I’ve seen a lot of discourse over which browsers we use and I myself have made the switch from brave to firefox. I still use brave as my search engine though, so… which do yall recommend? Is brave’s engine necessarily bad to use? I personally like its ui/theme.
I use startpage which is a google proxy. So, it does what duckduckgo does with bing but with google instead. Searx is also a great option. Neither have their own crawler though
As for the brave engine there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. In fact, I’d argue it’s much safer than google, bing, or the proxies of each. While proxying you can still be fingerprinted. With brave only brave could do that and I trust them not to more than most.
You should be cautious though, as brave has had some privacy issues before injecting affiliate links which would track you when going to ecommerce sites.
Of course, the brave CEO is a piece of shit though. Full on covid conspiracy lab made Fauci plandemic ivermectin type stuff, believes that gay marriage should be illegal while donating to anti-gay orgs, and otherwise uses his position to further far right ideas. He also tries to fund weird micro nation projects with the goal of creating anarcho-capitalist heavens in the ocean. Think bioshock, but crypto bro. All around weird guy
All this said, I’d still argue from a privacy perspective brave is a perfectly reasonable option. The company has one privacy controversy but that’s better than the big two. I’ll stick to startpage though for political reasons, until I find something with good enough results that’s fully independent and moral. Currently looking at mojeek myself
How’d you find us?
Oh shit, hey! Been a bit since I’ve said this but I’m happy to answer. I’ll admit I don’t remember exactly where, but I had asked about a privacy respecting independant search engine in a few matrix chats and separately did a bit of searching on startpage. It’s likely one of those two places I first found it but word of mouth through matrix is what convinced me to use it
I’ve been liking the service btw, I think you guys are doing something fantastic
thank you kindly, that is great to hear; we’ve got this new and even better (so far testing is showing that) algo ready to go too: https://www.mojeek.com/eval so hopefully it’ll be even more fantastic-er soon :D
Brendan Eich is a co-founder of Mozilla. So if you’re not going to use Brave because of him. How can you use Firefox?
Eich resigned Mozilla and started Brave over pressure from Mozilla because of his opposition to same sex marriage, and financial support to anti-same sex marriage intiatives.
I know, but he’s still a co-founder.
And Mozilla basically kicked him out for his political beliefs, so how is that a reason not to use Mozilla software today?
Brendan Eich is not involved with Mozilla anymore.
He also created JavaScript though. So by your logic how can you use the web in general?
Yeah, but he’s one of the co-founders. He did help make Mozilla.
I’m not against using the stuff he made/helped to make. Because he keep his beliefs and his work separated.
Does he profit off of Mozilla (which said profit is going to right-wing causes)?
Maybe. We don’t know about the exit deal he got.
Okay, maybe a not-for-profit organization that he voluntarily resigned from gave him a golden parachute deal with perpetual royalties that’s totally secret. We can never know …
One thing we do know? Using Brave has a 100% chance of supporting him financially.
I’m not, not directly. I’m using the mullvad browser. However, even if I was using firefox that is part of a not-for-profit organization that he is no-longer part of where the money and success do not benefit him. This is different than using a browser whose success gives him money, which he then uses to support causes I am vehemently against.
If using brave did not support him I would accept an argument around my usage of it. It does however.
Apologies for the fact that you’re getting downvoted, that is a reasonable question to ask