I’m a professional hater. To hate on shit like me, you have to have already faced it.
Browsers are a tough spot to market on. There’s a ton of choices, and you don’t know which to pick. The default would be Google Chrome, up next comes Firefox, but what if you genuinely care about what companies do with your data?
The obvious choice boils down to Brave Browser, right? Made by a famous developer responsible for the entirety of the web functioning, making a browser in his own vision of what a browser should look like. Sounds good on paper, until it doesn’t.
The Political Disasters
Politics in code is something I don’t personally dig. Many people who have questionable political takes with whom I heavily disagree with make some mean software that I still use to this day. Until they personally harm me, or my friends, or turn out to be totally untrustworthy with their software (I’m winking at a special someone whose proprietary software did so), I’ll keep using it as long as it serves me right.
I’ll derail this conversation for a bit to talk about Omarchy. It’s a distribution made by David Heinemeier-Hansson. Now I personally think he’s a rich kid turned dev that has 0 sense of optics for performance (which consequently tanked his own site’s performance because he expects top notch from his customers).
I HEAVILY disagree with how he thinks politically. Not just about his opinions, but on how he acts upon them, which is hypocritical at best.
Now I wouldn’t trust someone who makes decisions like that to build an opinionated distribution particularly because there’s no set plan and the paradigm will hardsteer itself into the ground.
Just like I wouldn’t trust Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, to manage my own browser, since he donated $1000 to 2009’s Proposition 8, which for the uninitiated sets to ban gay marriage. He has, since the light of that information got out due to the sheer amount paid by Eich, been “let go” from Mozilla by the board of executives.
Supporting a political movement verbally is a much better than donating more than what I have in my own bank account currently to a cause that takes away hard-earned rights made by people, worldwide. The right to express lawful marriage.
Brave as a Browser.
To talk about a browser, we must talk professionally.
I WILL peddle the fact that Brave is a browser that does browsing wrong. I’m not going to go into semantics on why tracking is okay and how, with an adblock, you’re not affected, but that’s a story for another day.
Brave’s decisions on what they obfuscate for “anti-tracking” are shoddy and performative. Their obfuscation of:
- CPU Thread count
- RAM amount
- Battery count (which is already anti-tracked)
COULD derail websites’ functionality, as giving a false amount of memory to a website like PCJS or MEGA could fuck its expectations up.
When an issue is detected and it’s only Brave browser users complaining, sites that warn users that the experience sucks on there get banned from using a function that tells the app if it’s Brave that you’re using or checks a list of sites and removes a segment from the User Agent string that tells sites that it’s Brave you’re using if it uses the UA string to ban Brave users and pushes its users to make issues that snitch if a browser bans brave users. It’s absurd. It’s actively pushing volatile experiences that could potentially tamper with your experience on the site.
Lots of links? Yeah. It’s just proof.
Another thing to watch out is how they handle their own code. A commit slipped through that hijacked links and inserted affiliate codes. It has since been fixed, but it immediately plummeted my faith in the trust of this browser.
Brave is also known for its many built-in gimmicks like Talk, Wallet, BAT etc. The problem about these is how the browser is trifling for you to use them.
As an example, BAT, however useless it may be (because the value you receive is really tiny for the amount that you browse) is getting peddled by the whole browser.
For a browser that prides itself on “Rigorous ad-blocking” (that is on-par with uBlock Origin/Lite – maybe even overzealous for no reason) it sure does take pride in inserting its own ads that advertise its own technology in the browser. It takes a lot of time to just remove them. And after that – you still have the annoying Brave Shields icon that you CANNOT hide.
I may be way too opinionated for this – but it’s clearly pandering not to the general public – but to cryptobros and people pretending to know about privacy.
Epilogue
There’s a clear line between expectations in privacy and the reality. Brave, however “private” it may seem, doesn’t protect you from actual bullshit the web pulls on you.
Tracking is not a subject worth arguing about to people using the web. If a service is free, you are the product. And when you’re the product, don’t expect that you’re owed privacy while using it. All data you publish is theirs, and there are laws that protect you from unconsentual data collection.
You are not protected on the web. You are tracked with worse tech than just how you have your browser set. It’s only which sites you use, which technology you use and if the “Anti-tracking” breaks the sites.
What you see is what you get. And you get a browser that goes against what it does and brings you both an unstable, incomplete web experience and an ad-riddled experience speaks volumes about what it stands for.