Why Brave??

It's better than Chrome and FF imho. Lacks the tracking BS from Chrome, and FF has gone downhill..

Any reasons not too?

Why not use a Firefox fork like Waterfox? That fixes a number of the complaints people have with Firefox while not pushing us towards a browser engine monopoly - which you do by using a Chromium based browser.

Besides, the Basic Attention Token crap in Brave is kinda shady.

> Waterfox

Or IceCat. Or, even better, original Firefox.

What's wrong with Firefox?

Nothing, so long as you're okay with telemetry, bundled junk like pocket, and the removal of the compact UI (see the thread from yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464533).

Firefox's internals are great -- it's never been faster or as stable, and for that we made real sacrifices like losing XUL extensions but increasingly I don't understand Mozilla's decision making.

EDIT: I understand many of the things I'm talking about can be fixed with about:config. I had a list of over 30 flags in my notes and it was becoming untenable to patch all my devices whenever a feature I needed was changed or removed. Whereas with Waterfox, I so far have only one about:config change:

    dom.security.https_only_mode = true

>> I don't understand Mozilla's decision making.

Yeah lots of (usually subtle-ish) incongruous actions.

Ignore the public messaging and work backwards from what they actually do to understand their real motivations.

I've written some other comments with my analysis on it if you're interests you can check my comment history.

I have not heard about Waterfox, will give it a try.

I've only been using Brave for the last ~2months.

Brave uses Chromium.

What's wrong with Chromium? I don't think Google's tracking specifically has anything to do with Chromium. Chromium !== Chrome

Because the direction Chromium is heading is in large part controlled by Google, more than Firefox. Also Chromium still has Google bits, otherwise ungoogled-chromium won't exist right?

I see. I generally agree with that, which is one reason why I'm a Firefox user, but I'm not totally sure I buy it as a reason not to use Brave. It's a fair viewpoint, though. I could see it being a reason for being against Brave if the Google-ness of Chromium is able to make Brave less private.

I think Google recently took out the syncing capability from Chromium. Things like that.

Edit: Also the manifest v3 thingy which made Ublock Origin operation restricted, also I think it prevented CNAME uncloaking. Idk whether Google went ahead with manifest v3 though.

I think the main problem is that by using it you're still giving google decision-making power over the future of the web

Nothing. I use Chromium. I just prefer it over Brave.

It's produced by a "Reputable" company and has a good update process. I can TRUST my software updates from brave.

"Ungoogled Chromium", while FOSS, have no good update method, and since i'm not going to build it myself, I don't have the same level of trust that something malicious hasn't been implanted.

Brave provides similar features to ungoogled chromium and I don't have to support Mozilla or Google and their practices.

Big issue is the trust factor. As well as all the Chrome zero days going out, not having security updates in a timely manner is risky.

There is a a lot of talk here about "Trust", that's somethings I cannot attribute to Brave. I am sorry.

What is the reaon?

What's the business model again? How are they making money?

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold"

I found this, and i do get ads... https://www.computerworld.com/article/3292619/the-brave-brow...

Brave is still new and when it comes to security, we will have to see how it turns out.

You put quotes around reputable and rightly so. Brave just bought a ton of clickstream data, harvested stealthily by another "privacy-focused" browser. When it comes to privacy, no, I don't trust Brave an inch.