I really like what Brave is doing. I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. I just don't see myself leaving Firefox without major upheaval in the browser space.
Mozilla's focus is user's rights online and privacy. They have a track record doing that. Brave (AKA AdBuddy) is just another product, desperately looking for a revenue stream, notably believing contaminating all news regarding browser technology with its presence is the way to go.
The last thing the world needs is a predatory vendor trying to force itself somewhere it's not needed. Its non existing market share is the proof.
Whatever Mozilla's focus is when you load Firefox you experience the following:
1. On ESR first time it loads two pages load including
https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/60.8.0/firstrun/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
You then find first party cookies are set by Google Analytics
_ga GA1.2.1671101194.1567114471 _gat_UA-36116321-1 1 _gid GA1.2.377831647.1567114471
In the EU this would breach the ePrivacy Directive - as there is neither consent or information supplied in advance. Privacy is not just about information captured about you, but about privacy of what you have stored on your electronic devices.
Note: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl... Myth 2: Analytics cookies are strictly necessary so we do not need consent
2. If you then type "privacy" into the address bar, it loads https://www.google.com/search?q=privacy&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&cl... directing users into the most privacy invasive service on the internet with no advance warning. I now have a wealth of Google cookies from their search domain, but there are also cookies set for DoubleClick and Adservices.
I'm now enrolled into surveillance capitalism and all I did was open Firefox for the first time, type "privacy" and press enter.
Mozilla talk a lot about privacy, but their products and websites don't live up to the privacy standards we need and if anything they're on the wrong side of the fence when it comes to acting on privacy - they still make things worse and not better; although it has to be acknowledged that they have improved a lot with the tracking protection features that have slowly been making their way into Firefox.
You might find this interesting to read https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...
You're right.
Do you have a better solution? I'm not asking to be glib, I actually want a browser that does a better job of protecting my privacy.
Whilst I have reservations about Brave, from a privacy standpoint they appear to be more trustworthy and some of the actions they are involved with, like complaints to regulators are far beyond anything we've seen of Mozilla - sure they may have corporate motives, but right now they appear to align far better with consumer privacy.
There are forks of Firefox that are trying to improve on delivery of privacy
https://tracker.pureos.net/w/pureos/policy/purebrowser/
https://github.com/intika/Librefox
I am not wholly comfortable using Brave because of its dependency on Chromium, too much of a dependency on a single web rendering engine reminds me of IE days.
I would suggest to anyone, install them both and more, you might love browsing the web in emacs (someone must) - if you find a website that doesn't work on Firefox and you need Chrome, then why not use Brave instead?
Personally I'm trying both, I also bought a Librem Laptop so I have PureBrowser too and I'm not afraid to throw some of my money and inconvenience at products that are better at protecting my privacy: for techies we can all do this with relative ease. For non-techies, which is where we really need the sea of change (and who are unlikely to read this), then we can advise them towards Apple's products and make them aware of products like Brave so it can be their "backup" browser if not their first choice - not perfect, but I'd prefer my family to browse using Safari, Firefox (with privacy settings I have to sit down and sort out for them) or Brave; than Chrome.