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Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser

www.spacebar.news Stop using Brave Browser

Seriously.

Firefox @lemmy.ml

Stop using Brave Browser

www.spacebar.news /p/stop-using-brave-browser

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Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) @feddit.it

Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser

www.spacebar.news /p/stop-using-brave-browser

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842 comments

But how can i replace the built in function of youtube playing music on mobile in the background? Please give me an alternative
- Newpipe?
  
  Thank you!!! Any chance the app supports a ‘random-but-personalized’ music suggestion feature? Like the playlist finish and it keeps playing based on your previous content

Just use Firefox.
- Firefox + uBlock Origin + arkenfox user.js gives you privacy, security and anti-tracking. The only way to fly IMO.
  
  And a Pi Hole for good measure.
  
  White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It's like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.
  
  Librewolf
  
  What does Arkenfox do? I'll definitely add it if it's beneficial.
  
  What about Privacy Badger? Is uBlock better?
  
  Is this applicable for Firefox mobile?
  
  Why not add Snowflake while we're at it?
- I bounced between the two for years, i guess i am going back to Firefox full time.
  
  The only reason I haven't switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn't have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it's not a priority. 🤷
  
  I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn't handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up
  
  Same. I had no idea about brave and I started using it full time on all my devices like a month ago. Guess I’m going back to Firefox. Which was fine.
- I've switched on Desktop a year ago. Also with Android. But Firefox on Android has an odd bug that I cannot get rid of. Pages are really slow to load on initial render. I've noticed it gets stuck on the SSL cert verification step, sometimes around 5 to 10 seconds before it starts painting the page.
  I've tried disabling all add-ons, logging out of Firefox sync, disabling the built in HTTPS everywhere, and literally any custom settings I've added. But I can't get past this issue and seemingly no one else has it.
  Chrome doesn't present this issue.
  
  Yup got the same thing. Annoying as hell. The loading bar always goes to like quarter of the way and stays there for a couple of seconds and the continues. After that it's fine, but it is always the first page you load after closing Firefox.
  
  I've never encountered this, which makes me realise I've been running Firefox beta for ages (with zero issues). Perhaps try that just in case it helps?
  
  Same issue here! I thought I was alone. It annoys me to no end and weirder still, issue doesn't present itself with Firefox for Windows running behind the same IP.
  Firefox Focus also doesn't seem to present the issue. Just the primary Firefox browser for Android. And honestly, often enough that it's nearly unusable.
  If you ever figure it out, please let me know.
  
  +1 for that issue, you are not alone :)
  
  You're not alone, I've been using Firefox on Android for two years now, and I've had this problem from the beginning. The first time I launch Firefox and load a page it stops a quarter of the progression bar for ten seconds, and then loads fine. Once pas that everything works perfectly. It's very annoying and I don't know why this happens.
- Unrelated, but why is it that so many kbin users seem to keep a dedicated reducing account? Relatively frequently, an account that reduces a post or comment has no recent posts or comments but heavy initial usage a month ago as jpgr above. It’s weird.
  
  I think those existed on Reddit too. It's just that you could never actually confirm they existed.
  
  I downvoted because it was a lazy comment not providing further elaboration. If anything, the fact that such a comment is highly upvoted shows that this community is not mature yet.
  That I'm not engaging in online discussion doesn't automatically mean this is a bot or "dedicated reducing" account. Please restrain yourself from judging strangers on the internet.
- I use chrome on my mobile device... Is that bad?
  
  Might as well take shits with the door unlocked; same level of exposing yourself.
  
  In a way yes. You're giving Google (via an increased browser market share) the power to decide the direction of the web. Their interests as a corporate organization are not aligned with yours, so they will make decisions to your detriment if they have to.
  
  Just use Firefox. Mozilla isn’t good but it’s not evil
  
  I don't know how people browse the web on mobile with ads taking half of the screen.
  
  It's not really bad per se, it's the default on most Android devices these days. The problem is that almost all modern browsers are Chromium-based which give Google a lot of power to implement changes (see manifest v3 & web DRM). Personally, I'm trying to slowly reduce my usage of Google products. I'm using Firefox on desktop and a mix of DDG+Fennec on my phone.
- On mac? Love safari? But also want good adblock? Use Orion! It’s safari, but with support for chrome and Firefox extensions! Fuck yeah!
  I always loved safari, and always got weird looks for it as a web developer (but after a month or two they love me for it because I always find non-chrome bugs because those peasants only use chrome), but that browser is so damn good guys… on mac, that is. Not sure if it even exists yet for linux/win.
  
  Orion
  Thanks for the tip! Do you know any similar solution like this for iOS? I'm struggling to find a fully featured browser with decent ad-blocking capacity.
- Just moved from Brave to Firefox when that “AI training” story came out. I think it’s faster than brave now
- I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
- This is the way.
- Firefox and mozilla aren't your friend.
  They like to play the "user and privacy friendly" company. Meanwhile they are hemoraging users, and laying off staff needed to actually build a great browser.
  Mozilla ceo pay increase + layoffs in 2020:
  In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
  In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
  
  They don't need to be my friend to be better than the chromium browsers though, so I don't know what this has to do with anything
  
  What's the alternative though, we have Chrome and Firefox as choices. Chrome is far worse than some issues with Firefox around CEO pay.
- Doesn't Firefox do telemetry and other shady shit out of the box? Ofc you can turn it off but I don't get the fanaticism over this browser.
  
  Every now and then, you'll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.
  Some examples:
  Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
  Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
  Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared
  And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing "about:telemetry" into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.
  Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.
  Any 'evil' shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.
  You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can't possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.
  But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.
  
  The fact that they have (at least for now) foregone implementing Manifest v3 should be reason enough to use Firefox. Turn their telemetry off and use ublock origin, call it a day well spent.
  If you're inclined to, use Librewolf with ublock, NoScript, decentraleyes, and chameleon.
  Copy the bypasspaywalls sites into ublock, add a redirect extension to avoid all the idiot megacorps, and use duckduckgo lite and learn to use shebangs for very fast web searching.
  
  Yeah it's not perfect out of the box but after turning off telemetry and adding some add-ons like ublock origin and such it's one of the best short of going full on tor/mullvad. And still less fanaticism than brave lol
- With brave I never see any pc or YouTube ads. With Firefox even with ublock origin I can’t get rid of those damn ads. That’s what keeps me on brave
  
  Which websites exactly do you still see ads on with ublock and not with Brave? Because I've not seen any ads in years with ublock.
  
  I don’t know why you’re getting ads… I run Firefox + uBlock just fine.
  But I also run NoScript and AdBlockPlus. Maybe try those?
  (Yes I know NoScript with uBlock is pretty redundant. Doesn’t really bother me to allow scripts on both to unbreak things. I like the double lock.)
  
  No ads on YT with Firefox + uBlock, not sure why your setup isn't working.

The ceo is a bigoted asshole, Brave is chromium, it was initially funded by Peter Thiel and they're literally just trying to make their own adsense network.
The self-proclaimed privacy focused browser is tracking your browsing and want to serve you personalized ads, and I think they want to use that tracking data for AI training as well, meaning other people can potentially access it.
And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. Which they seemingly unironically called it "Basic Attent Tokens"..
TL;DR: The company is basically a sham company trying to usher in a dystopia. Where you'll get paid for staring at ads, while having all your data stolen and sold back to you.
- I see no reason to use any other browser than Firefox and maybe Librewolf.
  
  So Mull browser, right?
  
  Firefox on desktop is awesome. Firefox on mobile is painful.
  
  I am forced to use Chromium on my work laptop because MS Teams doesn't work (all the features) on Firefox.
  Edit: I should elaborate this a bit. There are 2 reasons why I use Chromium on my machine.
  If I face a problem, company tech team only knows Chrome and they start crying when I open Firefox.
  On Linux, the official way to use Teams is through a web-app and Firefox doesn't support PWAs.
  All other MS services function fine on Firefox.
  
  I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.

The fact that their founder wants to ban gay marriage is enough reason for me to avoid it like the plague.

I dont know why anyone would leave chrome and land on something like brave.
If youre ditching chrome, which you should, go to an actual different browser and use Firefox.
- Personal anecdote:
  When I initially decided to drop Chrome, I moved to Brave because - as a chromium-based browser - it supported the same set of extensions I’d grown accustomed to.
  That being said, the crypto stuff weirded me out enough that, once I’d weaned myself off the extensions, I switched to Firefox.
  
  What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?
  My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world
- Streaming services seem to lower bitrate when I’m using Firefox vs Brave, so Brave is my go to for streaming.
  I use Firefox for everything else.
- I use it as my hardened Firefox doesn't play well with some government and bank sites
- Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seems to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don't buy the argument that it's easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It's not as complicated as people make it out to be. It's not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they'll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine's direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! 😄
  
  The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.
- I was using Chrome as a secondary because unfortunately "designed for Chrome" is a thing now, and got sick of Google's bullshit and thought I was doing better by going to Brave. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Brave has its own large ethical holes.
  
  When I need a Chromium browser I use Vivaldi. I quite like it!
  
  Ungoogled Chromium is a great option for a back up. It's lightweight and works well
- I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
- I've tried Firefox several times but always end up back on chromium due to compatibility; a lot of sites don't play well with anything but chrome anymore and this is very much something intentionally caused by Google, who have basically taken a page out of Microsoft's playbook but with a much more mature product that is going to be substantially harder to replace then IE was
- Brave is the only browser I know that can play youtube videos in the background on mobile. Please tell me another browser that can do that. The UX is just really good.
  
  Why not use NewPipe?
  
  Vivaldi can do that, there is an option in settings. Firefox mobile does that with an addon.
- Firefox and gecko are just not as smooth. I don't know how you don't notice this, especially on Android.

I have absolutely no idea how Brave got the reputation it has. It's business model is disgusting and extortionate, it's like paying for warez. Been clear as day since day one.

Brave is a marching band of red flags. It claims privacy while injecting ads, affiliate codes and crypto into the browser. It's kind of sad to see someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side and pretend this is all fine. It isn't.
Best advice I could give for anyone who wants privacy is use Firefox or a branch of it. Firefox is out of the box the most privacy conscious mainstream browser and add-ons make it more so. If you want absolute privacy you could even use a derivative like Tor Browser.
- someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side
  LOL, he inflicted Javascript upon the world. He never knew better and was always on the dark side.
- Louis Rossmann also recommended Brave in one of his videos. Quite sad.

At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see. Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave, and that's what's wrong in general with the "but the UX is so nice" mentality.
- Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave
  It starts to feel astroturfed at a certain point. The last week or so has been crazy.
  
  I would bet my left nut they astroturf
- At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see.
  To be clear, that means Brave is ① invading their users' privacy, and ② stealing money from web publishers.
  The point of referral codes is to reward web publishers for referring users to a product; leading to the user buying a product that they otherwise wouldn't.
  Your browser isn't introducing you to a product. For it to insert referral codes for the browser vendor's benefit is stealing money.
- Its almost like UX is one of the most important things for a user of any given program. 🥴
- If you really dig into the whole ordeal it was a software error, not some malicious idea to steal links from creators.
  
  How exactly does one accidentally insert affiliate data on links? At some point someone wrote that code, which is malicious in itself, even if the activation was accidental.
- What’s so bad about that?
  
  It's without your consent.
  
  Why the fuck should your browser get a share from your amazon shopping? It’s doubly galling since they pretend to care about user privacy.

Yeah, fuck this guy.
First, I have been online for almost 30 years. I’ve led an open source project for 14 years. I speak regularly at conferences around the world, and socialize with members of the Mozilla, JavaScript, and other web developer communities. I challenge anyone to cite an incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.
So I hid my hatred from everyone for 30 years successfully. Now that everyone finds out that I donated to a cause to strip them of rights everyone wants to say I'm hateful? Give me one example where I displayed hatred....how about the time you donated to strip people of their rights? That might be a big one for me.

The fact that its main 2 gimmicks are a shitty ad blocker and integrated cryptocurrency should be enough of a red flag, honestly. Just use Firefox, people!

Firefox is king 👑

So the CEO is a raging alt-righter. Glad I never used his product then.

the hateful browser
Holy shit man imagine if we judged every huge project by one asshole at the top. There wouldn't be a single thing to enjoy in this world.
Edit:
I am going to add more perspective to this, because holy shit people are so into eating nothing burgers.
Reddit/Twitter was a database and API that everyone was centralized onto, there was no choice. Brave you can literally fork because its open source. Aside from that this was literally the CEO's personal donation of $1000...in like 2014. Almost 10 yrs ago.
Elon, as CEO and on the X/Twitter brand:
"brainwashed" https://www.news18.com/buzz/elon-musk-causes-uproar-with-anti-lgbtq-anti-vax-meme-insults-random-twitter-user-6714733.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-twitter-makes-millions-off-anti-lgbt-groomer-tweets-report
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitter-pronoun-rule-invites-bullying-lgbtq-groups-say-rcna87336
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-triples-down-on-making-twitter-terrible-for-trans-people/
Meanwhile Brendan:
Literally stepped down as CEO https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-resigns-as-mozilla-corporation-ceo/
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/
made personal blog post about inclusivity shortly after https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
invented and worked on/for javascript, brave, firefox
Gnubyte

Use Firefox or Safari, the more people use Chromium-based browsers the faster we get to the situation where Google completely owns the Internet (and they almost do now).

Vivaldi? Trusting a closed sourced application for privacy? What?
Not even defending brave here, just weird that the author say that.

Today I learned that people take it VERY PERSONALLY when you criticize their chosen browser. 😂

Long time Brave user here. This made me uninstall Brave and move to Firefox. Thank you !

I can't think of a reason why anyone would use a browser other than Firefox and its forks.

I just use Firefox and DuckDuckGo

This article is useless trash. There is no real technical argument here except "founder bad".
I do have reasons for not using Brave, but it's to do with the annoying defaults and the crypto integration. They default whitelist Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook garbage that I have to go and toggle off.
Given the level of effort and extensions like Facebook container on Firefox, I just prefer the better experience for me. This bullshit about getting on identity politics agendas I find abhorrent and repulsive. This author's a stupid fuckhead.

Thanks. Whenever I raised the issue of homophobia or his general support of right-wing causes that threaten people's privacy (see the aftermath of Roe v. Wade for example), I got downvoted, be it on the PrivacyGuides sub where they adore the browser, or right here just weeks ago.

Oh boy, this comment section is gonna be spicy. I can already smell the smoke from the Brave enthusiasts heads exploding.

I ditched Brave ages ago when the ad and crypto bullshit really ramped up, and finding out Peter Thiel was involved and Brendan Eich was a bigot, were more than enough to keep me away from Brave.
I currently use Arc on desktop because it makes my life as a busy dev much easier to organize, and Safari on iOS because every browser on there is just Safari anyway. iOS Safari + custom DNS to block ads. Works for me.
I’d use Firefox but Arc’s organization features have become insanely useful.

Things wrong with Brave: #1- It isn't Firefox/a Firefox derivative

I've read the article via Firefox, with NoScript enabled. Am I doing this right?

I get people wanting an alternative Chromium based browser. Vivaldi, IMO, is a much better than Brave, and doesn't have all the annoying crypto weirdness.
I don't use either, though, I use Firefox

I started using Brave about a year ago... I didn't know any of this.
The Prop 8 stuff is enough of a reason for me. Firefox it is, I guess.

The writer is proposing Vivaldi, a closed-source browser, as an alternative to Brave, which is free and open-source. I think a better alternative would be Ungoogled Chromium.

"If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong."
I stopped reading here. If you would like to present objective technical arguments, please try not to sound like a 5 year old "I'm right, you're wrong, blah blah".
Use Brave or use Firefox. They both work great for privacy, but I find Brave is easier to configure to be private.

I used Brave on mobile for a full week about a year or so ago at the suggestion of a coworker before realizing it gave me nothing over Firefox and added the bizarre crypto angle to everything.
This was during my (thankfully brief) crypto interest phase and I tried to see if I could accumulate any of the BAT coins the browser would give you for viewing ads...that never worked somehow so I accumulated zero, which was certainly one thing that led to me getting fed up with it and going back to Firefox.
Beyond that, the interface was weird, it was prone to crashes, and it was generally a hassle. 100% flash-in-the-pan cash-grab effort.

Just because something is open source doesn't mean the people behind it have the best intentions in mind.

I use Brave as a backup browser. My main one is Firefox.
You can turn off the crypto stuff. You don't have to use Brave Shields (in browser ad blocker). It can be turned off. Now you can use uBlock Origin or another ad blocker.
About the CEO, I can't see nothing about his beliefs reflecting in his work. Looks like he kept them separated. I'm not for said beliefs.

Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Besides this I cannot find another good reason not to use brave. Nobody point to a specific line of code that ruins privacy, not enough reasons.

I stopped using Brave over the whole BAT thing, it just felt shady and weird. This article just validated my decision even more. Happy to be back with Firefox, even though Mozilla has its own issues.

I agree that you shouldn't use Brave browser cause of things they've done in the past but, oh Jesus, that article is so stupid it reminds me the Hogwarts Legacy boycott.

Unfortunately, there are the ame stuff about Firefox too. Mozilla Foundation is such a corrupt organization with extreme shady finances.
Foundation's main income is royalties by google: 567M per year.
Donations: 7M (which almost goes to the CEO's bonuses)
the CEO gets 700K salary and 4.6M bonuses. Lmao.
I'd suggest, using Firefox but not donating to them.

I've been trying out the DuckDuckGo browser lately on mobile. It uses the Chromium backend, so some sites work better in it than in my normal Firefox.
The neatest feature of the browser is the ability to generate random email addresses in signup forms, and those emails all get forwarded to your real email address. As it forwards the emails, it removes trackers from them. You can click a link in one of the forwarded emails to disable that address from being forwarded any more if it gets spammy.

Firefox works well enough for me. Never given me any problems or grief. I don't really understand the fascination with chromium forks or the insistence on using them instead of Mozilla's engine.

Well, fork, I hadn't looked at this team behind Brave. I use both Firefox and Brave. Bye bye Brave...

Im gay, I use librewolf

I think that the number 1 reason to not use brave is that is based on the chromium engine. The number 2 is that they use limited anti fingerprinting tools and support his self built tracking and ads. The others about ideology of the CEO i think are not so important.

I just read an article about a browser... That somehow included a court case about hulk hogan being gay or not... I had to stop right there lol.

I just deleted it on my phone. All roads lead back to Firefox.

I hadn't read the details of their intended ad network. I just recall it sounded shady. Now that I read about it, it sounds very similar conceptually to Google's Privacy Sandbox. I'm not sure if this is a better or worse approach than the status quo but I surely don't trust Brave Inc, a startup with a questionable business model and investors, with gathering and processing this data.

Wtf is spacebar.news. where do you find sites like this?

Honestly I don't care who or what he personally donated to. But the ad model is the problem for me.

I tried Brave for maybe 2 days before going back to literally anything else. The heavy push for Crypto made me wary, and it really didn't seem to be doing anything specific to increase my privacy online.

This article did not present a compelling case for abandoning brave. Who cares what the founder thinks about various political issues. If the software is good, then that’s all that matters.
Don’t get me wrong, I support same sex marriage, but people have a right to oppose the concept as marriage is a government idea that is tied up in politics.

Out of the box Firefox is definitely not very privacy conscious, better than Chrome no doubt, but worse than Brave. It can be configured to be better than both or one can use Librewolf/Mullvad browser

I dont use brave, but is this how most people choose what browser to use? Weather or not the dev supports gays?

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