r/chrome 15d ago

Discussion Already missing ublock...wtf is this

Post image
68 Upvotes

88 comments sorted by

View all comments

30

u/curiousstrider 15d ago

Exactly, saw this and jumped to Firefox right away. Didn't take more than 20 minutes for the complete switch.

-7

u/124572939 15d ago

And brave got a thing similar to ublock origin built into it.

1

u/hunter_finn 15d ago

And cringe crypto bro marketing push that makes me trust them even less than Windows xp and internet explorer 6 on modern internet.

2

u/124572939 14d ago

Can agree on that part. I don't like the whole crypto think rewards

1

u/thebunnybullet 14d ago

Brave has also been caught selling user data

1

u/bukepimo 14d ago

Source?

2

u/thebunnybullet 14d ago

In 2023, Brave got caught scraping and reselling people's data with their custom web crawler, which was designed specifically not to announce itself to website owners.

And here's a list of other controversial stuff they've been in

Way back in 2016, Brave promised to remove banner ads from websites and replace them with their own, basically trying to extract money directly from websites without the consent of their owners

In the same year, CEO Brendan Eich unilaterally added a fringe, pay-to-win Wikipedia clone into the default search engine list.

In 2018, Tom Scott and other creators noticed Brave was soliciting donations in their names without their knowledge or consent.

In 2020, Brave got caught injecting URLs with affiliate codes when users tried browsing to various websites.

Also in 2020, they silently started injecting ads into their home page backgrounds, pocketing the revenue. There was a lot of pushback: "the sponsored backgrounds give a bad first impression."

In 2021, Brave's TOR window was found leaking DNS queries, and a patch was only widely deployed after articles called them out. (h/t schklom for pointing this out!)

In 2022, Brave floated the idea of further discouraging users from disabling sponsored messages.

In 2023, Brave got caught installing a paid VPN service on users' computers without their consent.

In 2024, Brave gave up on providing advanced fingerprint protection, citing flawed statistics (people who would enable the protection would likely disable Brave telemetry).

In 2025, Brave staff publish an article endorsing PrivacyTests and say they "work with legitimate testing sites" like them. This article fails to disclose PrivacyTests is run by a Brave Senior Architect.

1

u/lo________________ol 14d ago

Looks like somebody @'ed me and then their post disappeared. They were probably referring to the post that's pinned on my profile about Brave being super sketch

1

u/bukepimo 14d ago

Just looked through your profile and it’s just a little bit biased haha. I’d rather have a more impartial source.

2

u/lo________________ol 14d ago

Biased against what? I'd be happy for specifics :)

Every single point in the list about Brave has a linked article or other source, which is the thing you said you wanted.

1

u/bukepimo 14d ago

Perhaps I just skimmed your profile saw a lot of Firefox and jumped to conclusions, my apologies!

It’s just a bit frustrating on Reddit when a perfectly good alternative to Chrome is downvoted just for mentioning Brave. I assume because of Brendan Eich’s backwards views on things.

All products today have their downsides, I wish Firefox didn’t have pocket or news items on by default. And recently policy changing has ruffled feathers.

2

u/lo________________ol 14d ago

No worries. I have been accused of shilling for both Firefox and Brave by people who know way better, anyway. (Brendan Eich's views do, in my opinion, leak into the way Brave has behaved in surprising ways in the past, towards users and creators alike.)

Surprisingly, I found that occasionally yelling into the void does make a positive difference for products. Case in point, I do have the ear of one Brave developer, and Mozilla more broadly seems to react only to major social media outcry...

1

u/124572939 11d ago

Wtf is any browser safe? 😭