I Recommend Against Brave

There seems to be a strong belief here that it isn't reasonable to use OSS software written by people with alternative political opinions. That is silly. People who write software have really diverse and frequently deviant political positions that are too variable to audit.

The people who are making choices and citing the one time Eich gave $1,000 to a political cause totally unrelated to his OSS contributions are just misguided (especially since the vote outcome suggests it was a mainstream Californian position). Spend your outrage on something relevant. That attitude is doomed to irrelevance because nobody is ever going to be ideologically pure enough. There'll be people who have already failed the test, people who are going to fail the test in the future and people who nothing is known about their private life.

"This man has opinions that are roughly held by half of California!" is not the criticism to lead with. I imagine a remarkable amount of software would fail this test.

I guess the author led with this to pad their critique, feeling that "we do scammy things with your referral links and we take cash in your name" wasn't enough.

Which says a lot more about them than it says about Brave.

I agree with you that you shouldnt oust people because of minor discrepancies but on the other side, you absolutely should draw the line somewhere.

The problem that any minority with hateful opposition has, that its subtle in the beginning until enough people normalized it, which is what trump is doing right now. And since you cant look into peoples heads, whether they are able to reason freely or distorted by emotions / biases, you have to measure by proxy.

This is the conflict line you have to draw, and its difficult, yes, but since the overton window moves fast, its needed more then ever. And i guess the mozilla insiders had the best position to observe these little telling moments.

The arc of him resigning from Mozilla and founding Brave definitely is context that needs to be mentioned. Personally, I feel $1,000 isn’t much to be donating, especially as he would have been decently wealthy going from Netscape pre-IPO and pre-AOL, through to co-founding Mozilla and staying on for 15 years. But Mozilla employees saw it differently, he was forced out, and that’s all part of the story of why Brave exists.

The ways they’ve acted a bit on the sketchy side are perfectly reasonable to call out, even if the writing here is a bit thin. Some are sloppy bugs that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen (.onion DNS leakage), but the rest were intentional decisions (replacing ads, soliciting donations in creators’ names, affiliate injection).

I feel it’s quite difficult to recommend anyone ever use a browser other than the main 4 (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari), because of things like this. All of those have had between 16 and 30 years of experience poured into them, full-time engineers working deep in the JS/layout/etc engines, and they have a fat budget to keep it all going. Startups like Brave, Browser Company, etc. don’t quite have such resources, are very reliant on the benevolence of Google/Mozilla/Apple, and need to keep watching their back to make sure they’re still profitable. Completely FOSS community projects like Ungoogled Chromium, Librewolf, and Zen don’t tend to have any security experience on the team, or any auditing going on, nor the funding to hire for any of those skills. It doesn’t feel responsible to tell someone to download one of these browsers and then go and log into their email, bank, government accounts, etc. on it. As much as we want projects like this to succeed and beat the Google/Apple-centric monoculture we’re stuck with.

I think Mozilla’s past decade would have been very different if he were able to stay as CEO. He’s clearly managed Brave as a startup well enough that it’s still in operation - now imagine what he could have done with those Google billions. There wouldn’t be any need for BAT or new tab sponsored links or injection of affiliate links (this all may change soon of course). But in the current situation, there are some legitimate concerns with how Brave operates or did so in the past, which aren’t likely to be fixed because they require it to work this way to be profitable.

When I use Brave it's so I don't have to see ads.

That simple feature seems to be overlooked in a pile of stuff most people won't care about. This doesn't read like a neutral article.