Isn't brave supposed to be "private"?

Try to disable telemetry.

From Wiki:

Brave Software was founded in 2015 by Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and former Mozilla CEO who left the organization after coming under fire for his support of eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry [...]

and

In August 2016, the company had received at least US$7 million in angel investments from venture capital firms, including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund [...]

Should tell you everything you need to know.

I'd say being 'privacy focused' is just a stick to get non-tech savy/gullible people that want to protect their privacy to use it, without thinking about it twice. Personally, I believe there is 0% chance they don't sell (or simply give) all data they can to Peter Thiel and Palantir.

....also to Facebook, also one of the investors. Brave has good privacy protections, but they are selective.

the crypto browser? it's not private and never was

better than stock chrome or edge. Not better than Mullvad Browser.

That's the lie they try to sell you.

I swear Brave ran a very successful guerrilla marketing campaign and it succeeded on Reddit. If you so much as question it or suggest an alternative, you get dogpiled on by Brave bros. I don't trust it one bit. I'll stick to FF and its forks.

Yeah, haven't they done a ton of shady shit? I always cringe when people recommend the Brave browser. It's like recommending a free VPN.
- Brave is a protection racket wrapped in a cryptocurrency scam, created by a bigoted fuckwit. It is fractally shit.
Apparently Brave's got some cryptocurrency components, so I guess that's where the cult-like following is.
Exactly. Same with Opera GX whatever, which is just a weird chinese spying chrome, with nothing to do with Opera from the good old days when it was still Norwegian (Vivaldi is made by those guys still).
PrivacyGuides being among those bros.

Just use Firefox for gods sakes, Brave is a complete joke of a browser especially when it comes to privacy.

Yeah, doing any kind of digging into Brave will immediately send up warning flares that the privacy claims are pure fluff. Just use Firefox or Librewolf.
Firefox is great. Librewolf if you're extra keen on privacy.
Yes, a lot of people believe it, FF devs discuting in Google groups, Vivaldi in a own Mastodon instance. Mozilla since time is an Google pet which can't survive without the support from Google.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43340948
https://groups.google.com/g/google-web-toolkit/c/QSEjbhhHB4g
It's not the engine which use a browser, all engines are 100% FLOSS, it is important what you do with it.

Why I recommend against Brave - Luca Bramè.

This article is a pretty good breakdown of why you shouldn't use Brave.

Brave is a scam.

I've never really had a comfortable feeling about Brave. I have no substantiating evidence, it just seems a bit squirrely. Besides the Tor browser, LibreWolf, Waterfox, and FireFox are the only acceptable browsers as far as I'm concerned, tho I don't come down on those seeking an alternative to Google Chrome.
- Librefox has been awesome. Once you get the hang of enabling cookies for specific sites it mostly just works. Although Fastmail keeps logging me out for some reason
- Any alternative to brave in iOS with adblocker? (I know, probably use another OS)

Brave is like the ExpressVPN of browsers

no, brave is just another crypto scam

Haha

Brave (the company) has a long history of doing dodgy stuff. They are just trying to do what Google did (directing clicks to their own shit), but they're using privacy as their marketing spiel.

People sadly believe so. Firefox, a few addons and you are good to go.

It boggles my mind how people still recommend Brave as a good browser for privacy.
The entire point of Brave from the beginning was their own Crypto currency that they wanted to shill.
In their early days they offered a bunch of Tech YouTubers some crypto (via affiliate links) in return for them shilling brave.
Brave is basically just yet another Chromium reskin with custom branding, extra tracking and crypto bullshit bolted to it.
No, the builtin AdBlocker does not make it "worth it". Stop recommending this pile of crap.

Not so much no

Can you suggest a better alternative browser for android?
- IronFox
- I use IronFox too, but I'd say depending on your goal even Fennec+uBlockOrigin is a pretty good setup.
  If you want to go chromiun-based then Cromite (similar in scope to IronFox).
- https://www.privacyguides.org/en/mobile-browsers/

No. At least not in the way most people expect.

It does block some tracking and ads that Chrome alone allows or explicitly adds. But it simply shifts that tracking to Brave. The idea was that you'd still get the benefits of that tracking by giving all of your data to Brave instead. I honestly never was convinced by this considering your data is still being sold, just by a different company so it doesn't sound much better to me. Supposedly, according to them, Brave is more trustworthy and gives you more control over what they track and sell, but I don't trust that business model. There's no real incentive for them to do what they said they would.

Isn't Brave just a crypto scam? I have no clue why people trust it so much
- It gets pushed often by reactionaries as an "anti-woke" browser LOL its a complete piece of shit. It's got crypto, tracking, NFTs, AI and ads baked in. Literally everything I hate about the tech industry rolled up into one package. I'd rather use Chrome, even.

even tho most low level searches and recommendations gonna point towards brave as the private browser, all you need to just look at the options. its datafarming, its running in the background randomly, its an nftbro chrome.

I tend to recommend Brave for the ones who aren't technically savvy. For that, its good.

For me who is really into privacy, I've always felt uncomfortable with brave or any chrome based browser. So I go with TOR and LibreWolf

Don't a lot of browsers by default have pings set up to track usage? Check the privacy section. There is usually a check box about sending daily pings to whatever company made the browser to track usage.

Not sure about the variations though

Any browser does it, it is needed for several reasons, every browser need to know the amount of users it has to calculate it's market share. But statistical telemetries are not a privacy issue, it's like an employee which count the amount of cars and trucks on a highway, to know if it is needed to enlarge the highway or not. A browser need to know it for its capacity of servers and sync, if they offer it. Normally the telemetries includes in which OS is used the browser and in which country, all this is legit and not a privacy problem.
Bad only when it also include logs and profiling of user data and activity, as Chrome and EDGE do, and worse if this is sold to third parties. Decent browser don't do it.

Librefox then? Or what are you guys using?

IronFox, or WebLibre which is pretty new but promising in my opinion
- TIL, weblibre exists. Thx stranger.
  For the lazy ones. https://github.com/FaFre/WebLibre
Vivaldi. The tab management is unparalleled, and the chrome extensions I depend on still work. I’ve been using it for many years now and have no regrets. I also use NextDNS and see no signs of it doing anything unexpected.

It’s more private but doesn’t have 0 telemetry. You can disable some telemetry in settings. But it still has to make requests for update checks if using Windows or MacOS.

I'm a grown adult and can check for updates my own damn self. This phone-home telemetry in the guise of updating bullshit needs to stop
- Then use an actual private browser and not some techbro cryptobrowser.
- Then as a grown adult, you can make your chrome policy.json to disable the automatic updates.
  And being an adult has nothing to do with it. If left to their own devices, most people will simply not update. Some people actively resist updates. Linux Mint had some statistics that showed that like half of their users were running severely out of date versions, so they had to change things.

I use Vivaldi, it's IMHO the only decent Chromium browser, apart European, with a good privacy, no logs, no tracking no third party investors. great services and community.

I think Vivaldi is source-available, but it's proprietary otherwise due to a BSD license that allows for source-availability.
- Yes, it's proprietary because some script parts are. It's not so easy to go full OpenSource for an Chromium browser which is more an online suite than a simple browser, because Google and M$ will kill to be able to fork it for Chrome and EDGE, which will have catastrophic aftermaths for all other Chromium browsers, include Vivaldi. Way easier to be OpenSource for simpler Chromium or Gecko forks. Anyway I think in a market saturated with browsers (over 100 different), beeing OpenSource isn't in the main interest for the user anymore, prevailing more the ethics and transparency of the manufactor, 100% given in Vivaldi. Apart, as say, it's the only decent browser from the EU on level eye with the US big Brother browsers. Alternatively there is Mullvad, butit is , apart of the privacy features, a very basic browser, more an platform for the Mullvad VPN, no own sync, only with Mozilla, Konqueror with the KHTML engine by KDE is discontinued, same as sadly the French UR browser. Thats it.

Any decent person wouldn't use brave.

https://www.christiantoday.com.au/news/former-mozilla-ceo-ousted-for-opposing-gay-marriage-makes-comeback-with-new-internet-browser-brave.html this is who you're supporting.

You can disable this in the settings. Nobara ships with Brave now but with all of the telemetry and crypto BS turned off out of the box.

It's a shame this is necessary, to be honest. It's the same argument with Windows users: "you can just run a debloater and fiddle with the registry to disable tracking". It shouldn't be needed in the first place.
- Yeah, Zorin did this recently too. They made some good arguments on why Mozilla's trustworthiness has nosedived these past few years, but awkwardly centered on a ToS change that didn't really amount to much.
  They didn't make a case for why Brave is more trustworthy, though.. (and I'm not sure one can)
- I don't think you can say the same as MS plays shitty cat and mouse games and is constantly patching the workarounds. And the changes required are much more involved than just toggling a switch. And Brave won't randomly toggle it back on after an update or just blatantly ignore it altogether.

Idk what the first two are, but you should be able to disable the usage ping at the bottom of privacy settings

What browser should I use on mobile? I use Librewolf on desktop since it runs fine, and the vertical tabs are great, and it looks nice.

On mobile though there's a lot of problems with the browser space:

Chrome: runs great but is obviously not good for privacy
Firefox: what most people recommend, but it has terrible performance, looks not great, and doesn't even have more than basic fingerprinting protection, and literally includes ads by default. It's also less secure on Android because they don't do per site process isolation, and the memory allocator is worse.
Brave: people tend to dislike brave here, but it runs well (since it's chromium based) and has at least better fingerprinting protection.

What other options are there?

Brave.
Maybe somewhat later the Helium Browser (still not for mobile, in Alpha version), ungoogled Chromium, if not, Vivaldi, for all platforms, even as automotive app, (the only one)
https://github.com/imputnet/helium
Tbh firefox performs great and works for me, and its issues can be fixed with extensions and settings, both on desktop and mobile. I never looked for anything else myself. I also like to use a browser that is not chromium-based, I do not want google to have the monopoly.
maybe I am just not picky, but if you need more privacy than what can be achieved with a hardened firefox config you might be better off using TOR at that point.
Safari
- yeah lemme just pull out safari on android and linux for its insane fingerprinting protection and great content blocking support
hmmm
i never get the performance part.
what the fuck are you doing where you can even notice performance differences?
nobody should use vanilla firefox. the extensions are the vital part of it
IronFox, Fennec Fox

Depends on what you mean by "private". I would not trust it much, but it's not a bad Chromium based browser when you need one. Use something like LibreWolf for much more privacy out of the box.

For the best privacy when you do need a Chromium-based browser, the ungoogled-chromium flatpak is an excellent choice.
- I vaguely remember some issues with extensions in ungoogled chromium. Maybe I should give it another shot.

I think you can disable the telemetry in the Brave settings. Maybe try that. Otherwise, if that doesn't work, your best bet is something Firefox-based if you're on desktop (hardened to the nines, with uBO, LibRedirect and an email aliasing service extension like SimpleLogin). If on mobile, there are other Webkit browsers like Snowhaze and Orion that are pretty good.

You can disable it in settings.

You can stop it in settings just like any other browser. I still will use Brave as my choice of browsers.

I trust Techlore. How come you guys are so anti? Idc what the CEO talks about