It also has nice privacy centric and QoL features that strip tracking URLs, removes "Open in App" banners and AMP pages + redirects (e.g. old.reddit) for mobile, fingerprint randomisation and of course, will probably be the best Chromium-based browser adblocker post Manifest V3, but yeah you can also spin these features into a bundled Firefox or use one of those Libre* forks which already does most of this afaik.
"I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
"He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
"So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.
"Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven."
A number of Mozilla's LGBT+ employees spoke out at the time saying that they'd already known about the donation but since he'd been utterly professional at work they still felt quite sufficiently supported by the company and leadership.
The donation getting publicised, going viral and becoming a shitstorm was what forced the end of his tenure as CEO, and I've heard comments since that his being replaced with a more business-y CEO has been a disappointing experience.
(I've no idea what percentage of the relevant subset of employees made such comments and/or held such opinions, and I'm not expressing an opinion on should/shouldn't about any given event, but it does seem to have been a little more complicated than "he got kicked out ... for being a homophobe")
Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, the mere fact that Mozilla forced out its CEO for having an unpopular political opinion is reason enough not to trust its leadership. Its one of the reasons I use Brave and not Firefox.
It seems disingenuous to sweep "actively working to deny people civil rights" under the rug of "having an unpopular political opinion."
Partially because this wasn't just a matter of having an opinion; this was an extremely concrete _action._ Even if you want to take the (dubious) stance that people should not be held responsible for their beliefs, surely we should still hold people responsible for their actions?
I invite you to imagine the equivalent but reversed scenario. What if Brendan Eich had been contributing money to the pro-gay-marriage campaign and had been forced out by right-wing staff at Mozilla? Would that have been appropriate?
Nope! But that's because extending civil rights more uniformly to more people is a good thing, and selectively denying civil rights is a bad thing.
Any reductive moral framework that abstracts every possible political position into interchangeable spherical cows in a vacuum does a disservice to its users.
You think that gay marriage is a good thing, but many people do not.
The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
You cannot decide moral questions by couching them in terms of “rights” and assuming that whichever side “advances rights” must be the correct side. Why? Because you can do that arbitrarily either way and for anything. e.g. “admitting gay marriage denies people the right to live in a society where traditional marriage is protected”.
Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
> The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
But the reasoning you seem to be proposing is "here is something you agree with and something you disagree with, therefore those two things are interchangeable and you should not favor one over the other."
> Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
I exercise human discretion and decide which of those rights is better, more valuable, more important.
In this case, that's not a tough call. Marriage provides a bunch of very concrete mechanical effects, from inheritance to medical decision making to finances to immigration. Whereas some people feeling happy about the fact that some other people can't access those rights is, at best, abstract and intangible.
And you'll also note that some of my previous references were to the uniformity of rights. Generally speaking, making rights more uniformly accessible to all people is better than having rights be selectively, arbitrarily limited to some people.
>> The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
>Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
Not to me. The difference between us is that I am perfectly happy to work with people who do not share my political viewpoints.
Whereas I feel that Desmond Tutu covered this pretty well already: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
the general discussion about crypto aside, if the genuine purpose had been to faciliate direct payments the obvious solution would have been to integrate some currency like Ethereum or Bitcoin, not pre-mined Brave Bucks, which is effectively like "paying" your users in your own quasi worthless gift cards.
There's flags for Firefox style scrolling horizontal tabs, and native scrollable vertical ones don't need a flag at all. Plus you get collapsible tab groups built in.
Is that really the only reason to install Brave?
Starting to wonder if I should just set up a Firefox that bundles uBlock Origin by default with a brand new name.