On the other hand, they clearly show they aren't the best one, and they include categories that they miss almost all of. Seems like fair play.

Use the ublock origin extension for general safety

As far as i know, they have their own ad blocker and allow the user to allow some ads and share a part of the revenue with them

But... It shows brave with an x too...

They also got caught dynamically inserting their own referral codes into peoples' URLs

Librewolf is the GOAT.

The CEO is not openly anti LGBT+. He made a single $1000 to a prop 8 campaign back in 2008, way before Brave was even a thing.

That's it. That's the controversy. A miniscule donation at a very different time. I know a lot of people here were infants back in 2008, but the levels of LGBT support at that time were WAY less than now. It even looks like he later apologized and said he regretted his actions. I'm not going to call the guy a saint, or even a good person; it was still a shitty thing to do, but in context, that's a far fucking cry from being "openly anti LGBT+" by today's standards.

That said, there are some valid criticisms of Brave as a whole. I just wish people would focus on the valid criticisms rather than parrot bullshit they heard others say that makes them look like uninformed idiots.

What are you talking about? Donating $1000 to an anti human rights campaign was bigoted then and now. And since when is $1000 considered a “minuscule” donation? It’s like donating to the Israeli military. Don’t matter if it was in 2008 or 2026. You support genocide either way.

Being sorry is a good start. But being sorry does not excuse the action. But yes there are other critiques you can choose to do in addition to the CEO donating to an anti human rights campaign I will concede.

Again, it was a shitty thing to do. But I want you to REALLY ask yourself: given it was almost 20 years ago, he has publicly apologized, and that he has not done anything besides that one instance, do you really think he fits the definition of being "Openly anti LGBT+"?

Like shit man, Obama was against gay marriage when he first entered office. Does he get the title of being "openly anti LGBT+"?

What's prop 8 campaign?
Why does it matter whether the donation was done before or after Brave was started?
Why does it matter that support for LGBT was lower when he made the donation?

You're attempting to make it seem like it's fine because of all these arbitrary rules you've place and by hiding what he donated to (most people won't look up what prop 8 is, and you know it), but why not hold people accountable no matter when or how big the issue is?

You can also hold them accountable on all the issues, not just the issues you care about. Just because you care about issue x, doesn't mean someone else caring about issue y is invalid.

Just because it admits when Brave faulters doesn't mean it's okay to lie about when other browsers are successful. In fact, if you cared about category X and both failed instead of only one, you'd be more inclined to ignore the category all together than remember one performed better.

It's still obscuring results and obfuscating who's behind this report. ~~Given Brave is the first browser listed (unless maybe it's alphabetical) it seems pretty clear. ~~

Edit: it is, in fact, alphabetical. I rescind that criticism.

If Obama gave a “minuscule” $1000 donation to prop 8 I would say the same. Having an opinion and being wrong, admitting it is different than giving $1000 to repress people even if you apologize.

(Obama has major issues aside this for the record but that is out of scope.)

But if you donated $1000 to repress people in 2008 or now yah you should be called out. Being sorry makes it better but does not undo the harm.

In 2008 I donated $20 to HRC to oppose people like the CEO of brave. He could have done the same or just done noting. He openly chose to repress LGBT+ people threw action.

What about waterfox?

On June 26, 2026, Swedish left-wing newspaper Flamman reported that founder and co-owner of Mullvad Daniel Berntsson had made a five million Swedish krona (~$500,000 USD) personal donation to the populist Örebro Party. (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullvad#Donation_to_the_%C3%96rebro_Party)

Said political party support far-right policies such as so-called "ethnic cleansing".

So we should be suspect about libre wolf clearly being ball handled by brave in this graph then?

I find it hilarious when people call brave, a browser by an ad company basically, a good private browser.

I followed all their shenanigans over the years. No one should touch this bloated browser.

And they say "the levels of support were way less than now" trying to imply everyone was like that than, it was the social sentiment. Why is that stupid argument used to try and normalise vile things, everyone thought like that, bullshit bullshit bullshit.

According to the other comments, the website is by Brave (or at least a Brave employee) so kinda, yeah...

Oh I'm all for shitting on Brave, and I didn't bother to give this list a look anyway because Librewolf is my goat. But that's so fucking cringe lol. It's a shame that so many websites, including Privacy Guides where I essentially started my journey into FOSS and learning about alternatives to Big Tech, recommend brave. Like if someone TRULY had to use chromium, I'd tell them to just stick with Ungoogled, as I don't know enough about Vivaldi. But like that should be an absolute last resort choice.

But the main issues was the commentor didn't notice it was Alphabetic lol.

Here's a good summary of some of the shady practices that they've done by way of @cannedtuna@lemmy.world. It's a summary of this article: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/

• Brendan Eich's anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement

• • Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.

• 2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads

• • Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as "blatantly illegal".

• 2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign

• • Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.

• 2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets

• • Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.

• 2020 — Brave puts ads in user's home screens

• • Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.

• 2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature

• • Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests

• 2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites

• • Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google's crawler.

• 2024 - So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection

• • Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.

• And More!

• • Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to "Forget the Fox". When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
• • The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
• • Brendan Eich's feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be "independent".

I think it's because you have to enable it first?

That's my point. It should have a green ➖ next to it instead. An ❌ implies that the feature doesn't exist.

Mind educating us on this one? The Brave skepticism is well covered in the comments already but your take isn’t.

he has publicly apologized

He said he was sorry for “causing pain”, he didn’t apologize for making the donation or for being against same-sex marriage.

and that he has not done anything besides that one instance

He has also not donated to pro-LGBTQ+ causes or expressed support for same-sex marriage since then either.

do you really think he fits the definition of being "Openly anti LGBT+"?

Yes.

Hell nah Brave is awful

Brave had a massive bug where Tor sessions were leaked to ISPs. Ain't no way im trusting something like that in 2026

Its cofounder, Daniel Berntsson, funding far right political parties in Sweden with substantial amounts of money. So 🖕 him and 🖕 Mullvad.

How come Brave can interfere with Tor sessions?

Brave has the functionality to access Tor sites. To ba fair,as far as I remember, Brave devs called against using this function for privacy sensitive browsing and added it more as a bonus to access a given resource.

Is this an ad for Brave?

Ah, yes, I should judge the browser by whether it strips arbitrary query parameters from links by default, because there's no way that'll break something, and if it uses encrypted DNS by default when... "connecting from Brazil", because that's definitely a good test of a browser.

I've been using helium as a secondary/Chromium browser, and it's pretty neat.

I love how there's continued bias confirmation that the main people who are crazy about privacy end up being right-wing shitheads.

Almost like if you irrationally care about privacy it usually means you have something to hide.

Now don't get me wrong, I love my privacy too, but Jesus Christ people. It doesn't mean we can't ask for better but we are all using computers here. We are all on The Internet. There is no privacy. Stop lying to yourselves and saying there is.

You want privacy go in a locked room and talk to someone in person.

I would say the "cofounder"/"CEO" factors are the main contributor factors that enable the "shithead" quality in each case, rather than the "care about privacy" factor. 😅 That's my personal take.

Considering the guy who runs that site is a brave empoyee, yes.

Does this spam work on the fediverse?