[radlad]

> Brave has received negative press for diverting ad revenue from websites to itself,[30] collecting unsolicited donations for content creators without their consent,[43] suggesting affiliate links in the address bar[49] and installing a paid VPN service without the user's consent.[58]

These are the primary issues I hear about regarding Brave on this forum.

It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage. I tend to be a bit idealistic, but this is a strong reason for me to avoid Brave, especially when they are injecting content into pages.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Not that it makes him any less opposed to same-sex marriage, but I think 'vocal' is very much not the right word here. The only quotes I can find from him on the subject are him saying he's not going to talk about it.

[asadotzler]

"Unrepentant financial supporter of opposition to same-sex marriage" is a more accurate description.

[pbhjpbhj]

Basically, we got played, Eich made a private political action, someone used that to get rid of him and then Firefox starting paying 10x as much to their CEO, doing all sorts of anti-user stuff, acting in advertiser's favour (but not too overtly), and ultimately ditching their engineers so they could maintain the CEOs stupid pay. All while begging users for money.

[willywanker]

He was opposed to it as a private citizen, not as Mozilla CEO. His beliefs and supported causes as the former are nobody else's concern; had he been discriminating in terms of employment or otherwise making public statements it would be a different story. Or are we now witch hunting people for wrongthink?

[radlad]

I don't think it's "witch hunting people for wrongthink" to suggest that those in a position of power are able to use that power to influence public opinion.

Especially when that position of power is the CEO of a browser that replaces content on web pages.

[willywanker]

>a browser that replaces content on web pages.

Mozilla went hardcore political and Chrome copycat long after his time. There was no such controversy there under Eich, and even now as Brave's CEO he isn't doing anything to 'influence public opinion'. Browser CEOs aren't newspaper editors or activists, Mitchell Baker excepted.

[hnpolicestate]

This goes both ways for people. I switched from Mozilla to Brave when the latter first released because to me Mozilla's political positions seem at odds with an uncensored and privacy focused browser. I actually support universal marriage equality but don't consider it relevant to why I would choose a browser.

I can't remember all of the details but Mozilla made a blog post regarding 1/6 and their commentary didn't align with a browser that would try and protect users from state, NGO and "just research" edu adversaries.

[FMecha]

Also, BAT being a cryptocurrency already turns off people who aren't fan of crypto.

[JohnFen]

BAT was what kept me from trying Brave for a very long time, but I eventually tried it nonetheless (I'm back on Firefox now). In fairness to Brave, you can disable the BAT stuff and never have to see it.

[bad_user]

The BAT stuff is entirely opt-in, not opt-out.

[JohnFen]

In terms of using BAT, yes. But at least when I started using Brave, you had to change things to get rid of the cryptocurrency-related UI elements. That's what I was referring to.

[bad_user]

> "collecting unsolicited donations for content creators without their consent"

Those "donations" were from handouts of BAT. What they "collected" was their own BAT that they've donated to users of Brave. And it wasn't long lived. At least they've been trying to create a business model that's privacy preserving and that benefits content creators. Firefox has been selling their users to Google for years.

> "suggesting affiliate links in the address bar"

You mean like what Firefox also did?

> "and installing a paid VPN service without the user's consent."

I've never seen a VPN service installed with Brave. Is this a Windows thing? If you're talking about the VPN functionality in Brave itself, isn't this what Firefox also did?

> "It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage."

He never talked on the topic. And did you know that, at that time, both Obama and Hillary Clinton were also opposed to same-sex marriage? Times change, people's minds have changed. Whatever beliefs he still has, he keeps private, as he should.

But yes, this confirms my suspicion that this is a US-politics thing, and for non-US citizens, it's getting annoying. While we are on the topic, don't you find it problematic when Mozilla engages in political activism, promoting Marxism? Or when they promote cancel culture?

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/chris-smalls-ri...

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

For me, these were never reasons to avoid Firefox, but seeing that this is how the world works now, maybe they should be. And I'm sorry for pointing at Firefox right now, I used it for years, but I'm sensing a serious double standard. So let's talk of Chrome ... have you surveyed the political beliefs of Chrome's developers? Because it's the big, faceless corporations that benefit from this kind of polarisation the most.

[radlad]

Most of your comment amounts to whataboutism. Many of the counter-examples you point out are also problematic!

> > "suggesting affiliate links in the address bar"

> You mean like what Firefox also did?

Firefox did experiment with "Sponsored" results in the URL bar but they did not rewrite URLs to include affiliate links, which is also harmful to privacy: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/gybv0e/brave_br...

> I've never seen a VPN service installed with Brave. Is this a Windows thing? If you're talking about the VPN functionality in Brave itself, isn't this what Firefox also did?

Yes, this was a Windows thing: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-se...

Are you referring to the Mozilla VPN that is a separate download? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/download/

> For me, these were never reasons to avoid Firefox, but seeing that this is how the world works now, maybe they should be.

Yes, you are absolutely entitled to "vote with your money" (or free usage / market share, as the case may be.) Boycotts are an integral component of free speech and self-expression.

[gjm11]

> when Mozilla engages in political activism, promoting Marxism?

The link you provide in support of this (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/chris-smalls-ri...) is an interview with Chris Smalls, a union organizer. It does not in any way promote Marxism.

(Smalls does at one point talk about "class struggle". He makes it explicit what he means: he thinks there is an opposition between "99.9% of us" and "the billionaires". This is not Marxism even though it uses one phrase that Marxists also use.)

> Or when they promote cancel culture?

The link you provide in support of this (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...) is to a blog post titled "We need more than deplatforming". It mentions deplatforming but doesn't advocate it (though it doesn't condemn it either), and the actual things it calls for are all Not Cancel Culture: "reveal who is paying for advertisements", "commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms", "turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation", "work ... to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms' impact on people and our societies".

You might reasonably disagree with those proposals; for instance, the next-to-last one could be anywhere from "excellent" to "dystopian" depending on what exactly "amplify X over Y" means and how "factual" versus "disinformation" is decided. But none of it is advocating cancel culture.

As for the "deplatforming" in the title: the specific case it's talking about is the idea that a social media platform should ban a particular user who had for some time plainly been breaking the platform's rules, and who (according to some) had used the platform to attempt to organize an antidemocratic coup. "Social media platforms should be encouraged to ban users who blatantly break their rules, even when those users bring them a lot of traffic" and "Social media platforms should not let themselves be tools for antidemocratic insurrection" are positions one can take without being a fan of "cancel culture".

(Not necessarily correct positions. E.g., if you hold that the insurrection in question was not antidemocratic, that it was a response to blatant election-rigging, then you will likely take a quite different view of how a social media platform should respond to it. I don't myself think that's a credible position, and I doubt the good faith of most of the high-profile people who endorse it, but I know it is something many people believe. Anyway, my point isn't that those positions are right, it's that they're positions many reasonable people take, and that getting from those to "Twitter was right to kick Donald Trump off" doesn't require any sort of endorsement of "cancel culture", and that therefore the fact that an article mentions the possibility of doing that in a not-obviously-disapproving way does not amount to "promoting cancel culture".)