• arc
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • arc
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        11 months ago

        JavaScript is a victim of its own popularity. It was originally meant to be scripting glue to do little actions in the browser while the real work was done in Java (LiveConnect) apps. But Java got jettisoned, JavaScript became more important and became the thing we love and hate today.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          JavaScript is a victim of its own popularity.

          No, that’s not the issue. If Javascript were well-designed we wouldn’t hate it, but it wasn’t.

          • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Most of the examples listed there are issues that don’t affect real applications. It’s just garbage code, so the output ends up being garbage too. Programmers don’t write code like that, unless they are doing it as a joke. A few of those examples can be real issues sometimes, but they are not that big of a deal to an experienced JavaScript programmer.

            It’s an imperfect language like any other.

            • grue@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              but they are not that big of a deal to an experienced JavaScript programmer.

              A well-designed language wouldn’t require “experience” for stupid gotchas like these to not be that big of a deal in the first place.

              After all, I’m sure a sufficiently “experienced programmer” could adapt to anything up to and including fucking Malbolge if necessary, but that doesn’t mean it’s equal to a language that’s actually good.

              Differences in quality between languages are real, and Javascript is closer to the bad end of that spectrum.

              • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Every language is gonna be weird if you don’t know it well enough. In Lua arrays start with index 1. Is it weird? Yes. But do Lua programmers care? Probably not.

                The stuff that many people say is bad in JavaScript is usually irrelevant. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t bad parts like the Date api or the lack of types is a flaw to many people. Those are actually important issues. In this case they are solved by libraries and TypeScript. The performance is also a problem in some applications. Which is why there is WebAssembly, which can help in some cases.

                So there are plenty of real flaws that can be pointed out, but you have to know the language to be able to tell what actually matters. To me it doesn’t seem any worse than any other modern language.

    • ours@lemmy.film
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      11 months ago

      Louis Rossmann also recommended Brave in one of his videos. Quite sad.

    • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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      11 months ago

      It only “injects ads” if you opt in to showing ads, which you get paid for, and which are inoffensive and unobtrusive.

      I’ve got a hundred bucks worth of BAT just for doing what I normally do in a web browser.

      Tell me what actual “privacy” issues it has?

      • arc
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        11 months ago

        From their own blurb you only get Brave Rewards (BAT) for enabling and seeing their ads, so you’ve affected your privacy whether you care to admit it or not. As for privacy, I suggest you read the link and look at the questionable and shady shit they did and only stopped doing when they were caught doing it.

          • arc
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            11 months ago

            Yes of course it is affecting your privacy. Brave knows when you are browsing and presumably has usage monitoring to stop people from farming rewards. And how do they know who to give coins? By associating your activity with an account and a wallet. There is sufficient information there for your privacy to be impacted or at least thrown into doubt. Not to mention all the things mentioned in the article where they were caught doing questionable stuff.

            • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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              11 months ago

              Ok so all you just did is prove you have no idea what you’re talking about. Cheers for that.

              Brave know when you’re browsing

              So does literally every browser in the world. Do you think Firefox doesn’t know when you’re using it? Who does it think is opening tabs and going to urls? 🤔

              stop people from farming rewards

              There are settings for how many ads you get shown, capped at 10 per hour. How exactly are you going to “farm” that?

              Attaching a wallet attaches a non identifying crypto address. No privacy concerns there.

              You can also completely opt out of their ads rewards program……

              You’re spreading FUD. Just stop.

    • prosp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      These people talking as if not all the crypto bloat would be opt in lol. It just take 30 seconds or even less to turn off everything of that.