If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it’s even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?
Why I recommend against pushing people away from Brave:
Most people are still trapped in an ecosystem owned by either Microsoft, Google or Apple. We’re yet to see a perfect web browser for everyone, but in the meantime we choose one, maybe two or three if we feel a bit more picky for each task, and use them to the best of our capacity. Making anyone feel guilty and ashamed for choices like this, when the best options are few, relative, and often come at a cost, is just useless.
I suggest reading the settings guides available at privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ or checking the browser comparison at eylenburg.github.io/browser_comparison.htm to know the details that anyone who actually wants a better browsing experience cares about. Better to lend a hand than push around.
If whoever reads this still can’t get over it and needs to play a blame game with someone about why everyone should boycott Mozilla, Brave, Proton and other privacy focused FOSS companies because of what someone said, did or thought, please at least find a decent fork, toss a coin to it’s devs, share their work and help others benefit from it.
At this point there is a pretty solid list of reasons to avoid Brave and use another FOSS privacy focused option.
Personally, everything I’ve read about Brave makes me trust them even less than Microsoft, and Google.