Not sure what websites these would be? Under what conditions?
I am not familiar with FF “breaking websites” as a sort of common thing.
What ever it is I have every confidence I would prefer uBO.
And if we must use chromium of some form then I also think I would probably prefer ungoogled-chromium or helium .. again with ublock:origin.
Anyways the point was not to have a browser flame war. I dont much care what anyone uses. It was simply to point out the constant examples of brave not quite measuring up to its claims and sometimes actually providing the exact opposite of what was promised.
This newest offering, even if we skip the licensing and cost and so on, is its own rebuttal to previous claims that the brave browser was ‘the fastest’ or ‘the most secure’ or ‘the most anonymous’ or the ‘most privacy-respecting’ or ‘the most adblocking’ or whatever other claim. The ‘selling points’ of brave-origin disprove all of those things.
In my experience, Firefox (and moreso forks of it) does break a small percentage of websites, but it is never formatting. Usually it is either payment processing or login. Paypal and Barnes & Noble both have this issue, while searching on SteamDB fails ever since they started using Algolia.
But yes… Brave’s claims are weird, and the existence of Brave Origin just makes them weirder. Especially the parts about buying your browser to have less features and not charging Linux users for the same basic product. Unless… maybe they are hoping that Linux users will pay them in bug reports?
Probably most of you who watch this thread noticed that recently Brave Origin release version(1.91.175) is added in Cachy OS official repository. On the other hand, Brave Origin nightly version in AUR refrains from update since 1.93.67, which is updated to 1.93.75. https://versions.brave.com/
The difference between the release version and nightly version I experienced is I couldn’t see the rain cloud rader on nightly version, but I could on the release version.
It happened on other OS, so it may not matter for Cachy OS.
Weird is a lot of things. But asking people to pay is not one of them (performance claim etc sure). Asking people to pay and fund development and infra required to host the project etc, should IMO be a norm. If I ever launched an open source project, I would require people to pay. I would still allow downloads (preventing people from compiling it is anyway not possible) but I would remind anyone who’s is not broke, that they’re either assholes or just dumb for not wanting to support a project they actively use or want to use.
Why pay for Origin but not for “normal” Brave is also obvious. Normal brave includes things and “features” that are helping them to fund the project.
With all this being said, I don’t really trust any major company or a popular project. Every popular projects almost certainly has people and developers who are on the payroll of “agencies”, countries, billionaires and so on. Maybe a decade ago there was a thread (now scrapped) with detailed info about one Mozilla employee who was responsible for the SSL implementation, who was caught implementing a backdoor disguised as a bug on his previous job.
Even if you discard this hearsay, there’s a ton of shady things surrounding Mozilla. Prime has a video about this, so anyone can watch it YT.
I’m curious how many people were around in the early days - from the Commodore Amiga - if they have any clue at all how much anything cost back then.
Fast fwd to the modern world, where the prices of games increased quite a lot - but games did offer quite a lot…
Search is basically screwed, and there are many new startups to regenerate the landscape.
But the root of the evil that afflicts us is money. Youtube slop = money, ragebait = money.
We’ll end up with a world where the ONLY way you can watch a real, or decent video, will be to pay a fee in advance.
So yes, it’d be better for people to wake up now and start making those donations (freely given or forcefully taken)… or just accept that they’re the problem, not the solution.
I think you missed the most important part .. which was never the payment for a license. Though I included that because I do only user free software. Nope I would not pay for adguard or anything similar either. I have a rare lifetime VPN service and that payment from a decade ago or so still constitutes the only real software purchase besides like a $5 game gifted to a family member.
The issue is that for years now Brave has touted itself as ‘the private, adblocking, fastest browser’. Naturally some of us disagreed. Events like them inserting their own tracking links were waved away as ‘in the past’ or ‘an accident’ etc.
Now we have Origins which .. trims fat? So its faster? What was cut out? Oh things like Brave Ads? All the promo materials said no such things exists (anymore).
These are the kinds of reasons that the claims around Origin make the claims around Brave itself even more suspect than they already were. And that neither them, nor apparently many of their users, can see this clear as daylight is also a little concerning.
I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with paying developers - but in this case we should be more curious if reasoning shouldn’t rather focus on simply not liking Brendan Eich?
Case in point - any money that goes to Brave then potentially goes to feed far-right political agendas in California…
He needed to be excised from Mozilla… like odious puss from a festering wound.
So tell me, when he created Brave - why would you re-immerse yourself in puss and support it’s work?
Ok… so what’s the perfect solution?
A Firefox that’s less compatible with some websites, heavily dependent on Google search revenue, includes telemetry by default, offers only limited fingerprinting protection out of the box, and is backed by leadership that’s made controversial decisions and layoffs? A Google Chrome/Chromium ecosystem shaped by a company whose advertising business creates an inherent conflict of interest, with telemetry, increasingly powerful fingerprinting capabilities, Manifest V3 limiting advanced ad blockers, and Google’s growing influence over web standards? A Chinese-owned Opera that’s closed source and packed with marketing features and AI? A closed-source Vivaldi with a small development team and potentially slower security updates? Helium, maintained by just two developers, one of whom is from Russia? LibreWolf, which sometimes even struggles to complete Speedometer and lags behind Firefox releases? Zen Browser, with its own small development team? Or ungoogled-chromium, which relies on Chromium but often lags behind upstream security updates and requires more manual maintenance?
Life isn’t easy…
There isn’t one. Every choice is full of compromises. Choosing a browser is just a decision on avoiding the ones that bother you the most.
I dislike Google’s virtual browser monopoly and how they’ve bullied the Internet into making it incredibly hard for any new player to develop an engine that can properly adhere to web standards, so I refuse to use a Blink engine(Chromium based) browser as I feel that it contributes to a strangled Internet.
These days I follow engine projects like Servo with interest because of how bad I think the current situation is for digital sovereignty.
But, for now, Gecko/Firefox based browsers will have to do.
