It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:

  1. It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
  2. It has ads right out of the box.
  3. It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
  4. They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
  • pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    91·
    3 hours ago

    I have been using Brave for its out of the box ad and tracker blocking. I’d been uncomfortable with the new AI features and had always been skeptical of the crypto integration, but it wasn’t until this post that I realized it was appreciably worse than Firefox on those counts, nor how bad the people running it are.

    Obviously, I’m now looking for other options. I’ve seen some good recs for desktop browsers elsewhere on this post, but what I’m not seeing is a lot of good mobile browser suggestions that will have the desired features. What would the folks here suggest for an e/OS browsing experience with similar or better privacy and ad blocking options? I know there’s Firefox, but A. With all the AI it keeps pushing, I’m sure there has to be better and B. I do also have mobile Firefox but have found it substantially less usable for my habit of browsing with a zillion tabs both non-incognito and incognito, so I mostly had only been it when I couldn’t get a video to play in Brave.

    I am, obviously, willing to run de-Googled Chromium, but if something else is going to actually support 100+ tabs in a performant fashion I’d be happy to totally de-Chromium too.

    I also use the shit out of profiles on Brave desktop, though mobile doesn’t support it. Do the Firefox forks like Waterfox have a similar option on desktop? Does another browser? I know it’s a feature Chrome has because I do sadly have to use Chrome for work, so I would expect at least the de-Googled Chromium-based ones would?

    • stochastictrebuchet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      3 hours ago

      I’ve been using Vivaldi (chromium-based) for about three years now. It’s customizable and has been generally solid. Also has a couple of unique tab management features. Doesn’t have builtin ad blocking afaik. But for that I use adguard desktop and route all my traffic through it, which filters out ads regardless of which browser I’m in. On iOS I can recommend Orion by kagi. It’s the only other webkit browser besides Safari, runs light, and has decent builtin ad blocking

    • pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      1 hour ago

      Currently trying mobile IronFox. I’m liking the privacy options and how stuff like unlock origin is literally included in the setup process. Their dark mode is nice and they offer a lot of compatibility options.

      Biggest downsides I’m seeing so far (I’ll see about keeping this updated as I go):

      1. Can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave, and I have looked extensively.
      2. No tab groups (not the end of the world, but it was a nice feature). EDIT: Looks like Collections does that!
      3. Clears your browser history by default on close, which may be undesired behavior. (I personally tend to use incognito for most things and then transfer sites over to tabs in non-incognito (cognito?) modes if I want them available regularly, so for me this was undesired, but it was easy to turn off.)
      4. Brave had a built-in experimental dark mode to dark modify websites that I am not seeing in IronFox. I’m sure there are extensions that will do it for me, so I’ll go looking, but I just discovered so many sites I did not realize were light mode all along. Reading mode also does the trick for most articles.
    • Cevilia (they/she/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      6·
      3 hours ago

      Firefox (and its forks) have an integrated profile manager, though it’s not always intuitive to figure out how to get to it. LibreWolf is the fork I seem to always go back to, and it has zero slop.

      I use containers. Right-click on the new tab button and pick a container to open the tab in. There’s also an add-on that will do this automatically for you when you visit a specific website, so if you want every site to live in its own container, you can do that too.

      Personally I just use its built-in cross-site cookie blocking, but multiple ways to do the same thing.

      • pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        2 hours ago

        LibreWolf looks promising. No mobile app, but they recommend IronFox for that, so I just downloaded that to play with. Thanks!

        Edit: mobile IronFox is looking pretty good so far. Made configuring privacy settings an option just out of the box, which I appreciate. Biggest problem right now is that I can’t seem to figure out how to import my bookmarks from Brave.