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Brave is charging $60 to remove features it added in the first place (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 36 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (13 children)

Can we agree that Brave:

  • Is scummy.

  • Has a shady ceo, and a shady history.

  • Is possibly a security risk.

  • Is still orders of magnitude better than using Google Chrome.

And that:

  • This headline is both true and clickbait-ish.

  • You can turn these things off in Brave’s settings, for free.

  • That doesn’t make this feature not scummy.

Basically no one should be using Brave, but no one should be using Google Chrome either, yet here we are.

And the revolving door of “best unabandoned Chromium fork to use” (Helium for the moment, or Ungoogled Chromium if you don’t mind some broken features, just to name two), is buried under so much SEO that it’s legitimately difficult to research.

So… I’m not gonna go out of my way to flame Brave users. If they’re trying to do better than Chrome, good! Not-Google is good. They can pay for this I guess. I’m not installing Brave, though, I’m not recommending it, and this certainly isn’t making me want to.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (12 children)

    use vivaldi if you want a chromium browser. its very customizable

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    Vivaldi concerns me a little, because I keep catching them trying to replace web addresses for major retailers with what appear to be affiliate links. For example, if I start typing the address for Amazon (I know, shitty company, but it's the first page that comes to mind) it will pop up an auto complete to click on. If I click it, I can see that I'm redirected to Amazon through what appears to be either an affiliate or a tracking link. However, if I type the address fully in the browser and don't use auto complete it takes me straight to Amazon, no redirecting or strange links popping up first. They do not disclose that they are doing this anywhere that I have found and I think it's shady as fuck. I don't have any extensions installed and it happens on multiple devices (phone, laptop, PC) and only on Vivaldi, so it's definitely the browser and not an untrustworthy extension or a compromised device.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (4 children)
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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Ooh, thank you. I get they need to make money, but I hate this. It also won't seem to turn off for me, I disabled the setting for direct match, deleted all my cookies and such, deleted the browser cache, and it's still popping up and still redirecting through the affiliate link. Boo.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Hmmm, that's weird, I didn't even realize this feature existed until I read your post. Guess I have always had it disabled, and I've never run into the issue. Have you also deleted the default bookmarks? The address bar will prefer bookmarks when you start typing an address, so if you don't delete the default ones that come with Vivaldi, they might be autocompleting?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I did delete the bookmarks, yes. I'll have to keep playing with it and see if I can make it stop, but it does make me feel a little better knowing what it is. I just wish they were more open and transparent about it. Seeing my browser just randomly redirecting me through third party links with no warning is alarming and makes me want to go find another browser and I've gone through like 6 in the last 2 years trying to find one I like.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago*

    This seems to be disabled for me on mobile, but enabled on the desktop. Seems like a helpful feature, though they could've just done something like Firefox where it's an offline search for a website with the same starting letters.

    Still, appreciate the writeup and trying to minimize data collection while calling a 3rd party service in the browser and the option to disable it.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    that might be the search engine you are using. that doesnt happen to me. i use amazon every day

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I've been able to replicate with DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Ecosia. Interestingly enough while testing it out to see if that was the issue I've noticed that it isn't happening every time, more like every other time. It redirects so fast it's easy to miss, but I was able to screen record and grab a screenshot of the link it's redirecting through. It's the same regardless of search engine.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    Yeah. Or SRWare Iron, IIRC. Or DuckDuckGo or Orion on mobile. Cromite. Firefox, Zen, whatever.

    There are tons of good options, certainly more than I know. But it’s a hard thing for the average person to research, especially when forks get abandoned or whatever.

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