Brave (Web Browser)

★★☆☆☆

Brave advertises itself as a privacy-focused browser, but for every cool privacy feature I look at there’s a reminder of how deeply enmeshed it is in the exploitative venture capital side of Silicon Valley, with cryptocurrency features and a core business model that blocks ads on websites and replaces them with its own ads.

So I’ve never really trusted Brave, looking at them with the same kind of skepticism as post-acquisition Opera. But I figured since I’m evaluating (or re-evaluating) a bunch of other browsers, I should upgrade my skeptical opinion to an informed one.

On first run it showed me an ad for a bitcoin credit card.

So there’s that.

Moving on. It also wanted me to opt into a “web discovery project” that would share anonymous search activity to help build up their index. To me it seems like the kind of thing that could be de-anonymized with a little context, but at least it’s opt-in.

I remembered reading that they’d added IPFS support to the browser a while back, which I thought was a good idea. I’ve experimented with it from time to time using an extension with Firefox and Vivaldi, and wanted to try it out in a browser with native support. It turns out Brave just removed it in the second half of 2024. But hey, it’ll still detect NFTs!

As for privacy: it comes with an ad blocker and a bunch of anti-fingerprinting measures (comparable to those in LibreWolf). It can use placeholders for embedded posts like Privacy Badger does, but only supports Facebook, X and LinkedIn. Its sync service uses a single client-side key (in the form of a long pass phrase) instead of an account. There’s also a Tor mode, which is nice if you don’t want to download yet another browser to access onion sites, though it’s still not as private as the Tor Browser.

But I don’t need a crypto wallet or an AI chatbot built into the browser, and things like Brave Rewards and the Basic Attention Token are basically letting Brave track you itself instead of the sites you visit. And they’ve been known to claim they’ll pay creators who hadn’t actually signed up, and silently add affiliate codes to links using autocomplete. Even some of its fans are complaining about bloat and increased attack surface. (That’s not even getting into the CEO’s unpleasant parting with Mozilla.)

The upshot is that while it does seem the browser is a bit tighter, privacy-wise, than LibreWolf where the sites I visit are concerned…I don’t trust the rest of the application. So now it’s my informed opinion that it’s comparable to post-acquisition Opera. For now I’m sticking with Vivaldi for Chromium compatibility, LibreWolf for a little more privacy, and when I want to use Tor, I’ll just use Tor.