue to recognize it and all the rights that came with marriage. (At the time of Prop 8’s passing, only Massachusetts allowed gay marriage in the US, but a few countries in Europe had already legalized it)
Prop 8 would have thus denied all those rights that come with marriage to people who might have been married in other parts of the world, including native California residents that would travel to Massachusetts to get married and have their marriage recognized in California.
Beyond that, having civil unions for gay people but legal marriage for straight people reeks of “Separate but Equal”
And you should know by now that “Separate but equal” is inherently unequal.
I don’t really like Brave, as I prefer Firefox, but I do like Brendon, and his courageous political views in the midst of the woke tsunami. Just because of that, I he’s got a good point! Now, regardless on how much I dislike Mozilla’s political views, I still believe their browser being the “less worst”.
Best advice (to anyone). Think first…. then write.
I am fully aware of Brave issues but consider Raspberry Pi desktop users. Firefox and Vivaldi are both way too slow and in case of Mozilla there are constant issues with video acceleration albeit 116 seems to be partially working (H.264 only). No Chrome/Edge/Opera at all for ARM Linux. Pale Moon is available but it equals to Firefox 52. And since vanilla Chromium has no sync, there is no other sane option for Raspberry Pi desktop if you need to sync with other devices.
So… stop using Brave, and use a browser that is tracks you harder then the FBI tracks trumps underpants.
So… stop using Brave because you want to attack someone based on thier personal beliefs and world view.
So… stop using Brave even though I dont’ use it and dont’ care anyway? What is this non article political message it definitely doesn’t belong on OsNews?
Ironically of all the browsers mentioned in this article the only one that values it’s users over data collection is Brave.
I don’t see why I or anyone else shouldn’t use a particular piece of software just because you don’t think people should have any political freedom.
There is extremely little in the article related to political freedom, and even less in Thom’s summary.
What is your opinion on the other, technical reasons to not use Brave?
The technical reasons seem to avoid are good ones, however I doubt many will read that far, given that an irrelevant and frankly silly reason is given first, and that generally most such articles are written with the more important issues preceding the less important ones. It would be a more persuasive article if the political nonsense was removed.
I use Brave Browser on Android because I want a Chrome-based browser that blocks ads. It works well enough and I won’t risk trashing my Android phone by rooting it in order to install an OS-level ad-blocker.
It’s very sad that also in technological arena there are positions based on political or related views.
When Hans Reiser murdered his wife, I didn’t stop to user ReiserFS (even if I had immediately clear that it’s future would be over) or changed my mind about how brilliant was his work.
Now I have to stop a pretty decent browser (that’s also very useful on RPI as already someone has stated) because one of the CEO of the company supported economically a motion in California to save traditional marriage.. without doing ANYTHING bad apart having a position that it’s not a woke-view? What a madness? We are now in a 1984 world? What’s happening?