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Brave browser quietly slips a VPN service onto your Windows PC (www.androidcentral.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 118 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

Yep, this news actually broke a couple days ago, I remember seeing a Brave fanboy having a meltdown over it and ranting about how Mozilla is the real shady company, blah, blah, blah.

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  • [–] 52 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Oh dear lord. What did they say in support of their “Mozilla is shady” argument?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    To be fair. Mozilla foundation is shady. They keep pushing things that don't follow their core mission. That try to expand their brand.

    You can use Mozilla to build solid privacy respecting systems, but Firefox out of the box not so much. They're better than Google, but that's a low fucking bar.

    Mullvad browser, Tor browser, mull for Android - all use the core Firefox open source engine, to make privacy respecting programs that work out of the box with privacy respecting defaults.

    So I would say Mozilla is a good guy in this conversation, but not a saint.

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  • [–] 53 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Though they are transparent with the fact that they are doing it. I'm not a fan of it either, but it's not too shady when they're open about it IMO.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Fair enough, they aren't evil to be sure.

    The Mozilla telemetry, pocket, Mozilla synchronization, experiments, the new tab page basically being an advertisement page. That leaves the sour taste in my mouth, so I don't trust them because of that... Shady good guy vibes:)

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    They're doing what they think they need to justify their existence, and although I personally believe being just a great browser would be enough I appreciate their communication around their ventures. It's not great, but it's not like they're installing malware in the background.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    And may I point out that just being a great browser hasn't worked out so well for Firefox so far. Unfortunately in today's day and age you have to promote yourself to stand out. Chrome is an abject piece of crap that actively spies on you and yet Google's PR has managed to convince the vast majority to use it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    It’s also worth noting that Chrome’s security model is much more robust than Firefox’s. Acting like Firefox is superior in every regard only serves to undercut Mozilla’s pleas for more contributors and funding.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    https://itsfoss.com/firefox-looking-glass-controversy/

    They get pretty close sometimes. I respect their mojo, but I don't install vanilla Firefox anymore. On anything. For any reason. I don't trust them anymore.

    I wish them the best, if I could donate directly to Firefox development I would, but it's impossible with them. So I don't. I donate to mullvad, I donate to the Tor project, and I donate to servo. That's what I can do to make sure we maintain an open and free web

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  • [+] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    This is an old issue, I was just linking to it to reference why I have friendly relations with Firefox but I doubt they're intentions, or at least I consider them an ally but one that needs to be double checked.

    The date on that post is clearly wrong. Maybe they got some weird content management system that's updating the date and correctly or they made an edit or something

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I dont get why everyone bitches about Pocket, tbh. Ive been a Pocket user for years and Mozilla's purchase of them has made them better if anything.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I've always liked the idea of pocket and have tried to get into using it multiple times but sadly I'm a savage who hates even using bookmarks for some reason. I just keep all of it in my brain (which tends to mean I do not keep it at all).

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  • [+] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Fair enough. I'm glad it works for you.

    For what it's worth mullvad browser works for all of my use cases, I haven't found anything it doesn't work for.

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  • [+] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    You can open up the no script options and click on disable globally.

    Sorry to hear mullvad's not loading anything. Seems like a weird bug

    Setting the default browser, is a problem on Windows, there is a workaround I could dig up for you if you want. But basically you have to make a script and then modify the registry to point to that script as the default browser. It's a pain in the butt but it works. Thankfully on Linux, and Mac OS it just works as the default browser

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  • [+] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    On Qubes it just worked after I did --register-app

    Their GitHub has an issue open for it in Linux, I see that the tor project is working on a solution as well to make it more elegant.

    But since it doesn't load any web pages for you, you don't want to make it your default anyway.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Probably something about Google.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah if it's the comment chain that I think they're referring to, I believe it came down to Mozilla "being in bed with Google" because Google is the default search engine.

    I'll take the default search engine being Google over things like affiliate links being hijacked, but maybe I'm crazy for taking that position.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I follow Ghacks, a tech site, as well and boy there is a Brave shill on there who attacks everyone there for daring to say anything against it. He knows stuff, judging from his comments, yet is so anti Mozilla and pro Brave that I can't understand. Almost thinks anyone not using Brave is inferior.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    It's not good to stereotype people. But, I would bet money that they have any three of these: bought NFCs NFTs unironically, supports OpenAI unconditionally, propose blockchain on everything, bought a pizza with bitcoin years ago that would be millions of dollars today and are still salty about it, have a Starlink receiver, drive a beaten down Tesla they can't afford to repair because they spent their money paying for FSD early access, and would definitely be first in line to fly Starship to Mars if they were allowed to, they posts to imageai regularly.

    EDIT: autocorrect.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Yes, that pizza for Bitcoin story is quite popular, though it happened in very early days of the currency. Also, I assume you meant NFTs instead of NFCs :p. For a second, I was wondering what did near field communication had to do with this.

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  • [+] -17 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The Mozilla foundation is super shady, and some Firefox devs does have it in them to change stuff to piss off people. It doesn't excuse Brave though.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Please cite an actual source for that claim.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Their public reports were a fair share of the money goes to its administration, were the dev funds are lower each years, were some funded orgs does not seem to exist, with the addition of actual user contribution being a drop in the ocean of money influx, is the source for the "shady" part.

    Me (and many other) having long debates on their bugzilla about changes they made that ignore user settings, against all common practices, with no chance of reverting them because they knew better, until some big service (say, gmail) is impacted at which point all their arguments are forgotten and the changes are reverted, for the pissing of people part.

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