Hi. Not sure where to post this, hopefully it fits here. If you haven’t heard of Brave browser by now, it’s made by the ex-CEO of Mozilla, and is prided on being private, and integrates crypto/bitcoin.

I like the idea of crypto, and would like to get more into crypto/blockchain, but I’m not sure I can support brave, or it’s CEO. Do I swallow my pride and just use Brave? Would it be worth it, just for the privacy additions and crypto?

One reason I’m hesitant, is Firefox now has site-to-site cookie protection, whereas Brave does not. Mostly, I’m arguing with myself at this point, on whether to use Brave, and swallow my pride. Sure, as CEO of Mozilla, he made a bad political call. People can grow, right? Someone rebutted to me that Obama didn’t support gay marriage either, and neither did Hillary Clinton.

Sorry to harp on this topic so much. What would y’all do?

Sidenote: A breadtuber I really like uses brave, so Brave can’t be all that bad?

  • themoonisacheese
    1·
    11 months ago

    For starters, brave is chromium. If you care about the open web at all, you should get firefox, end of discussion. It’s also not particularly good at being private, especially considering that whenever chromium stops supporting manifestv2, brave will have to either support it themselves or use manifestv3. This is generally true of all features that enable privacy and are being eroded by google (see: cookies phaseout and ad profiles phase in, web integrity).

    If you like the idea of crypto, I suggest you watch the YouTube essay “line goes up”. If you’re still interested in crypto beyond “the idea is cool, I guess” then I still suggest you get firefox and an appropriate crypto wallet extension. Last I checked the standard was metamask but it might have changed since.

    Any youtuber you see talking about brave have been paid handsomely to tell you to use it. Do not fall for advertising, and exercise level-headed judgement.

    Is the browser good? No, not really. Any and all of its demarcating features, you can get on all others with a few extensions.

    Is it still a good idea to support it despites the ceo being a raging bigot? At this point why even do that (btw the Obama points do not stand here, because he is irrelevant to this conversation; this is textbook whataboutism).

    Similarly, you could choose to pay J.k. Rowling for her books, and support a very vocal transphobe that has stated outright that she’s using the money she makes to further her agenda, or you could buy and read better books, such as the discworld series. At this point choosing Harry Potter over a better series is choosing transphobia, and choosing brave over a better browser not made by a nutjob is choosing the nutjob’s side.