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Is Firefox any more private/secure than Brave? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by brihuang95@sopuli.xyz to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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I've been using Brave for the past three or so years but I do know that Linux/privacy enthusiasts tend to swear by Firefox. Wanted to get people's thoughts on this topic to see if I should be making a potential switch. Thanks!

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[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I haven't done an audit of either but here are some points to consider:

  1. Brave is built on top of chromium, so it "by default" exposes lots of new APIs that Google is introducing that make fingerprinting easier if not outright invade your privacy. For example see https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ and look at the "negative" items. Many of them such as Web NFC, Web Bluetooth and WebUSB API are against because they don't have adequate protections against fingerprinting or other privacy or security concerns. Brave seems to do a pretty good job removing or disarming these APIs but they are basically trying to keep their balance on a shaky and antagonistic foundation.
  2. On a similar note Google pushing these APIs work because of the greater market share. Again, derivatives can provide some resistance by disabling these APIs but unless all of them block the same APIs they will still be available widespread. So using a Chromium-based browser harms the entire web over time by allowing Google to have control. Right now Firefox (and derivatives) and Safari are the only browsers that you can use to truly oppose Google's control over the web platform.
[–] astramist@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Agreed! Many times I faced the fact that the Chrome developers don't follow the W3C standards, but they require it from Mozilla. Therefore, some functionality will only work in Chrome, but not in Mozilla (it's not their bad!).

[–] sizeoftheuniverse@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

As hard as it is for me to admit, and based on some tests, Brave had better fingerprinting resistance than Firefox. I don't trust the guys behind Brave, but their product is good.

[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Brave has tried one scam after another before. I wouldn't trust it for a second for any use.

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Please provide any evidence for your false claim.

[–] 133arc585@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Depends on what you call a scam. I am not sure it's the right word, but duplicitous behavior and definite privacy violations (even if by negligence) are absolutely true.

They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak; also I'd take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn't the most savory:

... Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.

On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance

In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,

In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.

With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance.

He also spreads COVID misinformation.

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Tbh. Mozilla wasn't better in the past and as long it doesn't affect the product I don't mind the political views of the owner (it's still concerning). As long Brave can provide me better privacy and security for my daily browsing I will continue using and recommending it. And listening to Wikipedia he stepped back, by himself.

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Brave is more secure, in terms of safety, because it's base on chromium and has unique Privacy Features. If you won't use Brave, LibreWolf or hardened Firefox is ur best choice.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Brave is so unsecure because it uses chromium. The only unique thing i saw on brave was the crypto miner included. Chrome can easily just change terms so that brave looses his licence for chromium. Firefox is more secure in the way it is more secure, because they are not focused on stealing your data and there is librewolf yeah that one is open source and is the most secure of those 3

[–] emax_gomax@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unsecure how exactly? Being chromium makes the browser more standard. It blends in with other browsers easier which means it can add protections while still showing itself as chromium compatible. I'd like to learn more about how chromium can just kill forks by updating the license, last I heard it was a BSD compatible one and I wasn't aware of it retroactively restricting access. Of course google can just fork and deprecate chromium with a more restrictive license given their the key copyright holders but as their project that isn't surprising. Firefox isn't interested in harvesting your data but that isn't security, it's privacy. Most chromium forks are the same. Brave doesn't harvest your data. It did once (and it can be argued you should avoid it just for that) but you seem to care less about which browser is best for your online privacy and more for just shilling firefox. For reference I use and love librewolf, but I like to consider myself open minded enough to try the other options... such as they are.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Every browser that is chromium derived is depending on google. I tried before firefox chrome. But after the v3 manifest. That killed every "real" adblocker and script blocker. And that you cant block scripts is so secure :) ! Firefox IS the other option. F*** chrome browsers is my motto. As they are just poison. Because the fake "Polypol" google is creating with chromium.

[–] emax_gomax@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Again, I use Firefox, for the most part because of the reasons you've described. But none of what you've said is really an argument for security or privacy against the browser. If you just wanna say Google = evil, so don't trust anything they make, that's fine. The chromium forks aren't google owned and they don't need respect what google tries to do. Case in point manifest v3 came and brave still has native ad blockers and intend to support both manifest 2 and 3 going forward. It's really just a matter of who has the bandwidth and funding to maintain a browser of the scale of chromium or Firefox. Google clearly does, mozilla does a decent job despite the iffy funding situation actively restricting donations purely for the browser. If its just small privacy enhancing tweaks atop chromium smaller vendors like brave can do that. End of the day chromium is a well optimised, standardised and frankly well written browser that is perfectly fine for anyone that wants to use it. Should Google be the entity in charge of chromium given their clear conflict of interest, obviously not. But no one else has stepped upto the plate and mozilla is clearly the inferior in regards to features or browser optimisations (just due to scale of support available). Don't get me wrong, Firefox is great and everyone should use it for their own sakes, but this just blind fear mongering of anything chromium related isn't productive.

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yep. They definitly added a crypto miner into their opensource code. 👍

[–] Rooki@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was rumored sometime that they did or even thought about it.

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would be the stupidiest thing ever.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://lemmy.world/post/1510069

LMAO something other happensd

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you read it, you realize it isn't bad as it sounds and has nothing to do with there browser and really less with trustworthyness of the company in terms of privacy and security. So instead of trying to find evidence why "Brave is bad" make a Pro and Con List for Brave and compare it with the google infected Firefox and you will see why I prefer Brave as the browser of trust and use LibreWolf as second, because it's like a real private version of Firefox.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ok Chrome but in orange.

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is the reason why I left Reddit, nice to see that the toxicity also arrived Lemmy.

[–] ranok@sopuli.xyz -1 points 1 year ago

While Chromium itself is a very solid platform, and correspondingly Chrome is a hard exploitation target, it's quite easy to screw up a fork of it. Comodo Secure Browser was a chromium fork that was fixed to an old version of the renderer with known security issues and was built to disable the sandbox. It also added libraries that were compiled without ASLR that worsened security for every application that loaded them.

Chrome has an enormous security team behind it in addition to P0, so bounties on Chrome exploits are around $500k. FF bounties are a fifth of that, which is probably a portion of less security, and a portion of lower target market. Brave could be doing terrible things that without an audit would be unknown. Web3 code is pretty terrible on the whole, so adding that to a secure base may not be great...

[–] Engywuck@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

By default? I think so.

https://privacytests.org/

(these test are done with browsers at their defaults). Librewolf is on par with Brave, but I vehemently hate its interface and refuse to unfuck it wasting my time on CSS.

I'm on Brave as well since 2021, after almost 20 years of being an avid FF user and supporter. I don't like how FF is evolving and what Mozilla is doing and I don't buy the "Chromium domination" argument. If the sole reason to use FF is that "it is not Chromium", well, the developers aren't doing a great job.

However, let's be real: privacy on a browser matters until you go to whatever website that track you on the server side (Google/Facebook/Youtube/Whatever), or when you write an email from from you Gmail account, or when you buy stuff on Amazon... And so on. Just use the browser that works best for you and don't be paranoid.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't forget that https://privacytests.org/ is run by a Brave employee!

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That hasn't do anything with the results. You can test everything yourself. Techlore also made a interview with him.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As I said in another comment, if you work for Brave you're probably going to write tests that play to Brave's strengths

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is enough evidwnce that this is wrong. I would recommend to watch Techlores Interview too.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you telling me that you don't think a Brave employee would write tests based on the areas of expertise they have, that they may well already have implemented fixes for? Or, on a more sinister level, do you think Brave would allow their employee to have a web page up that made their browser look bad?

I'm not trying to be agro here, I'm just pointing out that you can't really consider this an unbiased source even if you are happy with all the tests!

[–] Voxel@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

I would suggest checking the Interview that Techlore made, he ask the owner of the site similar questions.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

Not the point. Using a chromium browser is a vote for Google domination of the web. Just no.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Short version: Firefox on desktop, something chromium-based on Android. See https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/ for the long version!

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I did not find any justification of why they arbitrarily did not considered Gecko browsers in privacyguides. They just made that statement. I am not surprised that certain chromium browsers are more secure simply because Google has a bigger budget, but I did not see any justification for it. Then again the EFF will say that Tor Browser is better then Brave so we can argue about these minor points forever.

Then again none of that minor stuff matters to me. I care more about the goals of the organizations themselves and I am not convinced that any of the Chromium browsers take us down a sane path. So I will be staying with Firefox thank you very much.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On Android, Firefox is still less secure than Chromium-based alternatives: Mozilla's engine, GeckoView, has yet to support site isolation or enable isolatedProcess.

From this page (which has links to Mozilla if you want to read more)

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Thanks, I did not see that before.

Other interesting thing is that about:config is disabled on mobile except maybe nightly. Wonder why?

The other advantage of Brave is that it is more secure out of the box. From privacy point of view that should be better at blending in to the crowd depending on user base size. In Firefox I usually add an extension and configure it and some about:config settings. Somewhat minimal but probably quite unique.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not sure about about:config, though it's the kind of discussion that pops up in !privacyguides@lemmy.one so you might have better luck asking there.

I never know what to think of Brave. They do seem to have some serious privacy tooling available, but they also seem to get up to so much dodgy behaviour when it comes to money that I don't really trust them.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Browsers are very complex and fast moving tech. This means expensive. This implies professional paid staff. Then comes how to raise money. The big companies have revenue streams. Smaller groups have to do it any way they can which is always compromising something.

Mozilla too makes compromises... setting default search to places I would not use. Trying to offer a subscription set of services which is actually not a bad plan but is not exactly to the point. So I trust them more and want to see them succeed but they have challenges too.

Some ways huge parts of tech relies on questionable income streams including the tracking, ad, and personal information broker business. Google of course but Mozilla is funded largely by Google as far as I know. Apple may get similar funding but larger. Microsoft even in Windows installs crapware from partners. So it is everywhere. HP laptops typically do too.

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