Why I recommend against Brave - Luca Bramè.

This article is a pretty good breakdown of why you shouldn't use Brave.

That's the lie they try to sell you.

I swear Brave ran a very successful guerrilla marketing campaign and it succeeded on Reddit. If you so much as question it or suggest an alternative, you get dogpiled on by Brave bros. I don't trust it one bit. I'll stick to FF and its forks.

the crypto browser? it's not private and never was

Just use Firefox for gods sakes, Brave is a complete joke of a browser especially when it comes to privacy.

Brave (the company) has a long history of doing dodgy stuff. They are just trying to do what Google did (directing clicks to their own shit), but they're using privacy as their marketing spiel.

Not so much no

No. At least not in the way most people expect.

It does block some tracking and ads that Chrome alone allows or explicitly adds. But it simply shifts that tracking to Brave. The idea was that you'd still get the benefits of that tracking by giving all of your data to Brave instead. I honestly never was convinced by this considering your data is still being sold, just by a different company so it doesn't sound much better to me. Supposedly, according to them, Brave is more trustworthy and gives you more control over what they track and sell, but I don't trust that business model. There's no real incentive for them to do what they said they would.

Brave is a scam.

People sadly believe so. Firefox, a few addons and you are good to go.

Librefox then? Or what are you guys using?

Don't a lot of browsers by default have pings set up to track usage? Check the privacy section. There is usually a check box about sending daily pings to whatever company made the browser to track usage.

Not sure about the variations though

no, brave is just another crypto scam

No.

It sold out on it's privacy promise years ago. Brave Browser CANNOT be trusted if you are someone who must ensure Privacy Preserving featurs must remain on at all times.

I recommend the Tor Browser. DO NOT USE THE TOR BROWSING CAPABILITIES OF BRAVE! YOU WILL BE DEANONYMIZED! Likely anything you'd be using Tor for, you don't want your browser slipping up and leaking anything.

Personally I use a blend of hand-hardened Firefox (Via plugins), Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium (for very rare cases where the site is actually trusted and requires Chrome to function predictably)

Idk what the first two are, but you should be able to disable the usage ping at the bottom of privacy settings

Brave is like the ExpressVPN of browsers

even tho most low level searches and recommendations gonna point towards brave as the private browser, all you need to just look at the options. its datafarming, its running in the background randomly, its an nftbro chrome.

Haha

I tend to recommend Brave for the ones who aren't technically savvy. For that, its good.

For me who is really into privacy, I've always felt uncomfortable with brave or any chrome based browser. So I go with TOR and LibreWolf

You can disable this in the settings. Nobara ships with Brave now but with all of the telemetry and crypto BS turned off out of the box.

What browser should I use on mobile? I use Librewolf on desktop since it runs fine, and the vertical tabs are great, and it looks nice.

On mobile though there's a lot of problems with the browser space:

• Chrome: runs great but is obviously not good for privacy
• Firefox: what most people recommend, but it has terrible performance, looks not great, and doesn't even have more than basic fingerprinting protection, and literally includes ads by default. It's also less secure on Android because they don't do per site process isolation, and the memory allocator is worse.
• Brave: people tend to dislike brave here, but it runs well (since it's chromium based) and has at least better fingerprinting protection.

What other options are there?

I use Vivaldi, it's IMHO the only decent Chromium browser, apart European, with a good privacy, no logs, no tracking no third party investors. great services and community.

Depends on what you mean by "private". I would not trust it much, but it's not a bad Chromium based browser when you need one. Use something like LibreWolf for much more privacy out of the box.

Try to disable telemetry.

You can disable it in settings.

You can stop it in settings just like any other browser. I still will use Brave as my choice of browsers.