It seems possible that Brave are building Brave Pro, which looks like its a subscription based service of some kind. A note on the Android implementation of the project reads (GitHub link):
"Implement the required runtime changes (profile settings, chrome flags, group policies, etc.) with the appropriate values that enable the Brave Pro experience. Using Brave in this mode with its default settings and making changes to the Brave Pro defaults require an active paid subscription.
When the browser has no active credentials for Brave Pro, the panel UI will promote the service and include the initial payment CTA. When credentials are present the panel UI will include the appropriate toggles for making changes to the default settings."
It also links to a private Google Doc.
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Brave using google docs. Wow
There is a level of irony here right?
Yeah, have never been a fan of Brave. Not shocked.
Unsurprisingly, Brave will try to profit from privacy seeking users…I hope their company dies a horrible financial death.
I’ve always disliked Brave for their carelessness in pursuing their business needs, adding stupid things like worthless crypto to try to buy out the advertisers and selling out their search indexing to the highest bidder.
Instead of just going the meta-search route by indexing by themselves; spreading out queries to multiple services; caching results; and just providing the results to users privately like a real company offering privacy would; they just gave up and let Bing do all of it.
They could’ve even negotiated their API usage and allowed for relevant ‘in-result list ads’ that were clearly marked as Ads without compromising the privacy of their search services to help defray costs of hitting the APIs of bigger players like Google, Yahoo or Bing and allowing advertisements relevant to queries to flow without compromising on user’s privacy or letting big advertisers know who’s searching what.
Additionally Brave has done a number of other shady things that on the surface might be advertised as helping your privacy; but really isn’t. In my opinion they should have hard-abandoned Chromium over Manifest v3 and rebased onto Firefox to keep their browser from becoming less privacy respecting overall.
- Imagine using Google Docs
- Dead project consider forking (I won’t because don’t like Brave in general smh)
i still use brave search because they are the only privacy-oriented search to have their own index. Unless someone can correct me. but then they screwed up a beautiful thing with the LLM garbage, so idk if i can stand to use it anymore honestly.
The browser sucks and is bloated. they have some really good ideas in it, but it’s mixed in with so much crap.
Also the Google Doc is hilarious.
Vivaldi > Brave
Just use Firefox
I mean, yes, I daily drive Firefox myself. If one must have a Chromium-based browser, however, Vivaldi is very much not-Google, very much not crypto, and is all around pretty based. It’s a solid choice for a secondary “I’m going to need something chromium on rare occasions” browser.
Why not Ungoogled Chromium? Yes it doesn’t have the customizations but at least it’s not proprietary afaik
I don’t know if this has changed, but last time I used Ungoogled Chromium, I recall the UI still referred to Google and/or its services in many areas, even if the underlying code’s removal made those areas nonfunctional. Google’s name is also still right in the browser title, like free advertising every time I look at it, and that bothers me as well.
I mean, why should the team bother so much with removing the UI elements? As a former developer I can tell that it’s not that easy. And where did you see Google in the title? I don’t remember seeing it in the last 2 years
Closed source
Not in actual privacy tests. And Brave is at least mostly open source. Not great either when compared to a good FF config, Firefox+arkenfox and ublock medium
Which privacy tests? Are you referring to the ones conducted by a Brave employee where he compares browsers in their default setup? Since Vivaldi asks you on first launch how you want to configure it, he decided to choose the worst settings and use that for the comparison.
Not a brave employee and barely affiliated with them. Also Firefox browsers come out on top still. Vivaldi is missing much of the fingerprint disception features of Brave or Firefox. It is also closed source meaning it isn’t a good choice for privacy anyways. All around a shit take when it is obvious Vivaldi isn’t built for anti-fingerprinting. I am by no means a supporter of Brave, I stay far away from it and its shit.
Not a brave employee
It is also closed source
It is ~95% open source. The remaining 5% of closed source changes are to the web-based UI.
Does that change the fact that Vivaldi is not a good privacy browser? Its content blocker is weak, its based on chromium which is affected by MV3, it can’t protect screen dimension fingerprinting, or canvas fingerprinting, or containerize cookies, or block 3rd party scrips and frames, or standardize specific settings like Firefoxes RFP, etc. Not a good privacy browser. Use a fully open source browser.
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That is a valid criticism of their setup process. My guess would be that “No Blocking” is set as the default option to ensure that the average user clicking through the setup process does not encounter difficulties accessing cerain parts of the web and mistakenly attribute it to Vivaldi being an inferior browser. Like all browsers, their target market will be people moving from the market leader, which is currently Chrome. As is well known by now, Chrome does not provide users with these protections by default and so many of its users do not know or care about them and just accept the experience as normal. Vivaldi and others therefore base their default installation options on what a Chrome user would expect, as opposed to what is objectively the best setup for privacy. If a user does care about their privacy, they are almost certainly going to select another option during setup.
I think a fairer and more relevant way to compare these browsers would be based on their optimal, in-house GUI setup options, without going into things like Firefox’s about:config or extension stores. To me this is a more realistic way to present information to a user who is concerned about their privacy and looking for a new browser. The assumption that someone concerned with their privacy would just blindly install a browser and never enter the settings or make any adjustments is a pretty silly one. Vivaldi would still not be the best, but the tests would better reflect its ability to offer privacy to its users.
