[rekoil]

I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN and other tech forums. It's a de-Googled Chromium fork which retains support for Manifest v2 extensions and has a bunch of neat extra features like first-party ad-blocking, an (underused and probably at this point should be considered a failed experiment) advertising network where users are paid for the ads they consume, Tor-integration, Web3 integrations.

Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features, but that's just it, a default setting, it isn't hard to disable if you don't want to "take part of the experiment".

[jorvi]

> Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features

It does not, you have to opt in.

You are right in the rest of your comment thought. And in general, when you compare default configs, Brave does far more to protect your privacy than Firefox does.

[rekoil]

Oh it's opt-in now? It used to be opt-out, good change.

[jorvi]

Unless we are talking about some very very early days, it has always been opt-in. Or rather, I have been installing Brave since ~2017 and I’ve never had Brave Rewards be on by default.

You’ll get notification badges on the Brave Rewards URL bar icon, but it isn’t active until you click on it and go through the BAT onboarding.

[soundnote]

The Brave way in general seems to be "icon for function visible by default, function itself has to be turned on separately". So there's a bunch of clutter at first, but not stuff like say, Edge just turning history sync on even if you've previously turned it off.

[rekoil]

Hmm, perhaps I'm mistaken then!

[Kuinox]

> I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN

Well maybe due to the multiples bad things that brave did in the past.

[pixxel]

Why are you in this thread?

[hn_acker]

What do you mean? Kuinox was guessing a reason for the thread author's disapproval of Brave.

Brave failed to tell the user that the people they donated BAT to won't receive the money if they didn't sign up to Brave Creators [1]:

> In December 2018, British YouTube content creator Tom Scott said that he had not received any donations collected on his behalf by Brave.[42][43] Two days after the complaint, Brave issued an update to "clearly indicate which publishers and creators have not yet joined Brave Rewards so users can better control how they donate and tip"[44] and in January 2020 another update to change the behaviour of unclaimed tips.

Brave (by accident? or so the company said) automatically added referral codes to cryptocurrency site URLs in the address bar [1]:

> On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance.[47][48] Further research revealed that Brave also redirected the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

[lupusreal]

> "I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN and other tech forums"

Eich bad

[kbelder]

That's the main reason. Everything else is mostly post-facto justification.

Incidentally, that was also the event that seemed to start Firefox's long decay.

[random_mutex]

Eich = guy who created JavaScript