Brave Software has announced plans to deprecate the 'Strict' fingerprinting protection mode in its privacy-focused Brave Browser because it causes many sites to function incorrectly.
  • Flori
    197•5 months ago

    Your friendly reminder that the Brave CEO is Mozillas old CEO, who was fired from Mozilla for being unapologetically homophobic.

    • @[email protected]
      24•5 months ago

      Worse than merely being homophobic, as he financially supported politicians and causes that worked to prevent equal rights.

      • BolexForSoup
        29•5 months ago

        Then you can not act on it and those of us who care about such things can. Does that bother you?

        • AnonTwo
          -30•5 months ago

          I mean it’s derailed the entire thread so pretty much nobody is talking about the removed feature anymore.

          • BolexForSoup
            27•5 months ago

            Are you seriously complaining about different comment threads within a post? That is literally how this works. Anybody who wants to talk about the feature is welcome to. You are not restricted to one thread at a time.

            Be real, you just don’t like the critique of brave.

            • AnonTwo
              -20•5 months ago

              I mean, it’s more like I wanted to see more discussion about brave. It’s not even like it’s talking about things the CEO specifically did to the browser, it’s just talking about the CEO.

              And yeah I’m complaining about different threads in a post, when 3 comments are about the browser and like 15 are about the CEO.

              If you have something to say negative about brave from this feature, that’s cool, but I’m not seeing it.

              • BolexForSoup
                15•5 months ago

                You are spending more time than anybody discussing this. The person wrote one short comment and here you are going back and forth still. If you want to talk about the removed feature then talk about the removed feature! Nobody stopping you my dude

                • @[email protected]
                  -12•5 months ago

                  If you’re a real person then you’re very unlikable and antisocial

                  If you’re a shill against Brave then you’re bad at your job. I’m going to check Brave out now because of your offensive and unlikable behavior

      • YeetPics
        29•5 months ago

        technical issues

        Well technically the CEO would have an issue with you if you were gay

        Lmao

        • AnonTwo
          -15•5 months ago

          Wait why are you on the privacy community when you don’t care about the parts that are specifically related to privacy?

            • AnonTwo
              1•5 months ago

              Uhhh…that’s not a meme, as the other guy said it’s virtue signalling. I don’t even know why you would fallback on it being a meme since people generally agreed with what you said.

              If anything I think that makes you sound like an ass but that’s just me.

          • RandoCalrandian
            -27•5 months ago

            For those oh so super valuable virtue signal points, as if most of the services and products they use weren’t created with slave labor and run by people who’ve done far worse

    • Engywuck
      -89•5 months ago

      He wasn’t fired. He voluntarily left. And thus Mozilla is left with an incompetent CEO whose only aim is to increase her paycheck year after year, despite pathetic market share results for FF. Enjoy that.

      That said, nobody cares about your “friendly remainders”. We’re talking about software here, not politics.

      And, to stay on topic, yes, it happened to me that Strict FP broke some website, in particular those displaying a frame with a map or similar stuff. So I’ve resorted to use “standard” FP myself.

      • @[email protected]
        82•5 months ago

        nobody cares about your “friendly remainders”. We’re talking about software here, not politics.

        Nah. I care. You dont speak for me. I cant tell if you’re a shill for Brave or a MAGAt or both.

        • RandoCalrandian
          -43•5 months ago

          Wow. The internet must be really rough for you if people don’t wear labels so you know who to hate before learning a damn thing about them!

          • @[email protected]
            24•5 months ago

            Yeah, it’s terrible when an entire group of people are discriminated against for a label.

            …

        • Engywuck
          -50•5 months ago

          I’m not a shill for Brave. It has its fair share of technical issues but it’s the less worse browser for my use case (better than FF, anyway). Your (or mine) opinion on the CEO has nothing to do with the technical issue discussed in OP’s link.

          And no, what MAGA are you talking about? I’m not even 'murican. Take your meds, dude.

        • AnonTwo
          -51•5 months ago

          I mean, you can grandstand all you want while you have no platforms to safely do it on. Pretty sure having working products for privacy is more important to activism than one guy being an asshole.

            • @[email protected]
              41•5 months ago

              Yeah that’s rarely the only trait someone has that I find objectionable. Homophobia tends to come in a cluster with other shithead opinions

            • AnonTwo
              -22•5 months ago

              I’m…honestly surprised you can be on lemmy when you damn products over singular people. Just cause I know there’s people who have tried to dissuade others from lemmy over the developers. And in that case the people involved are even closer to the code than a CEO would be.

              • @[email protected]
                15•5 months ago

                If someone gets fired for being a piece of shit and then hired somewhere else it’s pretty fair to assume that company isn’t great. As they presumably knew that when they hired him and didn’t care.

                It’s also the person running the company not some random employee.

                • AnonTwo
                  -3•5 months ago

                  Okay

                  But in this entire discussion we haven’t even tied him or his homophobia to the feature change this article is discussing.

              • unalivejoyEnglish
                3•5 months ago

                That’s the entire reason most of us are on Lemmy. Fuck spez.

                • AnonTwo
                  1•5 months ago

                  I mean yeah, but Spez we know for a fact actually did something.

            • RandoCalrandian
              -28•5 months ago

              🤔 look, I’m not defending bigotry….

              But an aggressive homophobe seems like the type to be highly motivated to care deeply about working privacy tools these days

              So who exactly do you trust?

      • @[email protected]
        8•5 months ago

        Do you hate the Brave CEO for doing the same thing as the Mozilla CEO, but with even less restraint?

        Or are you just whining in hopes that nobody will question whether you’re being a hypocrite

        • Engywuck
          -16•5 months ago

          Yawn… I’m tired of this shit. You people are really ridiculous. I’m going to just block you. Enjoy your cognitive dissonance and your virtue signaling.

        • Engywuck
          -7•5 months ago

          What is beyond my understanding is why every fucking time someone posts some relevant TECHNICAL info or question about that browser there’s always someone else, which appears to be less smart than an amoeba, that feels the need to write the same exaggerate and OT bullshit about the CEO.

  • YeetPics
    110•5 months ago

    The scam company brave? The one that scams people? With their scam based crypto rewards that don’t pay out? THAT brave?

      • Possibly linuxEnglish
        2•5 months ago

        It doesn’t really break things for me personally. However if it does break something just turn it off.

      • ditty
        1•5 months ago

        I have encountered a handful of sites that it broke as well. I use the strict protection option and manually add exceptions to the few sites it breaks - then I never have any other issues with them

    • @[email protected]
      2•5 months ago

      I’ve been having a pretty good experience with Mullvad, however I don’t hear many people talking about it. I wonder why is that, IIRC it’s being developed with Tor Foundation, and is basically a Tor browser for clear web, and that sounds perfect. So far, I didn’t run into any issues, so is there a catch, or are they just not well enough known yet? Or, maybe people are turned away by their optional VPN?

      • @[email protected]
        1•5 months ago

        Probably because LibreWolf is most of the way there, and the Mullvad branding + proprietary VPN is more than a bit much. I use(d) the VPN alongside it and found the add-on “hints” regarding the correct DNS settings more frustrating than helpful, too.

        • @[email protected]
          1•5 months ago

          I was using LibreWolf before, but I really like the idea of bundling VPN + Browser, and also the way they handle payments - not only is Mullvad VPN kind of cheap, I can just pay with crypto and don’t need any account (kind of - you just generate username that also serves as an password, without any other contact information required).

          But what I like the most about it is the idea of making a browser with the goal of having the same fingerprint between users (as much as possible), and offering it with a VPN - becuase that means that most of other users of the VPN will probably also have the same fingerprint from the browser, so you will blend in with them. I wasn’t really sold on the idea of VPN before that and didn’t use one, but this was what convinced me.

          But tbh I haven’t done much research into the company, or into the effectivness of their implementation. I’m kind of betting on their cooperation with Tor Browser, which should have most of this stuff already figured out. But it’s possible that other browsers are just better at it, I never checked.

          I do however still use LibreWolf for the occasional site that breaks with Mullvad, but it’s not something that happens too often.

          I use(d) the VPN alongside it and found the add-on “hints” regarding the correct DNS settings more frustrating than helpful, too.

          Hmm, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed anything about DNS. I think I’ve actually never click on the browser vpn extension, though :D Is it the encrypted DNS hint?

          EDIT: Found this, apparently it’s doing pretty well https://privacytests.org/

    • @[email protected]
      -21•5 months ago

      Firefox lacks a ton of features and its default settings have terrible fingerprinting protection to start.

      • @[email protected]
        31•5 months ago

        Yeah, Firefox lacks features like built-in pop-up ads, full screen homepage ads (those ones are enabled by default), and a VPN you probably didn’t even purchase.

        Truly, the features I wanted to clog up my hard drive whether I use them or not

            • @[email protected]
              1•5 months ago

              The affiliate link one certainly couldn’t. It wasn’t until people identified it and started complaining that the company had to backpedal.

              And even for the scam stuff that can be disabled, why should it be downloaded, installed, and take up space on the hard drive to begin with? If it’s so good, they can make it an add-on for people to optionally choose.

              • @[email protected]
                1•5 months ago

                Well, the reason that is because brave wants you to use that, same way mozilla wants to you use their account services and the cloudflare dns that you can opt out of but can’t uninstall unless you use a fork of firefox.

                And also I don’t know why you put emphasis on space usage when firefox uses more resources on websites than brave and chromium, I tested it back when using xfce4 and for 3 tabs and the total system mem usage was 1.24 GIB for firefox and 1 GiB for Chromium and Brave. And when I did that test chromium hadn’t implemented a new feature that they added that moves inactive tabs to the disk.

                I also don’t think I’m gaining anything by replying to your comment after you didn’t even bother replying when I told you all the issues and missing features that firefox has and instead focus on hating brave. I hope you’re doing this because you hate the brave ceo and not because of some weird fanboyism with firefox lol.

                • @[email protected]
                  2•5 months ago

                  Well, the reason that is because brave wants you to use that, same way mozilla wants to you use their account services

                  Brave cryptocurrency crap = a Firefox account? Come on, at least compare apples to apples.

                  And also I don’t know why you put emphasis on space usage when firefox uses more resources on websites

                  Because we were talking about how opting out of cryptocurrency crap doesn’t fix the issues with it being installed by default.

        • @[email protected]
          -16•5 months ago

          FIrefox lacks vertical tabs, can’t change the default new tab page background color without having to use a custom .css file.

          Having to use a userContent.css for something so basic is insane. That is orders of magnitude more work than disabling the crypto ads in brave which you don’t even have to go in the settings to disable, it is right on the homepage menu.

          Also firefox lacks configurable keybinds and when I used librewolf I had to add two extensions for something that basic.

          One was to change the default keybinds to changing tabs from alt+123 to control+123 because for some reason they changed it on linux to that which is retarded (opening a new tab is still control+t so you can’t just say that it is all the control options that got moved to alt lol).

          The other extension was to deattach the tab which firefox has no keybind set for it.

          And one of the best features that firefox has, which is the userChrome.css has only gotten worse over time with it breaking with new updates and also now having it disabled by default and hidden inside the about:config menu.

          The default vpn on brave is terrible, although that only affected windows. And firefox is only slightly better on this because and pardon me if I’m mistaken (I don’t wanna install firefox to check lol) didn’t they change the default settings to send all dns over https to cloudflare? On librewolf they got rid of the default one and you have to provide one instead.

          Edit: Look no further, you even have to install ublock origin on firefox to get rid of ads and also configure its filter list if you want to get rid of cookie prompts, something that brave does by default already.

          • @[email protected]
            11•5 months ago

            These are all UI things you can add with extensions or some modding. Firefox needs forks for that.

            Not to speak of actual features like sandboxing on android, user namespace sandboxing on Linux, and more.

            • unalivejoyEnglish
              6•5 months ago

              Firefox needs forks for that.

              You’d be amazed what you can do with userChrome.css.

              • @[email protected]
                2•5 months ago

                True. This needs better documentation though, and I would highly appreciate to have official templates.

            • @[email protected]
              -3•5 months ago

              Yeah no biggy, just some 7 extensions and some css and you will get somewhat usable experience on Firefox…

                • @[email protected]
                  -4•5 months ago

                  That is horrible that you have to install a bunch of extensions for basic features, and one of those extensions to fix something that mozilla went out of their way to break on linux and not that they havent add.

                  And there is also things like syncing the user sessions and settings without an email which brave can do while firefox and forks can’t

                  edit: And you ignored half of my comment, doing css to get firefox to work IS NOT EASY lmao.

          • @[email protected]
            6•5 months ago

            Tree Style Tabs has existed for over a decade. It does not break. You are the problem if you cannot install an addon in 2-3 clicks, from what is the richest browser addon ecosystem on the internet.

      • Possibly linuxEnglish
        8•5 months ago

        Then customize it. Honestly they aren’t all that bad and by using Firefox you ate not supporting google.

        • @[email protected]
          -5•5 months ago

          I have done that, and it a horrible, it takes more work to make a useChrone.css on firefox than to setup a wm on linux lol

          You can also use any of the forks of chromium and not support google, what you said is like telling people not use grapheneos because it is a fork of android.

          • @[email protected]
            1•5 months ago

            If we had a working alternative to Android as a whole, we would surely use it. But Linux on mobile works only in few devices and not flawlessly at all. But for the Chromium monopoly we have an actual alternative that works.

            • @[email protected]
              -3•5 months ago

              Linux on phones already work, just that phonecalls might not work sometimes, but if you are into privacy you might as well not use that anyway lol.

              So yeah, time to drop graphene and start using linux on phones, if you managed to get firefox to work you can use linux phones, sure some websites might not work on firefox (that is not fault of firefox, same way not all apps might work on linux) and you may need to do some coding to get some things to your liking (using custom.css files is like settings up a bunch of configs and scripts on linux) and you might need to add a bunch extensions to get basic features (like adding extensions to gnome lol).

  • baud carbonEnglish
    79•5 months ago

    Whenever people tell me to use Brave, I know they fall for marketing very easily

    • @[email protected]
      12•5 months ago

      Whenever I see a Brave shill on YouTube, I take their advice on most matters with atleast a sack of salt. And most of people’s favourite tech tubers are le lion shills, DistroTube included.

        • @[email protected]
          1•5 months ago

          I do not think Tim Pool is an important person. Most of these reactionary right/left wing podcasters never appealed to me. They are an example of people who invent drama and nonsense, and are all bottom of the barrel as far as intellect goes.

        • @[email protected]
          1•5 months ago

          If you have observed web browser related threads on 4chan /g/ in the past 4-5 years, you would have observed this meme. One of the rare memes they made that is not offensive, that I love using.

          • λλλ
            1•5 months ago

            Never used 4chan. Thanks for explaining though!

    • @[email protected]
      -3•5 months ago

      Braves default fingerprinting protection is better than the one that librewolf uses, or at least it is according to the EFF.

    • @[email protected]
      -15•5 months ago

      I use it. I don’t get marketing because I use brave, which has a fucking indestructible adblocker. Like while everyone was panicking from the YouTube issues, I’ve never seen a single message to turn it off on YouTube. And there was a bunch of other things that users has reported, like slow videos, that brave just didn’t have problems with.

      • callyral [he/they]English
        4•5 months ago

        ublock origin works fine for me on firefox. i use freetube (desktop client), but when i use the youtube website i don’t have ad issues.

    • @[email protected]
      -18•5 months ago

      Brave is simply usable Chromium. On GrapheneOS it is not the most secure as it has its own Chromium engine which is not as hardened poorly.

      On Linux it works well with hardened_malloc while Firefox straight up does not run. This is probably because Firefox has memory issues.

      It sucks relying on Chromium as Firefoxes UX is top tier. I have no idea why normies are using Chromium Browsers, they all suck for UX, especially Chrome.

      But on Android and Linux Chromium is very secure, while Firefox is at least questionable.

      Brave sets very weird priorities though, they dont focus on many features people need and instead bloat everything with news or crypto stuff that doesnt even support Monero.

    • @[email protected]
      -9•5 months ago

      No it literally breaks sites. I was using Firefox with Arkenfox user.js, basically Torbrowser, and nothing broke unless the site told me “your browser is not supported”. Braves strong defaults broke Github and more.

        • @[email protected]
          -2•5 months ago

          Not much Brave can do there? I dont know what they did. You are probably better off with UBO and NoScript (both MV2 btw).

          But everyone is escalating about Brave removing a broken feature as if they where getting worse or something. The feature was broken, they removed it. Thats it.

      • AnonTwo
        2•5 months ago

        Was strict the default? I’d assume the standard would be the default.

        I’d imagine if you were using strict you want the sites to break because you absolutely do not want fingerprinting. That kindof restriction usually comes with the breaking being expected.

        • @[email protected]
          1•5 months ago

          Yes probably. I have no idea what they did though, because Arkenfox / Torbrowser doesnt break anything.

          Noscript and ublock origin are both MV2. But Brave wants to keep supporting MV2.

          So I think they should not try implementing stuff extensions already do better, but at the same time something like this is the only way if they want to also go full MV3 and save themselves a lot of maintenance

  • @[email protected]English
    39•5 months ago

    Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave’s users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.

    How are they getting this data? If it’s with telemetry this data doesn’t seem reliable, I doubt that people who change the fingerprint setting don’t disable telemetry.

  • @[email protected]English
    33•5 months ago

    I used brave for a while, but left as I felt there was something fishy about them. Seems I was right

  • @[email protected]
    14•5 months ago

    I’d ask why they don’t make it optional (I’m not a Brave user) but it seems it was.

    Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave’s users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.

    This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.

    Given that, I’m inclined to agree with the decision to remove it. Pick your battles and live to fight another day.

    • RandoCalrandian
      10•5 months ago

      Unless there’s a strong correlation between those who set fingerprint protection to strict and those that disable telemetry

      In that case they’re about to piss off a much larger portion of their users than they realize

      • @[email protected]
        1•5 months ago

        but if they have all that disabled, they probably have their ads disabled too, which means they are not making Brave any money. So they don’t care.

    • @[email protected]
      1•5 months ago

      Both points are a bit BS.

      Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave’s users

      Based exclusively on whether a user had not gone through the Brave’s browser settings and disabled the “Send statistics about my behavior to the Brave corporate HQ” flag.

      In other words, the number is useless.

      This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.

      This argument could be used to tell people to avoid using the Brave browser too. After all, only a minority of people do. The best way to blend in would be to use Google Chrome on Windows 11, and improve no privacy settings.

      Unless someone wants to argue that using Brave makes you an acceptable degree of unique, but using advanced tracking blocking makes you unacceptably unique.