What hasn't been said as explicitly yet: It being Chromium-based means there's tons of implementation details that are bad, which will not be listed in any such comparison table.

For example, the Battery Status web standard was being abused, so Mozilla removed their implementation: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/battery-status-api-being-removed-from-firefox-due-to-privacy-concerns/
Chromium-based browsers continue to be standards-compliant in this regard.

And this is still quite a high-level decision. As a software engineer, I can attest that we make tiny design decisions every single day. I'd much rather have those design decisions made under the helm of a non-profit, with privacy as one of their explicit goals, than under an ad corporation.

And Brave shipping that ad corp implementation with just a few superficial patches + privacy-extensions is what us experts call: Lipstick on a pig.

Looking into privacytests.org, the main developer behind it is someone who contributes to Brave source code. He may not be officially affiliated with the company, but it would be hard to ignore any sort of bias towards Brave.

brave owns that domain, I believe. Of course they are going to rate their browser te best

The product isn't all that bad, but the company behind it have proven they're not trustworthy many times over.

I don't run Brave because Brave runs a crypto scam right in the browser.

I don't care that you can disable it, I don't care that it might be the only way they found to make a buck out of free software: anyone who dabbles in crypto is instantly sketchy. And I don't want to run a piece of software as critical as a browser made by someone who's not 100% trustworthy.

That website is run by an employee of Brave, who rates the privacy of browsers based on their default settings (which Brave tends to perform best in). If browsers prompt the user to select their privacy settings on a first run, he scores them based as if the user had selected the worst privacy options.

If he actually spent a few minutes setting up each browser, as is always recommended within the privacy community, that table will look a lot different. But then Brave wouldn't stand out as much...

For further explanation of any point, please hit me up :)

• It is Chromium based
• It has used dubious methods in the past (replacing links with affiliate links, the whole ad/crypto thing, ...)
• Brave's business model relies on ads (I think)
• [This is a weak point, but at least in the privacy community, Brave isn't super popular. It feels more geared towards the "hyped crypto early adopters". ^[1]^ It might be "fine" for someone switching from Chrome (which is always a good thing) but going all the way would be a modded Firefox.]

TL;DR For most provacy concious Brave users, Brave is a step in their journey towards more privacy, and not the final destination.

[1] The "dumb AF tech youtubers" you mentioned in another post are typically the Brave hype crowd. This is not meant to discredit Brave; it's just that a share of their users are this way.

The man who is CEO is a shitter who gave us the blessing/curse that is JavaScript

They're relying on a cryptocurrency for growth

They use Chromium/Blink

So much with anything privacy comes down to trust. Any piece of software's technical ability to keep you private is of course important but when it comes to a very large (in terms of code and use) piece of software, being able to trust the motivations and intent of the people behind it is also very important.

It's now reached the point that I personally don't feel I can trust the person leading the company, or the intent behind the software(s) the company makes.

Brendan Eich is a homophobe and an antivaxxer. It's hard to trust in the common sense of a man who thinks in these ways.

Brave has been caught inserting affiliate links and ads that track and just recently of selling other people's data. Any one of these things, taken in isolation is bad enough but this is now a pretty much established pattern of very questionable behaviour.

I also forsee a time when the browser is going to have to make some concessions to it's Chromium base. I know they've said the change from Manifest v2 to 3 won't affect ad blocking as their Shield won't be an extension but built in and that they'll also carry on supporting v2 but the issue goes beyond merely adblocking and they've been unclear on exactly how and for how long they'll support v2. As long as they're Chromium based browser, they are dependent on Chromium and the whims of Google developers. It's hard to see a good future for Brave.

Chromium, Crypto, Trash UI

Brave as a browser is fine for now.

But they’re crypto bros with concerning views and it’s just yet another chromium browser.

We really have an issue with the monoculture of web browsers.

That's just browsers with default settings. Firefox doesn't have a built in ad block, so it will always perform worse in that test. I guess FF + ublock origin + hardened settings (such as arkenfox) would perform like brave, if not better. For example, if you check android browsers, you see that Mull (a hardened fork of Firefox) performs great, even without ublock (that you can install as extension anyway).

Judging by a default browser is also really misleading. Firefox is by far the most private with extensions, no competition.

From the JDLR dept… notice how brave is listed first, and passes every test (except a very few)

This report just looks biased. Even if it is totally legitimate, and many users have pointed out how it isn’t , it looks biased.

It looks like every sales pitch for a product where they list everything their product does and how it’s better than the other things.

I vote librewolf

Just install Librewolf

My big grudge is their method of getting revenue. I'm not fond of ads, but replacing services ads for theirs means diverting revenue stream from creators to the company behind brave.

And how did they do this? Why, man-in-the-middling root certificates...

It's not only stupid, but evil.

Have a gander at the people behind Brave Software. They're all cut from the same silicon wafer as everyone else in the Silicon Valley executive biome. And the (lack of) readiness of the information about who is behind Brave is another tell in itself.

The website is run by an employee of Brave, but if you look past the order, even by their criteria Mullvad is ahead.

Librewolf and Mullvad does the same thing Brave does, and doesn't contribute to Google's monopoly on the web by using chromium.

The author of the site works for Brave. The results need to be taken with a grain of salt. Is is more private than Chrome? Absolutely. Is it the best browser for privacy? Ehhh...

it is not even true that "privacytests.org rate it as the best", if you look close enough, librewolf is best rated, which is an amazing browser BTW.

It’s a free country, you can use whatever you like. Respect yourself and your own intuition :)

The current situation (~~summer~~ July–Sept 2023) is, you better switch to any browser that is not Chromium-based. The reason is “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI), which seems to mean, basically, Google is trying to DRM-lock the whole Internet to make sure you see their ads and they can track everyone. Freedom-loving users obviously don’t like that.

At the same time Firefox is getting more and more annoying, yet it’s better than Google. A safe bet for a general user might be LibreWolf. Another new option is Mullvad Browser.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology

The owner being a homophobe would be reason enough for me even without the crypto/affiliate link scandals

Librewolf with minimal extensions is the only browser one should use, but I must add that too much of restrictions will break websites. Like not allowing JS

There is a summary linked here also: https://lemmy.ml/post/4077614