They were adding their own referral code to queries made in the search bar, not replacing or altering referral codes on websites. They apologized and reversed this after criticism back in 2020 (https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/).
Overall Brave is pretty good, they build in ad-blocking by default and their own ad service is opt-in. They also have Tor and IPFS support that does not exist in Chromium, and are maintaining Manifest V2 support.
I don't think you know what I mean about ads. The pages are setup different on Chrome and Google inserts ads into everything, over the website itself, it doesn't matter what content you are viewing, you just need to be viewing anything.
There are no ads on Brave. Not on the side of the pages, not in the middle the content scroll, not behind the content scroll, not before or after - no ads.
If you use pirate streaming sites - I rarely, rarely have a popup ad on those when I do use them.
It's not just ads, it's all about the user with Brave - most sites open in reader mode, I have to actually select to see the website itself, otherwise I just get all the content I want by default and only that content.
I have 2 different compromised gmails - both of which happened during my years using Chrome, tho one was the Experian hack I'm pretty sure, Google is not secure, I don't know why anyone would ever think that.
I never have any ads whatsoever on any website that I visit. I legitimately cannot understand what you're talking about. Pages on Chrome and Brave look exactly the same.
So... humor me... let's say that this is exactly true, and Brave adds or replaces referral codes. Is that a privacy problem? The only information that the website gets is that you're using Brave, but not where you got the link. We can absolutely talk about the ethics of the thing or such, but I can't see why privacy conscious people would care.
Brave was caught inserting their own referral code in signup forms on websites. This is basically exactly what Honey is doing and under fire for right now.
Brave basically does a man-in-the-middle attack on those websites. This goes MUCH further than just a privacy issue, it's a security issue.
I don't care about privacy, it doesn't exist, and I use Chrome. But I won't compromise my security by using a browser that is happy to pirate the pages I view.
Oh, I suppose I do see some ads. Every now and then there will be a little popup recommending something - occasionally it's something even relevant. It's funny bc those ads are from Brave but they don't use the Browser, they come thru as desktop notifications and I only see them there. I do have an ad blocker that has always been on also, so I maybe augmenting the Brave experience a little but I just don't see ads online.
I use Edge occasionally - which is far superior to Google and I don't kno how ppl deal with browsing the Internet like that, it's wildly frustrating.
Overall Brave is pretty good, they build in ad-blocking by default and their own ad service is opt-in. They also have Tor and IPFS support that does not exist in Chromium, and are maintaining Manifest V2 support.