Browsers

735 readers

1 users here now

About Community

This is the community to discuss about browsers.

Browsers List

Open Source browsers

Closed Source browsers

Vivaldi
Microsoft Edge
Opera
Chrome (Not recommended)

List will be updated

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What browser do you use? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi Lemmy! I'm curious which browser everyone uses? I'm currently on Librewolf, but I try out a variety of different browsers. What browser(s) do you prefer? Do you think blockchain or web3 browsers are the future of browsers?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Brave Browser is funded by DoD: https://np.reddit.com/r/privatelife/comments/fe34ls/exclusive_brave_browser_funded_by_dod_contractor/

Brave traffic detected with Cryptocompare despite BAT rewards disabled: https://removeddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/gr8nue/

Brave also has a known history of whitelisting Facebook and Twitter trackers, and has a crippled adblocker that does not work on Brave's "acceptable" advertisements.

Brave Browser hardcoded their crypto partner Binance referral links (https://twitter.com/cryptonator1337/status/1269201480105578496) alongwith Ledger and soon-to-be-compromised Coinbase (https://decrypt.co/31461/coinbase-wants-to-identify-bitcoin-users-for-dea-irs)

NEW LINKS

https://sick.codes/sick-2021-109/

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/13527

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

My worry is many of those posts are assumptions being made without any evidence at all of anything actually happening - yes someone can be a chairman of two companies, but does he have the means to exchange data between the two, are the two companies in fact passing any information, and has this actually been observed? Thiel is a known investor who invests for profit. Yes he is also a board member of Facebook (who we know we cannot trust as we know about Cambridge Analytics and similar issues, as well as the WhatsApp privacy policy issues - all widely reported with evidence), but again we can't just assume now that Brave data is in fact being passed to Facebook - it is not mentioned for example in the privacy policy like it was in WhatsApp's privacy policy. I like to see some evidence of something happening, otherwise everything ends up being linked to everything else without any basis. Google pays Firefox to have their search engine as a default, but does that mean Firefox is passing private data back to Google? We don't know for sure, but if we don't yet have evidence about it, should we automatically now condemn Firefox by association?

Other issues like the link redirect did actually happen, but have been fixed - https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-browser-brave-busted-for-autocompleting-urls-to-versions-it-profits-from/. So it happened, but is no longer the case. Yes it casts some doubt, but every company has to ethically make their money somehow otherwise they don't exist. They should not make it that way, though, and hopefully they learnt their lesson

Then we see studies like this at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/27/brave-beats-other-browsers-in-privacy-study/ which puts Brave first in terms of the least privacy data that leaks back "home" out of a number of browsers.

In my mind, I then come back to: Do I give more weight to a study or to a few posts that speculate some connections? I'm not saying either that I now pronounce Brave to be 100% secure and private: But I'm not seeing evidence to the contrary.

Firefox has been too slow for me, and although I really liked Vivaldi, I was not happy with their business model about keeping their improvements as closed source (in case someone else used it, they say). One could also speculate there - are they hiding something in there, but we don't know because it's closed.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 years ago

I like to see some evidence of something happening, otherwise everything ends up being linked to everything else without any basis.

You see there is plenty evidence of Brave planting spyware and needless cryptoware into a web browser. Seeing it is upto your bias towards usage of that browser in exchange for a few useless bucks.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/27/brave-beats-other-browsers-in-privacy-study/

The study you linked gives off weird vibes because it does not try to make it clear that Firefox telemetry can be turned off with a couple toggles. Instead it says it turns the identifier persistence "silently on by default".

The other issues it mentions are usage of Google's Safebrowsing API and autocomplete search engine predictions being on my default for Firefox. These are credible depending on your threat model. If it is a lighter one, this might not be a concern. And these are a toggle away from being turned off. Users being this technically illiterate will have more problems on the internet than mere autocomplete prediction pings.

Quoted paper by Leith also mentions:

The issue for many of these browsers seems to be not so much what they’re doing, as the fact that they do it by default, leaving non-techie or unaware users open to more information gathering. From Leith’s paper:

In summary, Chrome, Firefox and Safari can all be configured to be much more private but this requires user knowledge (since intrusive settings are silently enabled) and active intervention to adjust settings.

Brave's autocomplete fiasco is what set off most of the privacy community to get away from it. Also, there are a fair bunch of Brave shills on the internet doing rounds these daysz going from reddit to 4Chan to HN and wherever easy to target privacy communities exist online.

Brave comes off as a grifter in the privacy browser industry because it leaks IP via WebRTC a lot, leaks via so called Tor mode, has hardcoded cryptomining features which is junkware, and has done a fair share of "oops just a bug we will fix it" things for a browser that claims to be gung ho about privacy, yet uses Chromium as its base and has its own adblocker giving you a false sense of adblocking (while inserting its own ads), unlike how uBlock Origin does it.