Sometimes bad people do good things.
Brave 🤮
Windows 🤮
“feature” 🤮
Truffle Shuffle 🤮
Kirby vacuuming blended spinach 🤮
Wait, what?
I mean Mozilla’s Firefox is 🤮 too… there’s no perfect browser
nothing is perfect, except the horseshoe crab. however both librewolf and cromite are great with ublock, and ltsc windows has no copilot since companies use that edition.
Librewolf is too restrictive and not suitable for everyday browsing. I hate it.
never tested cromite
im pretty sure you can disable a ton of stuff in the options menu
Yeah but for example fingerprinting is either fully on or fully off
Switching defaults hurt fingerprinting more than it helps so at that point might as well stay with the default firefox
People are still using Windows!?
Games
I’ve been gamin on Linux for over a year with 0 issues, the only games that should be keeping people back are a small handful of competitive games with certain types of anticheat. (Most anticheat does work on Linux)
One of my favorite games Phantom Dust only works with the microsoft store. Not really linux’s fault but that’s the reality
Have you actually tried to install it on Linux? I’d bet it would work.
Phantom Dust is distributed solely via the Microsoft Store, which requires a Windows environment to function. Compatibility layers such as Wine and Proton do not support the Microsoft Store, as it depends on Windows-specific services and APIs that are not replicated in these layers.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1b3lqqb/phantom_dust/
And many VR games. Linux is not viable for VR gaming (without a lot of concessions).
Aside from anticheat BS, Linux has come pretty far. It’s not perfect, but it’s not the frustrating mess like it used to be half a decade ago.
Until Macs become cheaper or Linux becomes easier, Windows will remain the largest OS.
What’s easier in Windows compared to Linux? Except the fact that you have to install it, since it doesn’t come preinstalled on as many PCs. But many people who think Windows is easy would probably still consider installing it difficult.
installation of software on Linux is very bad. Literally everything else on Linux is very ready for the mass market, but installing apps is horrible to the point of making the whole OS not ready for the general public
What? When was the last time you tried Linux?
With flatpak, it’s usually a one-click process to install anything nowadays.
Except:
- Most of them are bundled terribly, forcing you to use flatseal or similar to make it work - way to much to do and understand for the average user
- Roughly half of all the programs I install are flatpaks, and the other half are appimages. They both largely work the same, but the fact that there’s a difference will be crippling to the average user. Especially if you ask them to choose between one or the other
- Believe it or not, a lot of people are not comfortable with the app store mentality flatpak seems built around. Googling “chrome download” is far more ingrained in the average person. Aside from browsers and projects of similar scope, this is difficult to achieve on linux
Can 800 year old grandma Doris use the feature? Can the average person who writes comments on YouTube videos? Minion meme posting facebook aunts? If not, it’s not ready for mainstream.
While I agree with most of what you said, typical users won’t run into these issues unless they’re doing something more technical (e.g installing blender or something), in which case they can ask for help.
Can 800 year old grandma Doris use the feature? Can the average person who writes comments on YouTube videos? Minion meme posting facebook aunts? If not, it’s not ready for mainstream.
I don’t think these people can install Windows or are pros at using it either, and in which case it’s the responsibility of whoever installed the OS to guide them through it a little like I did with my parents (they’re in their 80s and they’ve been using Linux for the past five years just fine), and I imagine those kind of people to only care about browsing the web and maybe viewing a PDF every once in a while.
That would be totally true if every software was distributed as a flatpak and every distro had flatpak enabled in the package manager out of the box. That’s just not reality.
Not even then. For example the biggest Linux distribution in use is Ubuntu, and it doesn’t have flatpak built in. So even if a flatpak of an app is available, a user of Ubuntu would have to already understand what a flatpak is, and already know that it would make the app installable on Ubuntu, and know that flatpak itself can be installed separately, and know how to use a different install method already just to get the flatpak system onto their computer in the first place
and every distro had flatpak enabled in the package manager out of the box
I said “usually”, and I’m talking about mainstream distros.
Also the original comment says “the whole OS is not ready for the general public”, which is also vague. I don’t expect the “general public” to install Gentoo and suffer from this issue.
I said “usually”, and I’m talking about mainstream distros.
They don’t all have that either
I use Linux regularly, and the last time i installed an app was probably within this past 365 days
Ah. I see. That’s very informative.
I can install apps well enough, but I’m very techie, the general population isn’t gonna be able to do it reasonably
Sadly, quite a few things. Here’s a few:
- Application support; some popular software is built with Windows in mind.
- One-click installers; Software usually comes with user-friendly installation wizards. No command lines or dependency juggling. Also better compatibility woth past versions
- Driver availability; Linux is getting better, but Windows is superior
- Better peripheral support like for printers, webcams, game controllers.
- Gaming performance; although Linux is gaining ground, Windows is just better in this regard
- Media codecs and formats; again, Linux is getting better, but this isn’t always an out-of-the-box experience
- Business integration; Windows plays nicely with enterprise tools like Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and legacy business apps.
Don’t get me wrong. I use Linux as my daily driver. That also means I get frustrated on occasion when again I must consult man pages instead of just running a troubleshooter or fiddling with Nvidia drivers instead of just running the game.
(venting frustration)
I’d argue with the installer point - if it’s in the repo, and it almost always is for anything a newbie would be using, it’s actually easier. Search, click, done. BUT…
Drivers though, specifically companies not supporting Linux drivers, is shit. I’m helping a friend transition to Linux and am dual-booting myself so I can help with the actual os available for troubleshooting. And fuck me, sound drivers fucking suck ass on Linux. It’s because Creative is a bitch and won’t make Linux drivers, but also apparently literally nobody is both running a creative card and anything above 2.0 speaker setup. I have two creative cards, a decade apart, neither works with my 5.1 speaker setup. FL and FR work, the rest are some sort of fucked and come from an incorrect speaker(s). One of these cards is like 15 years old now, and nobody has noticed or rectified it. And if I reboot straight from windows to Linux, the sound is mangled. I need to shut the system down and boot it cold. Then FL and FR work. Hours of troubleshooting last week got me absolutely no progress.
Then I need software for my Logitech g903 (there is 3rd party software available) that does profiles and switches on the fly based on the application in the foreground (crickets).
Then there is an issue where if my monitor goes to sleep, when I wake it up I get patches of graphical artifacts. On the 2D desktop. Every few seconds, for about a quarter of a second. Random location each time. Random size. I’m on a Radeon 7900 XTX, which isn’t terribly new now. But the friend I’m helping, no issues at all with drivers or hardware. An older 6700 XT. But come the fuck on.
Both of us are on bazzite (I suggested it so they wouldn’t nuke the system as they learn) so it’s just Fedora silverblue with a few tweaks, not some out-there distro.
And, shit. If you need cellular connectivity on Linux, as far as I can tell you’re fucked if you don’t go the Ubuntu route. Debian doesn’t work, Fedora doesn’t work, Mint doesn’t work, I went down a rabbit-hole and tried a dozen distros. I ended up with kubuntu, since I wanted kde, but I tried anything just to see what would work. This is on a modern ThinkPad, still under (extended) warranty. I thought ThinkPads and Linux were supposed to be like this holy-grail of free-as-in-freedom computing? Ugh.
So yeah if you have a basic system, aged a bit, nothing special, it works well. Take one step outside of that perfect-scenario bubble, and paaaaaain.
To be fair, a lot of those are due to a Windows legacy of dominating the market, which isn’t going to change until there are more people elsewhere. It’s a bit of a catch-22, and yet even being a small percent use in desktop Linux has started to get distros that feel and run similar to Windows enough so people who don’t dabble in Windows specific software don’t miss it. It’s also a bit much to weigh Windows as better in many of those above features when it still have its own issues often, even though it is the dominate and supported OS.
I laughed at your last part. I have never not had to do the same for Windows as I have for Linux when a problem pops up. Google the problem. Those troubleshooters are such a waste of time, and honestly the only time I’ve had an automated fix that worked to resolve a situation was in Linux via purging the old driver and reloading it. The Windows troubleshooter is like the first tier on a tech support line, where you tell them, yeah, I already did all that.
Media codecs and formats
Got burned by this recently, was trying to use MPV for playing a YT vid, and it had no video but had audio. Turns out Fedora comes with an open-source or smth version of H264 encoders, so I had to uninstall those packages for the official Cisco ones. But I was on atomic and it wasn’t fun so I ran to forums for help.
Driver availability
Not sure if it’s the driver or the kernel (maybe dual-booting? But it worked on both partitions originally…) but my Bluetooth is nuked on my Linux partition. I tried to do rfkill, btusb, systemctl, etc. and the only solution I got was to rollback to an older release of Fedora atomic because it’s most likely a kernel issue. That just sucks man, having to be stuck on an older version to get my earbuds to work lol. I didn’t like atomic and now I’m on reg KDE Fedora, so I’m truly fucked as that’s not a rollback distro.
I still love using Fedora (every time I boot into Windows I cry) and it just makes me love my laptop like it’s brand-new. Tinkering is fun to me, I’ll literally sit at my desk and starve myself while trying to get something to work. But some days, I want my stuff to work with minimal tinkering, and not have to worry if it’ll break when I really need it down the line.
Gaming performance; although Linux is gaining ground, Windows is just better in this regard
I mostly agree with you but this contradicts everything I’ve seen. Presumably you have evidence of this?
- Driver availability; Linux is getting better, but Windows is superior
Doesn’t Linux have pretty much every driver built into the kernel with the only notable exception being the NVIDIA closed source drivers. Even those drivers are a single command away from installation, it even configures itself correctly out of the box for Wayland support.
Doing anything requires the memorization of thousands of commands that must be formatted perfectly and are specific to your distribution, into a black box that rarely provides any feedback at all, and when it does it’s extremely generic.
I’m sure my inbox will be blown up by delusional people claiming you don’t need it but it’s just not true.
The simple act of installing software is crazy complicated and different on every distro.
Hardware compatibility is a huge problem, fingerprint readers, WiFi, facial recognition, Bluetooth, etc. etc. Very few companies make computers with Linux compatibility being considered at all. Everything will have drivers day 1 on Windows and then they’ll trickle down to Linux a year or two later.
I dislike Linux the least but there’s no way I could recommend it to anyone who isn’t a giant nerd who likes fixing computers.
i wouldnt know where to begin if i had to switch, since im not in the tech industry, only 2 of my bros would switch since they are programmers.
I don’t use Linux except on my steamdeck and even I know there are a bunch of distros that look and act (minus lots of the bad stuff) just like windows
They act (minus lots of the good stuff) too.
What’s easier in Windows compared to Linux?
Graphics drivers. I can’t say I ever had a graphics driver update in Windows that rendered my system borderline unusable, but I 100% blame Nvidia for me running windows until recently. I tried a dozen times over a decade and ended up back on windows when the Nvidia update trashed my system and I got sick of dealing with it.
On team green and running Bazzite with no issues
That’s more of an Nvidia problem than a Linux problem.
it’s easier because they’ve been using it all their life. If they’d been using linux all their life, they’d say that windows was too hard to use, nod oubt.
I would rather be set on fire and have it put out with shovel than use a mac.
MacOS isn’t terrible, only the hardware is.
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I mean I don’t particularly like it either but not having tons of choice is not always a complete negative, it simplifies a lot of things. And having an OS that mostly functions like an OS instead of a fucking billboard is nice. Just keeping things in context here.
“It just works” only works for very basic normie stuff.
I think that was @Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world’s main point. Apple is great if you’re a normie, but if you even think about tinkering with things, have an unusual issue on your system, or creatures forbid… want to play games, you’re fucked.
My mom is an Apple diehard who has used Android and Windows in the past (2000s), but got burned by Window’s shitty security and really only switched to iPhone due to iMessage being more reliable than SMS at the time. She knows a little bit of tech stuff (I guess I get it from her), but overall, she’s a “normie” compared to me, so Apple (90% of the time) does what she needs.
It simplifies a lot of things
If this was me about 3 weeks ago, I wouldn’t have debated this as hard. But recently my grandma had to call my mom and I to help her get her iPhone pictures to work on her Windows laptop, and she almost thought she downloaded a virus when trying to get an HEIC app. Apple’s asinine proprietary file format is a plague on society, and I hated when I had to send pictures from my iPhone to my Google drive for school in HS. That’s not simple, and now we have to help grandparents understand that they need to screenshot their camera pictures or else literally no website will take their damn photos.
The little things add-up for me, and so yeah, it’s nice having something that “just works”, but only if you literally accept everything and never complain about any of their choices.
I despise their business model, their design decisions, and their walled garden. I will agree that the OS is fine. I was forced to use a MacBook at a software development job in the past. It being UNIX was a big point why I didn’t immediately hate it. I will still agree with the other users and say that their hardware is pretty nice and well thought-out (not praising the anti-consument measures like soldered RAM). Still, I would personally never buy their devices due to the aforementioned business practices.
Modern Mac hardware is excellent. The software is good too, but’s more a matter of taste. Not everybody likes how macOS works but Asahi Linux has made incredible progress so it’s a daily driver option for some already.
Mac hardware is a fucking atrocity. $2k for a “pro” laptop with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage and no i/o except 4 USBC ports, that’s completely and intentionally irreparable and unupgradeable? SSDs and RAM that are marked up 3000%? That’s what you call “excellent”? It’s fucking gaslighting. You’ll never convince me it’s anything other than a cult.
I will give you the RAM and SSD capacities are atrociously priced. USBC is perfectly acceptable for the people apple is targeting. Nobody is trying to use a MacBook as a server. Ignore the “pro” name in any consumer electronic device. It has nothing to do with anything other than marketing, and that’s not exclusive to apple. Apple did give up on the 8GB bullshit already though.
You need to take a closer look at how the M-series chips work and why they work they way they do. There are design considerations in how PC does things and Apple does things and they are not 1 to 1. What makes sense the PC world doesn’t always make sense int he Mac world.
Apple does a lot of anti-consumer bullshit which we should absolutely club them over the head for, but many of the things they pulled off with the M-series Macs were NOT possible with traditional PC methodologies. One thing’s for sure though, the hardware performs and it does so with very little energy. It’s so great a difference the entire industry is changing course to try to outdo Apple. They eventually will too, but they haven’t yet. They are just cheaper.
USBC is perfectly acceptable for the people apple is targeting.
It’s literally called a “pro”, who do you think they’re targeting?
Ignore the “pro” name in any consumer electronic device.
I do, thanks to Apple. It doesn’t make it any less shameful or ridiculous.
You need to take a closer look at how the M-series chips work and why they work they way they do
You’re going to have to elaborate because I already have and I don’t understand what bearing that has on this discussion.
Apple does a lot of anti-consumer bullshit which we should absolutely club them over the head for,
You shouldn’t “club them over the head”, you should just stop buying their trash. That’s literally the only thing that will work.
True.
Hmm, I have kinda opposite opinion, hardware is pretty good, build quality is great, but the OS itself is meh. File manager is bad and clunky, desktop customization is very limited, network manager is buggy, especially with VPNs, no built-in functionality to import VPN config files like in Linux. Also, I used it for years and still couldn’t get used to all the shortcuts and "Mac-way"s of doing things. Just not for me perhaps. Not bad, but in terms of UX worse than both Windows and Linux for me.
I’m the opposite of both of you. The build quality is good and the OS is good. I love having a familiat UNIX system while also having a polished desktop environment that supports 4k scaling very well (though the polish has been lacking a lot lately)
The issue for me is the insane price of their computers and the fact that you can’t (officially) install MacOS on your own hardware. I have a Linux desktop and a MBP but I’d run MacOS on both if it was officially supported
Plenty of people still use it for work
Any workplace with halfway decent IT will disable it by default.
Which may be about 50% of workplaces, but still.
As much as I wish your estimates were true, you have no numbers to back you up. They seem wildly optimistic.
People are still using the os that has like 95% market penetration? Yeah man pretty sure
The situation is much different for gamers. They might have been thinking of the Steam survey where Windows does in fact have 95% adoption:
Interestingly, the percent of Windows goes down if you look at just the United States, where it’s only 63% of OSes. And it also goes down similarly when you set it to the UK, or North America, or almost any other region. But it goes up to around 73% when you limit it to Europe or Asia. Weird, why is it higher in those areas?
(Click “edit chart” to pick a different region)
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america/#monthly-202406-202506
Because it’s mainly a measure of how much people use Macs. Apple products were always significantly more popular and “hype” in the Anglo world than anywhere else. 5,5% global vs 16% in USA, for example
Interesting hypothesis
Unless you’re tech-savvy and actively change your OS, people just use whatever is shipped with their computer and, yea, Apple isn’t nearly as popular outside of the English-speaking world as it is within it, at least when it comes to laptops. The share of Linux, and other smaller systems, is probably roughly the same.
Literally nothing will get me to use this crypto scam of a browser.
I’ve used this for years and have never interacted with any crypto feature
It’s okay, it’s never too late to switch.
Not interacted doesnt mean it’s non-existant.
It exists and therefore it’s bad enough.Existent**
It’s fine as a browser and it does a good job at syncing across devices. Still my chrome based browser of choice.
How mich actual difference (minus the crypto) is there to base-chromium?
Afaik chromium is capable pf being a browser. Does that also have syncing or is it not capable of that?Honestly not sure. I haven’t done a side by side with plain old chromium in years.
it’s bad enough.
This is debatable. i find some that people hate on AI and crypto regardless of it’s implementation
I’m as crypto bro as they come. Fuck Brave, BAT is a pay-to-surf scam.
Exactly this. They’re acting braindead and disliking things for no valid reason
Just massively spreading misinformation
They kind of just ignore that the crypto feature is opt-in.
The fact that the dev behind brave is a homophobe isn’t opt in though…
Peter Thiel was also a major, early investor in the project.
That’s another ‘this one thing should let you know this is radioactive.’
It’s also just another flavor of chromium so it still helps Google maintain their monopoly.
Anyone trying to de-google needs to be using Firefox.
Also, their whole business model was (is?) just replacing ads with ads they get paid for.
Sure, but that’s opt-in. By default, it just blocks ads.
Uh… no? It just puts sponsored backgrounds when you open new tabs or windows notifications if you opt-in
It never replaced ads in websites afaik
They’re not actively replacing elements on a web page, but they’re still getting paid to show you ads and you can opt in for some crypto nonsense.
Sure, so? It’s still opt-in, and by default it sends the generated crypto money to creators and websites you visit
If you don’t like it, don’t enable it? They’re pretty transparent about how it works overall
They have pretty much abandoned this feature anyways
Sure, that sucks, but the product is good
You can’t always agree with everyone
If you only use software that is created by people you like… well… i guess your only choice will be an abacus…
I don’t care if I like them. I very much care if I’m making money for people who are actively trying to take away my rights
The dev behind Brave isn’t part of Brave anymore.
Did you even read the text you shared? It just says he left mozilla.
I did, just made a mistake. Thank you and have a pleasant afternoon.
wow why is this getting downvotes for admitting a mistake?
That’s saying that he left Mozilla for that. He’s still CEO of Brave
Can’t believe this poor reading comprehension is getting upvoted.
What’s amazing is they proved themselves wrong in their own post, thinking they proved themselves right. It’s actually impressive.
Thanks.
He left Mozilla (chased out because he’s a homophobe) and went on to found Brave, where he still remains
Ah, thank you for the clarification.
That you know of
That sounds like fear mongering, but ok.
Brave was found to inject crypto referral links into your
clicksurl auto complete.https://www.tomsguide.com/news/brave-affiliate-links-autocomplete
This isn’t unique to Brave.
for browser this is the first time tbh
What other browsers are implementing this? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.
This still doesn’t make brave a good privacy browser in the long run
All I have to say is I hope this catches on with other browsers.
Just avoid using an “AI” cpu.
You might say that they are being so very… Brave.
🎤 tap tap … is this thing on?
I used some stuff to block my location and windows recall BECAUSE FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!
The sad thing is that you now have to protect yourself against the OS you are using. Feels a bit like in the movie TRON.
I don’t, my OS doesn’t come with any nonsense.
Me neither, I just watch the shit show from the bleachers.
Brace’s CEO is a homophobic Trump supporter. No thanks.
He invented JavaScript, so definitely don’t use that either. For real. JavaScript sucks.
I used to hate JS but barley had used it. Now I use it on a daily base and hate it even more.
Ah, you beat me to it.
Does he run/have power over JavaScript right now?
No, not directly. Not any more than your average tech leader who goes to conferences and discusses it.
Oh wait hey you’re on my instance. Cool! We’re such small one lol
“It’s a small club and you
ain’tin it”—Warren Bullgates Lincolnham
😁 It’s an elite club.
JS is difficult to avoid. Brave is easy to avoid, just use another browser.
He could be next husband of Ivanka Trump - I don’t care
If he provide good service for me - browser which fits my needs. I would even send him money every day
“I’ll support fascism as long as it’s convenient for me”
No. “I will support a good service and not mingle with politics”
If fascism was a passive philosophy that didn’t hurt anyone then you might have a point. But as you can see recently it’s extremely dangerous and ruins lives.
You may not want to mingle with politics, but it doesn’t have the same view.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Plato, The Republic bk. 1, 347c
Yep, everything is politics whether we like it or not.
That’s the logic of as long as it benefits ME I don’t care and I support them no matter what they do. This same logic has been applied to all the shitty things done in history like slavery, war and so forth, and the reason the world is the way it is.
Do you know all the personal histories of all the people related to all the services you use?
Of course that’s not possible, the issue here is being aware and not caring and in some cases supporting it for convenience and selfishness.
How does me using brave browser supports fascism?
In my country, one of the most successful supermarkets is run by a fascist and he uses part of his fortune to finance our local fascist party, which is gaining strength every year by the way. Do we support fascism by buying in that supermarket? What if we suddenly started to boycott the supermarket to hell?
My point is that they earn profits by using their services and in today’s society money is power. And from where the CEO got his power? From the millions of people with the mindset of “if it benefits me I don’t care”.
That’s not even the worst thing about him. He also invented JavaScript.
That’s it, brave is getting uninstalled from my PC NOW.
I need a better option then. What can yall suggest?
Thorium.
Firefox
Sure I use that too but you should have at least one chromium based browser for certain features though.
Why should you? What are there certain feauture?
Yes some tools do not work with Firefox. It‘s a niche but I‘ve run into it a few times just recently. For example with a gamepad enabler tool where Firefox simply won‘t be able to see your USB input.
The thing is, Firefox follows web standards. Chrome doesn’t always and websites put in custom code that works only with Chrome.
I’d rather use the browser that follows standards.
I use LibreWolf (FireFox fork) + Ungoogled Chromium
This is my setup, and I never actually use ungoogled chromium.
If I have some kind of issue that I need to work around immediately rather then figure out, I usually just open Firefox and try that.
Vivaldi? (Sort of continuation of Opera, run by it’s former CTO.)
Vivaldi is OK, but I would replace it with something else. It’s a pretty busy UI and I have had issues with it freezing in Fedora 42 KDE.
I personally haven’t had to use a chromium browser for anything yet since my swith to Firefox. Only to test a render bug in chromium that Google hasn’t bothered to fix in over 9 years for a case that works correctly in every other browser.
Mozilla also has many problems
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What does that have to do with the browser? Last I checked, browsers aren’t transphobic.
You do you, but I personally refuse to make product choices based on the person who makes it. Brave is the least bad chromium browser, so I use it as a backup to my main Gecko-based browser. I’m not a fan of Mozilla either, but that’s irrelevant since I pick my software based on what it does, not based on the management of the company that builds it.
I would not choose to use a product made by people I disagree with but leaving that aside:
Is it the least bad? Why not degoogled chrome? Or chromium? Even vivaldi seems like a better choice.
Ad blocking mostly. That’s literally all I need in a chromium browser, because I only use it on a handful of sites that don’t work properly in Firefox.
Chromium is also okay, but no ad blocker. I have that installed as well in the really unlikely case that the ad blocker gets in the way.
99% of my browsing is on a Firefox browser, and 99% of the rest is on Brave. I use it so infrequently the “time saved” metric is a merely seconds.
Brave is the least bad chromium browser
It’s pretty sleazy. Ungoogled Chromium or Vivaldi are probably less sleazy, if at all.
Vivaldi is not open source, so for me it doesn’t count as a valid option.
The only two there that bother me are the affiliate code thing (reminds me of the Honey drama) and installing extra software without consent. The first was a bad call and probably related with how their ad replacement stuff works (if anything, they should merely axe affiliate links; Firefox has that as an option), and this"solution" to the latter is pretty odd to me:
reinstall the browser without admin rights
Why would a browser need admin rights in the first place? I haven’t used Windows in well over a decade, so I don’t think that particular one would be an issue for me.
The rest can be grouped as:
- bugs - bug fixes generally don’t get prioritized until enough users complain; I would be very picky if I was an at risk person (activist or whatever) and would probably only use Tor browser
- opt-in services
- their marketing department
My options for chromium browsers are:
- something with ineffective ad blocking
- Opera - I used it before it became a chromium browser, then it went downhill; not FOSS
- Brave, with all its warts
Since ad blocking and FOSS are my prerequisites, Brave basically wins by default.
Just block with unlock 🙉 why choose browser based on a ad block feature that is worse (injecting own ads/adware and therefore trying to dictate who is allowed to grab your attention) than the ad blocking extension?
I recommend Firefox, due to best compatibility with uBlock (fuck manifest v3) and additionally have a DNS filter in your network, like pihole or adguard.
On the go, use wireguard VPN to always be digitally home, and get your ads blocked (as well as tracking organisations) like that.
I recommend Firefox
So do I, that’s my main. Brave is my backup for the handful of sites that don’t like Firefox.
I‘m not even pro Brave but all that ad stuff is opt-in so it doesn‘t matter as long as you don‘t want to see ads. The arguments in this thread are starting to just loop in circles. Essentially using Brave is fine if you stick to the default. There‘s no sleazy stuff if you don‘t enable it and the CEO also doesn‘t make a dime from you if that‘s something you‘re concerned about. You could of course use a different chromium browser if you want but it‘s virtually the same thing.
Actually, I consider Brave the best (or the least bed…) browser on the market. Period. The fact that it isn’t made by Mozilla is a plus for me.
I don’t like Mozilla either, but here are my priorities in a web browser:
- FOSS
- Privacy tools - includes ad blocking; I’d actually be okay with ads if they didn’t track me
- Promotes open web standards - rendering engine diversity is critical here, I don’t want a repeat of the IE era
- Security
- Performance
Firefox ticks all of them, and my issues with Mozilla as an org don’t really come into play. I use a fork on my phone, but I use Firefox on my laptop and desktop because I trust the binaries coming from my Linux distribution maintainers (part of 4).
Brave also ticks all of them?
at this point, Firefox’s development is not very much more open than Chromium’s
It doesn’t tick #3, hence why I use a Firefox browser as my main. If they had their own rendering engine, I would consider it as my main. But for now, it’s my backup in case I need a website that doesn’t work on Firefox (i.e. they use something Chrome-specific).
Good for you. I actively refuse to use it or any of its derivatives to avoid endorsing Mozilla by giving them market share. Additionally, I find that Brave just performs better (and needs one extension less to be functional).
I care a lot about rendering engine diversity, and Firefox is the largest non-chromium browser, so I use it. It’s fast enough for me, and my handful of extensions gives me what I need.
Again, good for you.
The better option would be to not use spyware as an operating system.
Do you consider any form of telemetry “spyware”?
You consider actual, literal spyware as being merely telemetry?
I don’t think taking screenshots of everything you do every few seconds is telemetry.
how the hell do you not?
I don’t know, maybe because I understand the definition of “spyware” and “telemetry”?
Well, semantically yes, not all telemetry is spyware. However regarding Windows telemetry it’s indistinguishable from spyware - you have no idea nor control over the data gathered, measured and processed.
The crux is that Windows telemetry is opt out, opting out can’t be done during installation, and historically opting out wasn’t sticky. Additionally some Windows telemetry is still being sent despite opting out.
That makes Windows telemetry fulfill all spyware criteria.
However regarding Windows telemetry it’s indistinguishable from spyware - you have no idea nor control over the data gathered, measured and processed
Ah, so you’re another one of those fear-mongers?
Here’s the Required Diagnostic Events Fields (required telemetry) documentation.
Keeping in mind that it’s anonymous - which parts of this are you so vehemently against sending to Microsoft?
That makes Windows telemetry fulfill all spyware criteria.
The shittiest spyware in history, I guess, considering it’s all anonymous…
Honestly it largely is.
Personally I like sharing crash reports, but even then, the user should be able to turn that off if you like.
Telemetry should be 100% opt-in.
Honestly it largely is.
I mean, by definition, it isn’t.
It’s anonymous and not malicious in nature. It’s a diagnostic and engagement measuring tool.
not malicious in nature
Haha, sure thing William
diagnostic
I think it is useful to send crash reports, but the user should have power over it (see: when macOS generates a crash report, it asks the user if they would like to send it)
engagement measuring
That is your data they are taking to make money off of without your consent, and I consider that malicious. There are ways to do that with consent. See: Steam’s annual hardware survey
That is your data they are taking to make money off of without your consent
I mean… They’re a for-profit company, so literally anything they do is to make money.
But it’s not “my data”, it’s anonymous. The “engagement” info is in relation to features. That’s why some features are removed - because nobody uses them. Or rather: not enough people use them to warrant maintenance.
And how do you know it’s not malicious in nature? I’d like to know what your definition of “malicious” is if you’re just fine with letting a Corpo run system look at everything you’re doing.
In this thread something I see a lot on lemmy is happening. Maybe someone can give me a hint on how that happens. The post itself is 90% upvotes, while the comment section is really anti-Brave (for good reasons). Do most upvotes come from people scrolling through without looking at the comment section and those with an opinion on the topic dive into it?
Let me know when it is discovered that they in fact replaced MS Recall with their own version that was scraping your data in yet another sketchy attempt to make money.
