Technology

CEO was forcefully ousted from Firefox for anti-LGBTQ views and donations.

I think this is making mountains out of molehills. My understanding is that he had a very good working relationship w/ LGBTQ people in the org, and he had been working for many years at Mozilla before this point. The issue was his private donations to an anti-same sex marriage initiative. He didn't push for any company policy change, didn't advertise the donation, and didn't use company funds (used personal funds), so it really shouldn't be anyone's business.

I personally disagree with his political views, but I think he was a fantastic candidate for CEO of Mozilla. How he votes or spends his personal money shouldn't be relevant at all.

Replaced existing ads on sites with Brave’s own “private” ads.

I like this idea in principle, but not in implementation. Brave should have worked with major websites to share revenue, but what Brave actually did was remove website ads and insert its own, forcing websites to go claim BAT to get any of that revenue back.

My preference here is to not use a cryptocurrency and instead have users pay in their local currency into a bucket to not see ads (and that's shared w/ the website), and that should be in collaboration w/ website owners.

Collected crypto on behalf of others without their knowledge or consent

This is a big nothing-burger.

Basically, Brave had a way to donate to a creator that wasn't affiliated with the creator. The way it works is you could donate (using BAT), and once it got to $100 worth, Brave would reach out to the creator to give them the money. They adjusted the wording to make it clear they weren't affiliated with the creator in any way.

Injected referral links into crypto websites to steal crypto revenue

Yeah, this is totally wrong, and they reversed course immediately.

Put ads in the new page tab

Not a fan, but at least you can opt-out.

Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS

Mistakes happen. If you truly need the anonymity, you would have multiple layers of defense (i.e. change your default DNS server) and probably not use something like Brave anyway (Tor Browser is the gold standard here).

Doesn’t disclose the ID of their search engine crawler via useragent

Also a bad move, though I am sympathetic to their reasoning here: they just don't have the resources to get permission from everyone. Search has a huge barrier to entry, and I'm in favor of more competition to Google and Microsoft here.

Removed “strict” fingerprinting protection

This was for better UX, since it broke sites. Not a fan of removing this, they should have instead had a big warning when enabling this (e.g. many sites will break if you enable this).

CEO is generally a right-wing dick.

Fair, but that should be a separate consideration from whether to use a given product. Using Brave doesn't make you a right-wing dick.

You probably wouldn't like the CEO of any company whose products you like, so basing a decision of what product to use based on that is... dumb.

I personally use Brave as a backup browser, for two reasons:

• it's a chrome-based browser
• it has ad-blocking

My primary browser is something based on Firefox because I value rendering-engine competition. But if I need a chromium-based browser, Brave is my go-to. I disable the crypto nonsense and keep ad-blocking on, and it's generally pretty usable.