I’ve been seeing a lot of people hate and uninstall Brave. Why? It’s not like they’re tracking us or doing anything else shady. If so, what’s the privacy alternative?

  • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
    19·
    1 year ago

    At least they are financially independent from Google, which you can’t say about Firefox.

    I absolutely love it when people bring this up.

    It’s always funny, mostly because Google is, let’s see… A member of the GNOME Advisory Board, a financial supporter of the GNOME Foundation (scroll to the bottom to see their supporters), a supporting member of the KDE e.V., a Gold member of the Linux Foundation, and a major contributor to the Linux Kernel (you’ll see some other companies you absolutely hate in that list as well).

    Almost nothing in the major open source space is untouched by Google. But sure, Firefox in particular is evil because “Google money”.

    If you don’t want to use something with financial support from Google, feel free to run FreeBSD and browse the web with, I don’t know, Lynx or something. Or Apple devices with Safari only. That’s a pretty good option, actually, provided you like proprietary software and a super locked down system (except WebKit which is open source and I honestly believe more browsers should be based on it). Lol, edit: Google pays more to Apple than Mozilla to be default on Safari, so nevermind that.

    • hedgehog@ttrpg.network
      5·
      1 year ago

      Apple devices with Safari only.

      Google pays Apple over 30 times what they pay Mozilla ($15 billion vs $450 million - both annually in 2021) to make the Google search engine the default in their browser.

      • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
        3·
        1 year ago

        Ooh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing!

        That’s actually quite the sum, but I guess considering Safari’s reach, it makes sense.

      • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
        7·
        1 year ago

        I just think that if you consider that, they are more dependent on Google than Brave is.

        I think we’re defining “dependent” in two different ways here. There’s financial reliance (which applies to far more than Firefox when it comes to major FOSS projects) and software reliance. I don’t particularly think either is better or worse, but there are significant differences in the result of either.

        Financial contribution in exchange for defaulting to a specific search engine is very different from using a Google-led project as the base foundation of your software.

        Unless Brave actually hard forks Blink/Chromium, they’re literally depending on Google’s work for the entire base of their flagship software.

        They can choose not to implement certain features, but without Google, their browser as it currently is wouldn’t exist. Theoretically (this is highly unlikely, but just as an experiment) if Google were to somehow move to a closed source model for future versions or ditch all work on Blink, Brave would very likely die.

        If they wanted to keep it alive, they’d have to fork the last open source version of Chromium, maintain it alongside everything else, and still push out something secure that adheres to web standards. None of which is easy and requires a lot of work.

        Financially, yeah. Firefox has more reliance on Google than Brave. So do GNOME, KDE, and the Linux Foundation.

        When it comes to their software, Brave is far more reliant on Google than Firefox could ever be.

        The only major browser not reliant on Google at all is Safari. (Edit: ignore this; Google pays Apple a shit ton to be default on Safari as well.)

        Despite my dislike of web monopoly, I don’t particularly care what browser people use, provided they’re being honest about it.

        I don’t like Google. I don’t trust them. But it would be incredibly shortsighted to dismiss their contributions (financial or otherwise) to open source. Whether people like it or not, without them, we wouldn’t have a lot of shit we take for granted.

        If people want to “get away from using Google stuff”, they might as well just ditch tech altogether. Google’s fingers are in just about every big FOSS cookie jar, whether financially or via software contribution.

        Think about it this way. Brave needs Google. Google doesn’t need Brave. At all. Mozilla needs funding from Google. Google doesn’t need funding from Mozilla. Google requires very little of either of them, but they both rely on it for different reasons. One approach isn’t worse than the other, but the effects are very, very different.

        • millie@beehaw.org
          3·
          1 year ago

          I’m with you up until the use of all of this to discourage getting away from Google stuff. Just because Google is also involved in open source doesn’t mean that their other projects become more trustworthy, or that the safety of those open source projects should automatically come into question.

          If Google pulls out of Gnome, it’d affect Gnome but it wouldn’t obliterate it. Likewise, somebody would probably take over some form of a hard fork of Chromium. But if Google drops support on something you’ve made an essential part of your workflow, you’re in trouble.

          The point of getting away from Google as much as possible isn’t to exist in a world without Google, it’s to avoid having a single point of failure and to avoid putting literally all your data into the hands of a company that will use it however they can to profit. Half my duck duck go searches get a !g at the front, and Firefox or no, I’m still on an android phone, but that doesn’t mean I’m trying to hand them all my notes for work that isn’t finished yet so they can regurgitate its component parts. Train on my stuff all you want, but at least let me finish it first.

          Google right now is like a bad relationship. It’s gotten completely wrapped up in our way of life to the point that it’s overly comfortable doing a half-assed or self-serving job and knowing most people won’t bother to shake things up looking for something better.

          It’s probably best if we all get a little space from megacorps like Google, even if we don’t abandon the relationship entirely.

          • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
            2·
            1 year ago

            I actually agree with you entirely. I was just trying to play a bit of Devil’s advocate with admittedly some exaggeration on my part. I would much prefer keeping our cookies free of their sticky fingers and we can all still do our best to minimize their influence.

            They have their reasons for funding and contribution, but it’s often than only in their interest to do it, rather than being “good to the community”. Their Linux kernel contributions, for example, often end up predominantly being for things that affect Android.

            I do my best to minimize the amount of Google stuff I do/use as well. It’s just that I often find the Firefox-Google talking point to be missing the bigger picture and it’s not as simple as "Google gives money to Mozilla, therefore Firefox = inherently bad for taking their money ".

            The irony of all of this is that I was typing my previous comments on Brave on Android due to my constant browser hopping. Mull is my default, but sometimes I just go with Brave or Vivaldi for random shit (Firefox mobile is really bad for live streaming video compared to most Chromium browsers, in my experience, but it might just be my set up or something).