I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
I would be very curious what other browsers people recommend. I use Brave solely because of the profile feature it offers, which for my use case is an order of magnitude better than Firefox’s containers. Is there something more private/better than Brave that still has profiles?
People discuss a way to use Firefox profiles here.
I tried using those (albeit fairly briefly) and I could not find a way to make profile switching as fluid as I needed.
As a long time Firefox user, I didn’t really understand how much I would enjoy using profiles until I had them. It’s my understanding Firefox can’t replicate Brave’s ease of use. Features such as:
All of these features, and the overall robustness of profiles is great from both a workflow and privacy standpoint in my opinion.
Containers are really just better any way, you probably just aren’t used to them. (Not to say your points aren’t valid) We always give up some convenience for privacy, and vice versa.
Firefox has been my web browser of choice for roughly 5 years continuously, on both Windows and Linux. I would say I’m very used to it, and containers. I would agree they are better in some ways, but there is one single, major flaw with them that was enough to make me switch. The way containers handle multiple copies of the same website.
I’m just going to use Pinterest as a random example website. This problem occurs with any website that requires login however. Let’s say you have a single Pinterest account. You make a Firefox container for Pinterest, tell it to always open Pinterest in that container and you are done. Every time you click a Pinterest link, Firefox seamlessly opens it in the correct container. This works great, and is actually a place containers at better than profiles.
The problem starts when you have multiple accounts. Maybe sometimes you want to visit Pinterest while logged out, and other times you want to visit your account for viewing landscape images, and others your account for character references. Now you need at minimum three separate containers, and every time you want to open Pinterest you have to manually launch the container you want it in, which takes a lot of clicks. Now you can no longer just type in the url and hit go.
This is where profiles work so much better for me. I can have a work profile, a personal profile, etc and decide which accounts to login to on each profile. Then when I am in a given profile, I can use it just like a normal web browser without the container system getting in my way.
I had a similar problem and got around this by using couple of add-ons.
I have three containers, work, personal and default. The first addon forces me to choose which container to open to and second let’s me view which tab in which container I have opened.
For the websites which I know I am going to always open in a specific container, I use Firefox’s built in mechanism to force open in specific containers, say JIRA for work. For websites where it is ambiguous, eg gmail for work and personal use, I let the addon handle it. It is convenient enough, as I usually type the URL, but even if you use mouse, the container selection is right there on center of screen.
This is built into Firefox.
privacy.userContext.newTabContainerOnLeftClick.enabled
True, but I use keyboard shortcut cmd T and I would have to learn a new shortcut for this. Cmd T followed by typing url pops up a page where I choose container.
Moreover, I don’t really have tab bar enabled as I use container tabs addon. I don’t really have the (+) button to create new tab.
Try Vivaldi. I moved to that from brave since I also need proper profiles
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libre fox
Does libre fox have Brave-like profiles? It almost looks like just a tweaked version of Firefox.
No, it is just basically a FF fork with Arkenfox baked in. That is it.
i don’t know about the profiles, but it is a tweaked version of FF
I use Opera for the profile feature! I really like Vivaldi too.