And they don’t exist in Firefox?
I’m aware of the past controversies, some exposed through open-source code, which drove accountability and fixes. I’m not interested in political noise or a CEO’s personal affairs. I value 100% open-source code that’s fully auditable. Without clear evidence demanding I abandon it, everything else is irrelevant. A browser like Vivaldi could conceal unethical code in its UI, unnoticed. That’s why I champion fully open-source code over politics or settled scandals.
I’m not down with cancel culture.
They screwed up, fixed it, and the code’s still fully open source. I see no real issue worth dwelling on.
Life goes on.
You are the only one bringing up ‘cancel culture’.
The software is made by a company and it has repeatedly demonstrated activities counter to those in their advertising materials. And these arent ‘screw ups’ .. they are part of a pattern of valuing their bottom dollar over their users.
You dont even need to go far to get a cursory, though incomplete, timeline that reflects this right on their wiki page. Besides the name-spaces thing. BEsides the inserted links. Besides the rewards program. Besides the various other technical issues over the years ..
We have broken fingerprinting, broken ‘tor privacy’, and oh yeah - non-consensual installing their proprietary VPN services.
But do go on and keep using it if it suits you.
But no one will ever be able to convince me it is ‘secure’, or that such a thing is even of any importance to its development. Outside of the marketing material that is.
I agree, Brave’s pattern of doing shady things over the years is relentless.
Whitelisting Facebook and Twitter trackers was a pretty egregious one I always thought…but you know what? As far as I am aware they are still whitelisted, because we wouldn’t want to break some random site’s Facebook widget.
Yeah, after they were caught, they responded by saying basically “it’s not that bad, fingerprinting isn’t very effective anyway.” Script Blocking Exceptions Update | Brave
" Fingerprinting is not always a reliable tracking method. Given that most users on the web share IP addresses with other users because of NAT, it is unlikely this can be used to reliably track users unless they have a very distinctive user agent string."
That is certainly an interesting stance for a “privacy” browser to take I think.
Then there was the whole fiasco where they started injecting affiliate codes into user traffic.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-users-through-affiliate-links
https://www.technewsworld.com/story/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-urls-for-cash-86701.html
Obviously this is kind of malware-ish to begin with, but also it sabotages the user’s ability to hide their browser identity from these sites. After they were caught, they basically said “oops, sorry about that” and turned it off.
Those are just a couple things, the list goes on and on and on. I’m not one to begrudge anyone their browser choice, but I think anyone who still trusts Brave has been fooled by the marketing and hype.
If you want to audit the code, knock yourself out. It’s the license which is not open; the code is source available and can be audited.
They should make them opt-in settings, instead of opt-out settings then because crypto and wallet features aren’t the main goal of a web-browser. Besides that Brave’s sync feature is shit compared to that of Firefox, Vivaldi and even Chrome.
Vivaldi’s reputation currently wins any day over Brave’s reputation, you can stil read Vivaldi’s code if you like as @BluishHumility stated, it’s only the license that’s not open.
To that, I’d also add Trivalent – it is claimed to be “a hardened Chromium for desktop Linux inspired by Vanadium”.
For those who don’t know – Vanadium is a hardened version of mobile Chromium and the default browser for GrapheneOS.
Unfortunately, these Chromium browsers no longer have a decent ad blocker. This is forcing more and more users to buy YouTube Premium. And don’t say, “Then just use Firefox!” Nobody knows how long it will actually work for them with Mv2. You can promise anything…
And NO, ublock otigin LITE is crap!
Brave’s default ad blocker filters out YouTube ads. Too bad the browser itself gets involved in controversial stories.
Yeah it is present in the Firefox Settings > Privacy & Security > HTTPS Only mode.
In this setting HTTPS can be enabled for all the websites and also exceptions be maintained. There are other options to which prevent going to HTTPS only mode.
That should be helpful for @Moonbase59.
Brave is not a privacy browser. It is just a browser pretending to be a privacy focused browser. It is in many respects worse than Chrome and Edge.
For those who need privacy, LibreWolf and Vivaldi+ublock origin+fingerprint blocker ought to be the way forward.
Believe me, I tried that:
But:
Firefox may still upgrade some connections.
All, in my LAN. They’re starting to paternalize like Microsoft, and I’m not going to add a few hundred local machines into an “exception list”, darn!
Even the “old tricks” from a few versions before don’t work anymore, like typing the protocol in, appending a slash, like http://machine/
. Grumble, mumble…
You might want to check in about:config
for
browser.fixup.fallback-to-https
and
dom.security.https_first
(Set to FALSE)
I havent had issues with firefox forcing https when I dont want it.
Another possible issue is cache - might need to clear it out in order to not be RE-served the same https again.
Cheers for the pointer, I’ll try!
If they are all local machines then most probably their IP addresses will be internal/local IP addresses. i.e. they will start with 10.x or with 172.16 or 192.168.x.
Can you check whether wildcards or CIDR notation work with exceptions?
On the related note for the OP.
Consumer Reports recommends Firefox, chrome and brave browser. First of it is surprising that they are going with chrome and not vivaldi. And secondly they are recommending Brave. Flakon would have been better.
It is good to see that they do not recommend Edge.

Consumer Reports recommends Firefox, chrome and brave browser. First of it is surprising that they are going with chrome and not vivaldi. And secondly they are recommending Brave. Flakon would have been better.
It is good to see that they do not recommend Edge.
I suspect this is article is targeting normies. The justification would be, that these are maintained, mainstream browser choices with wide website support, and receive reliable updates. In the context of the typical community in these forums, which is a bit more researched and capable (and using Linux afterall), I wouldn’t pay it much attention.
after all this “ranting” about Brave (which i been using for years) , i thought let me try this Librewolf.
installed it …looks just like FF , which i don’t particularly enjoy, but i’ll give it a change and see how it goes .
PS:
yay -S librewolf
took FOREVER and at end still was some error so didn’t install
yay -S librewolf-bin
worked great

yay -S librewolf
took FOREVER and at end still was some error so didn’t install
yes compiling a Web Browser can take a very long time depending on the system. You should always try to grab the -bin for a browser unless you have the time and a system that can handle the job.