Why do people switch from chrome to Brave browser and not to Firefox?
Why do people switch from chrome to Brave browser and not to Firefox?
135 comments
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Brave falls under "security theatre" and is absolutely useless
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SCNR if they were able to make good decisions, they would never have switched to chrome anyway. /s
tbh, i don't get all the mozilla/firefox hate. even "the linux project" missed the mark by a mile with his firefox critique.
whatever mozilla does, it's not even half as evil as google
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We learned that from politics in general. Vote for the lesser evil, not for the optimal choice, as there is none, sadly.
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Somewhere along the line Brave tricked people into thinking they weren't owned by a couple of really bigoted dudes.
In fairness Brian Bondy might be a good dude, but Brendan Eich sucks.
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Do you have a source that resumes everything bad about Brave in one neat package ? I am tired of searching for sources everywhere and not finding everything I need each time someone ask me about it
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Firefox is my main browser but there's a few specific things that only work in chromium.
People will use whatever works for them.-
I run 2 browsers as well, with about 90% of my use on Firefox
I have found that simply being willing to use multiple browsers solves a lot of problems for me
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I wanted to try Brave a couple of years ago. I ran the installer, and it was one of those pieces of shit installers that just goes ahead and installs without any input from the user, dumping god knows what onto your system, and it puts everything in some obscure AppData subdirectory that can't be deduced without right-clicking the desktop shortcut. I uninstalled it without even launching it once.
If a user is 50/50 on whether or not they just installed malware, you might wanna check your programming practices.
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Well reading comments here has me going to download Vivaldi to replace Brave.
Thank y'all!
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How vivaldi isn't more popular with tech users that want to use chromium totally eludes me. The browser is super moddeable and the devs have so far been nothing but super open and correct to their community. I don't think there's been a single vivaldi "scandal" of note. It literally opera before that went down the drain, and is a better browser on top.
The whole "it's not open source" mantra has also been thoroughly addressed.
Also don't get me started on the brave love. It feels astroturfed. I do not get how you can genuinely shill that browser...
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I choose Brave instead of Vivaldi in Android as a second browser just because of 1 feature:
Vivaldi won't force dark mode in all the websites WHEN the device is in dark mode only, it includes a toggle to on or off only and it doesn't care if the device is light or dark.
I use automatic light/dark mode and Brave and Firefox (with the Dark Reader extension) works well with this.
Also the Vivaldi team is aware of this lacking feature since years ago but they can't seem to fix it somehow... That's fine by me, I can work my way without it.
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the whole ui is web based and because of that its super slow and glitchy for me.. i do like how it looks tho. even got it to look exactly like opera 12 at some point.
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You literally ignored the whole comment section, you madlad.
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I want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile, but Firefox doesn’t support ad-blocking on iOS.
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Maybe the problem is not Firefox here, but Apple.
Apple does not allow other browsers than Safari on iOS. All other browsers are just reskins of Safari.-
The problem is absolutely Apple but a guy’s still gotta block his ads somehow
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Apple does not allow other browsers than Safari on iOS. All other browsers are just reskins of Safari.
And yet only Brave blocks ads effortlessly...
Of course it is an Apple issue in the core, but unless Firefox includes a proper ad blocking frautre (no add-ons needed because that's unlikely to happen in iOS) is also a Firefox issue, and I I'd say the main reason why it loses market when competing against Brave in such a closed environment.
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Also simply compatibility, some sites just don't work (or dont work well) on Firefox or librewolf, thats one key reason I go back to brave for a lot of things.
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They won't make it compatible if they don't have Firefox users.
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I genuinely have not seen a site that doesn't work on Firefox in years. Probably five or more. Can you think of an example off the top of your head?
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Name and shame them. Send them a complaint.
Relatedly, does anyone know if there's a public list of sites that don't work (properly or at all) in Firefox somewhere? A quick (non-Google) web search doesn't seem to turn one up. If I was working at Mozilla, that would be the kind of database I might be interested in making a public resource. And I don't mean as part of the Bug Tracker, though links between the two for legitimate problems could be useful, I guess.
Something with a very basic interface that has an offending site name, how it doesn't work, perhaps why, and what, if anything, Mozilla can do about it. In short simple sentences. One per offending site in 16pt text. And a search feature for when it runs to the hundreds.
It could be something like: [favicon/logo] example.com - Outright states that it will not support Firefox. Mozilla cannot do anything about this. Complain to Example Inc. [favicon/logo] example.net - interface is buggy in Firefox. Site misuses web standards in a way incompatible with Firefox's renderer. We are looking into this.
<Link to bug tracker here>
[favicon/logo] example.org - interface does not load. Site uses non-standard Google-only CSS properties. We are looking into this, but you could also contact The Example Organisation to ask them to review their CSS. etc.I've not had any problems with the handful of sites I use, at least not outside of something caused by browser security or add-ons which I eventually figured out how to fix.
That said, I've probably forgotten a handful I just straight up refused to visit again when they didn't work and now they're not in my regular rotation any more, so I don't notice.
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This doesn’t solve your same browser issue, but just fyi the browser “Orion” on iOS supports full browser extensions. Its developed by the company that runs the Kagi search engine
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No idea it's been plain to me is Brave is kind of dodgy to the point I've never even tried it.
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cause most people just google a chrome alternative. they dont do research. brave gives them a surafce level adblocking, and they feel fine with it.
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Doesn't Firefox still have brand recognition though? I'd have thought even people who answer "google" to "what browser do you use" would have heard of firefox, and therefore looked it up rather than using the neurons to ask, "what alternative browsers are there?"
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You're assuming people know things about the tech field. Very few do. I mean, those of us that do recognize the name Firefox. But someone who heard from a friend that Google went on trial for bad monopoly practices and wants to deGooglefy has no idea what's available or what any of it means.
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Because vanilla Firefox has to be tinkered with to get the best out of it and the average user is not able to do it
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As a user of Firefox from 1-3 and quantum to current.... What exactly are you tinkering with? Install ublock and be done.
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In what way?
I switched recently to Librewolf, but as a long time Firefox user (of which Librewolf is a fork anyway) it didn't seem unusable out of the box. There are some settings for privacy and studies etc you mght want to change, but they are all very obvious in the GUI preferences.
I did personally go into about:config to set a few things, like not allowing searches from the address bar because I'm weird, but what makes Firefox no good for the average user?
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The typical conversation I have is:
- Hey, how don't you have ads on Youtube?
- Well, its easy: you install Firefox and then...
and that's where I loose most of the people, that extra step.
Me and you can go down on the
about:configall day long to dissect every aspect of privacy we care about. For the other 90% of people, even just going to Mozilla extensions manager and downloading u-Block Origin is too much.Bear-proof trash can theorem...
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Any more so than vanilla Chrome?
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No, in fact the
<u>
average</u>
user doesn't tinker with Chrome either
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- Brave is more secure than Firefox, in terms of sandboxing capabilities that it inherits from chromium.
- Brave includes a default adblocker and use their own search engine, compared to Firefox which does not have a default adblocker and uses Google as the default search engine.
- Brave is more efficent in terms of CPU and GPU usage, while Firefox is more efficient in terms of Ram usage.
- Brave is relatively stable(Not a lot of surprising changes) compared to Firefox.
- Brave is better looking out of the box(Wallpapers, New Tab Page (NTP) Customization and built-in Themes).
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Firefox is some other type of engine that renders pages differently and doesn't always work the same but brave has Chrome underneath it so it's the same thing and it's fine and uses all the same extensions and you like it
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Firefox still doesn't have tab groups on mobile
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You got downvoted but it is true, it doesn't while other browsers do, and block ads which is a nice plus.
Firefox offers extension support and that is a reason to forgive it a lot of lacks... But we shouldn't be conformist about the fact that the Android/iOS client needs a lot of work.
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It's just weird that the post asks people why they use Brave over Firefox/Librewolf and I get downvoted for giving an honest answer.
If Firefox added tab groups for mobile I'd start the (unfortunately slow) transition over to a fork that respects privacy by default.
But unfortunately, Mozilla keeps insisting that it's "hard to make tab groups in a way that's intuitive and efficient for the end user" when Chromium already has that as an example. So I still use Brave, because I need my tab groups.
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I tried out Firefox on my phone a year or two ago. I had a number of issues, including accessing secure pages for work. I have little doubt that it wasn't Firefox at fault so much as it was narrow testing by website developers, but the end result was problems for me regardless of who was at fault, so I switched back to Chrome.
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I have Brave alongside my Librewolf installation because of Chromecast. Yes, II know, crazy to have Google shit in your house but it just works and I at least have TechnitiumDNS.
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A good chunk of websites are just broken with Firefox and their not even broken in obvious ways. Some times they fail to load, sometimes they render weirdly, sometimes their just unresponsive. I use Firefox as my main browser but I always have something chromium based as my backup for when a website I wanna use just doesn't work. A lot of the time I don't even think to use it and assume the site would be broken on chromium as well but nope. Its almost always Firefox:/.
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Haven't had trouble with Firefox for a long time. Sure, I also have chrome sitting somewhere on the hard drive as a backup but didn't need to use it for months if not years. Started to use Waterfox on one pc and I'm happy with that one too.
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Can you give any examples where we can see these differences?
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The royal mail tracking website for example brings up an obnoxious full page block on top of the actual content. Only happens on Firefox on android. Chrome worked fine.
Edit: also, just for reference, I'm amazed anyone actually needs examples of this. Its very well known that different browsers have different supported functionalities and unless the webdevs are properly customising styles and scripts for different platforms their gonna deviate. Thusly its not surprising most stuff only works as designed on Chrome since that's the only Web browser that's guaranteed to be tested on (it has the lions size of market share, to the point Firefox barely even registers).
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I can't speak to Brave, but a lot of us have been burned by Firefox before.
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And the minority that still uses FF is constantly reminded that Brave is a flaming dumpsterfire that pretends to be not on fire. Sure, FF occasionally did questionable things. Brave does them all the time.
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promotion, especially as a 'security focused' browser with 'uncommon' features.
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Been using duckduck go for a while now, can recommend.
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For me, it’s because I’m a web developer and most people use chrome. I have to run my code on a browser that is close to what people will really use. I have noticed a blind spot recently where I assumed another project I’m working on is similar, but that one I think has more Firefox users. Likely I’ll have to change my preference by project.
Also, hot take, Chromium is actually a very good browser aside from all google’s nonsense. I’ve had to turn to list virtualization to handle large lists of elements, but I noticed Chromium was much more forgiving of these lists compared to safari. Admittedly I need to do more Firefox testing.
I think people get too caught up on which browser is the best. Probably a good thing we have both brave and Firefox as options. I know brave has done its own share of nonsense, but it’s still miles better than chrome.
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Don't you normally test in Firefox as well?
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I got my dad to try Firefox and he said it drained his phone battery like no tomorrow, so now he uses brave because it doesn't
I've been using Firefox for years on my phone with no such problems, so I can't exactly verify what he's saying
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It’s possible dad was lying.
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Firefox keeps adding stuff I don't want, Chrome keeps removing stuff I do want.
I wish there was a browser that just does what I want, and lets me turn off the stuff I don't want.
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QuteBrowser. You control it completely. you can add scripts you want, remove stuff you don't want. I have mine tied in with my bitwarden account so easy password management. I have a script that skips all youtube ads and has never been detected by google because technically I'm "watching the ads" it just immediately skips them. it's tied in with greasemonkey so it makes adding customs scripts for whatever site I use a breeze. It has vim style navigation so it's super quick to move around and don't need to use a mouse.
I love it, I'll never use a different browser again. Plus the dev for it is really cool and very helpful.
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This look to be amazing. I live by a CLI, but most browsers have some keyboard shortcuts at best. This one seems to have the capability to be fully KB using a VIM-like command line, which is awesome.
Thanks for the recommendation!
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I use FOSS browser on frim f-droid. Federated SearxNG engine.
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Ive browser hopped a bit, Im currently on brave because it has a good vertical tabs integration and works decently well. Having to use another browser because a page won't load correctly is infuriating to me. After reading the comments here, I'd like to switch. I'm guessing Firefox is my best option huh?
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Vivaldi is nice. Created by the Opera creators. Cookie removal, antitracking, etc out of the box.
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I was browser hopping a bunch lately. Stayed on Zen for a while but setting it up for multiple devices was a pain and there was always a new update that broke a mod, so I kept looking. Somehow I landed on edge, mostly due to how it did vertical tabs. But then I recently found out that standard Firefox pretty much does them just like that now, so I'm on that now.
Edit: changed some words that were incorrectly autocorrected
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I was also on edge for a while exclusively for the vertical tabs, initially it was actually a decent experience if you stripped out bing. Now I'm on brave because it's fine and it has good compatibility.
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Don't look at me, I've been an Opera fan for more years than I care to admit.
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Opera, like Edge and Brave is just Chrome in a trenchcoat
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RIP Presto :( I wish they had open-sourced it when they abandoned it
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Even after it's been sold to a Chinese company?
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My Firefox is set up to more aggressively block sites from doing stuff and clear my cookies. I use Brave for when something breaks or if I want the site to track my preferences, like for YouTube.
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I've always preferred to choose from the options offered by my Distro's repository. I might not install that -exact- version (prefer to install where I can easily back things up).
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Hmm, I thought I'd find Waterfox mentioned but I didn't. That one gets my recommendation.
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Firefox was borked on my machine when I started using Brave. Still using it on other machines though
135 comments
I can't answer that question but I've always wondered why anyone switches to Brave. I installed it a few years ago because I heard it was privacy focused and it immediately hit me with a bunch of shit about crypto and rewards or something. I uninstalled it immediately.
It does respect your privacy but it comes with bloatware. You can actually remove them pretty easily
"Respect" for you as the user means you shouldn't have to do stuff like that in the first place.
I installed it. Crypto stuff is off by default. Ad blocking built in. Multiple 3rd party testing shows it blocks virtually all tracking/fingerprinting.
Firefox/Chrome - you need all kinds of addons and pihole type setups to do the same thing. God forbid you want to use it off your own network, you need additional tools. All these tools break with updates, whether they are the browsers or addons/tools themselves. Brave has never once broken its adblock/privacy settings in the years I've used it.
Most of us on here are privacy focused, and want the average user to be that way too. Brave is a one click setup, nothing else needed solution. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is the owner a piece of shit? Hell yes. Does it allow the average user to take ownership of their privacy in an easy and non-technical way? Yes. Perfect is the enemy of good. I will gladly jump ship once another turnkey solution comes along that is as easy and privacy centric that Brave is.
bullshit
you need a single addon, ublock origin. enable additional builtin blocklists according to taste.
you can have additional addons for additional functionality. does brave have libredirect built in? does it block and redirect google AMP sites by default? does it have a feature to only delete cookies regularly for specific sites?
and let's not forget the elephant in the room: ublock is not working anymore in chrome! google made it so that you can only use the inferior lite version, that can only load much much fewer filtering rules into the browser.
I don't know if brave kept supporting mv2 extensions, but if they do, I guarantee to you that it won't be that way for long. it has been relatively easy sailing so far because google did not actually remove support, but it will be lots of work when finally google does remove it, and they'll be needing to patch it in for every new version
pihole is not used for firefox, and that's never been its use case. It's for everything else that uses the internet, but cannot have something like ublock origin: various software, windows itself, android and apps there, smart home and iot garbage.
Honestly this statement of yours proves to me that you don't know what you're talking about.
I have no idea what you are talking about. anyone else?
Because it is still Chromium based and it means it is fast on Android, plus it comes packed with an adblocker by default which works wonders in closed out systems like iOS, also as many browsers (not all of them) it supports account syncing which it is always a nice plus (I can use a good working version of Brave in all the systems and keep a good flow for example).
I main Firefox in pretty much all the systems, but the Android app is missing a lot of features like tab management, and the iOS client just sucks (Brave works better there despite being Safari based too).
I tried to install Brave and it almost nuked my PC. Completely jammed up. I uninstalled it immediately.
Yeah so true!! I installed it, and it launched an attack to overheat and destroy my CPU. Thankfully I reacted quick enough, and unplugged my computer quickly. However when I turned it back on, all my files were gone. It was cryptomining without my consent. Absolutely crazy!