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And they wonder why people use an ad blocker???
- Thread starter romanof
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I am using Firefox (always have done) on a 2014 MacBook Air and certainly do not have any Google ad on the site you mention. Firefox 115.15.0esr and uBlockOrigin - brilliant! Even YouTube plays without a hiccup with nil ads.
And others have not.
The motivation for several to have stepped forward to respond to you, me amongst them, falls along two areas:
- one, the notion that anyone getting online in 2024 just blithely does so without the most basic of protection (like human beings wearing clothing, or intimate, casual partners using a protective barrier), making a download-and-do-nothing-else approach — a reckless tack, frankly — the only rationale supporting your case argument for Brave; and
- two, your uncritical promotion of a problematic browser (both under the bonnet and in the political adjacency of its founder) which has a history of being resource-hungry relative to other browsers, including other Chromium forks, and not conducive to user customization.
If a generic user is good with a generic Chromium UX and trusts solely in strangers for their online security, then more power to them.
Most users, however, know there’s just a little bit one needs to set up on their own before going off into the World Wide Sunset — not unlike wearing a coat when it gets cold outside. That you refer to this initial setup as “[going] to considerable lengths to rid themselves of ads and trackers” says more about you than it does of them.
And in its default settings, it’s also a nice little crypto miner and it loves to phone home, including by default to Google properties, for analytics. Those two privacy holes from the very outset undermine any conjecture that Brave is some open-it-and-forget-everything-else fantasy of a browser.
I don’t remember a Mozilla browser — any browser — requiring personal details as a requirement to launch and run. Were that the case, then it is highly unlikely Tor would rely on the Mozilla code base for the Tor browser.
If you’re doubling-down by making unqualified, advertorial claims like “it’s the best free browser”, then spoiler alert: you’re closer to what your quote alleges you probably are.
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to do the basic internet-equivalent task of putting on clothes appropriate for the weather, then I guess Brave is your browser.
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to think out their own privacy and online hygiene needs, then make a mad dash to Brave.
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t think about big-picture, consequential impacts arising from decisions one makes at an individual level, then sure, why not: “shut up and take my download, Brave!”
For any and every number of valid reasons, others have expressed they aren’t as keen as you are for a browser which has its share of unaddressed (and possibly unresolvable, intractable) problems.
UPDATE: Just installed NextDNS, and that has got rid of all the ads in Apple News+
It works like a dream.
It makes reading any article in Apple News so much more pleasant.
This combination will test out very well at: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It makes Safari one of the most private setups that you can achieve.