[StevePerkins]

The only concerning thing here is the growing belief that one's consumer choices are their "identity", and alternate choices are an attack on that identity. Moreover, that alternative choices must be feigned in bad faith, part of a conspiracy, "fake news", etc.

What happened to you, Internet? Politics is one thing, but this is starting to bleed over into "liking Apple", or "hating Apple", or any similar camp one finds themselves in with a web browser or programming language or other piece of tech. "People who feel differently from me must be faking it as part of a plot." What the hell?

[smoldesu]

I'd love it if this wasn't political. If Brendan Eich wasn't running Brave, I'd probably trust the browser a whole lot more. Same as how if Apple stopped providing service to China and quit leveraging slave-labor, I'd probably trust their products a lot more too.

[soundnote]

How is it political? One of the primary reasons I started using the damn thing is that whatever Eich's politics, they don't seem to affect the product. Vivaldi seems the same, and at least some of their staffers have politics opposite of Eich's. But both teams bring a simple professionalism to work: They all believe in user control and privacy and try to build a good browser on those principles. They're not interested in external political evangelism a la Mozilla, and to me it shows. Even though both of them have the same ethos, the angles they're coming at it are different.

But in the end I can expect both teams to deliver a tool that's built to enable me and my wants, regardless of what our opinions on things outside the browser are. After all, they're irrelevant to the browser. Within the browser space, there are politics, but both orgs' politics are of user control and less tracking and spying.