I feel like there is no web browser with a sane default configuration that I can recommend to other people. All browsers are preconfigured in a way that harms the privacy of their users or include services that no one wants such as Pocket and BAT.
Here are my problems with some popular browsers.
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Mozilla Firefox: Pocket integration, no ad-blocking without extensions.
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Brave: Everything related to crypto. Also its start page is horrible.
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Chromium: No ad-blocking without extensions and soon Manifest v3 will cripple all content blockers.
Now, these suboptimal defaults wouldn’t be such a big problem if the configuration files were easy to backup and restore and respected the XDG base directory specification.
The difference is brave is shady as fuck.
Yeah, and there’s definitely some pay-offs going on with their reviews. Almost every one of them says something close to “This browser pays you just for browsing the internet!,” most of them don’t mention that it’s crypto, and none of them mention that it has nothing to do with browsing, but is instead for clicking integrated ads.
Clicking doesn’t improve earnings.
What are you on about? Clicking is literally the only way to get anything from it, period. I used to use Brave on both mobile and desktop, and that was true universally. You don’t get BAT unless you click the ads.
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/14648356808845-Do-you-need-to-click-on-Brave-Ads-to-earn-BAT-
This says otherwise.
Regardless of what they claim, I noticed a large difference between months where I did and didn’t bother to click their push notification ads. Well, as large a difference there can be on a maximum of $0.75/month.
Liar
Shill.
Been seeing a lot of people talk positively about Brave like it’s some hail corporate shit
They were definitely astroturfing for a while, especially around the time of that Firefox Megabar stuff on the Firefox subreddit. I can understand not liking the Megabar but there were so many people acting like the sky was falling and saying they were going to abandon Firefox after 15 years or so… for Brave.
A few years later and almost none of those accounts look like real users. A bunch of them were active on Brave subreddits well before the Megabar.
The impotent r/Firefox more missed all this of course, and let a bunch of trolls go rampant and unchecked.
Is it not open source? You can literally audit the code and point out any shadiness yourself.
You don’t need to audit the entire source of the browser yourself just to know it’s shady, you just need to pay attention.