Brave to end 'Strict' fingerprinting protection as it breaks websites

Your friendly reminder that the Brave CEO is Mozillas old CEO, who was fired from Mozilla for being unapologetically homophobic.

Since everyone else is piling on negatively, I appreciated your friendly reminder.
Worse than merely being homophobic, as he financially supported politicians and causes that worked to prevent equal rights.
So?
What I care about in this story is the technical issues.
- technical issues
  Well technically the CEO would have an issue with you if you were gay
  Lmao
- Then you can not act on it and those of us who care about such things can. Does that bother you?
- O...kay? I don't really care lmao
He wasn't fired. He voluntarily left. And thus Mozilla is left with an incompetent CEO whose only aim is to increase her paycheck year after year, despite pathetic market share results for FF. Enjoy that.
That said, nobody cares about your "friendly remainders". We're talking about software here, not politics.
And, to stay on topic, yes, it happened to me that Strict FP broke some website, in particular those displaying a frame with a map or similar stuff. So I've resorted to use "standard" FP myself.
- nobody cares about your "friendly remainders". We're talking about software here, not politics.
  Nah. I care. You dont speak for me. I cant tell if you're a shill for Brave or a MAGAt or both.
- Technology and ethics and politics are not airgapped magically distinct things. Pretending that they are is a strategic political choice you are actively making.
- Well, you're wrong.

The scam company brave? The one that scams people? With their scam based crypto rewards that don't pay out? THAT brave?

- But other than that, there's no reason!
- You're right, no reason at all :)
- I had a small mountain of BAT they locked me out of due to shoddy linking with their banking affiliates and out of date DRM practices locking me out of my account due to too many devices being logged in (each OS update counted as its own device).
  I noticed you didn't have that linked, that's because not every shitty move a company makes gets news coverage. Sorry I don't fit into your narrow view on what constitutes a valid reason.
- This made me wonder - is there any active Best Of community on any instance? This would be a perfect candidate.
- We really need a based privacy-first Chromium fork... something that
  allows installing addons from a custom source
  removes everything Google tracking related
  adds good sync compatible with things like floccus
  is hardened with switches like MS Edge
  has a good UI like Firefox
  restricts fingerprinting by randomizing or blocking many identifiers
- You can dig as much shit on Mozilla. Every big browser company right now is shitty
- I just don't use brave and things are better for me.

fuck brave all my homies hate brave

What would you use then, if Firefox doesnt launch when using hardened_malloc on Linux?
- So we're shitting on a browser because of a bug reported 2 days ago?

Honestly you really should be using Firefox.

The real answer
I've been having a pretty good experience with Mullvad, however I don't hear many people talking about it. I wonder why is that, IIRC it's being developed with Tor Foundation, and is basically a Tor browser for clear web, and that sounds perfect. So far, I didn't run into any issues, so is there a catch, or are they just not well enough known yet? Or, maybe people are turned away by their optional VPN?
Firefox's resist fingerprinting breaks sites too.
- It doesn't really break things for me personally. However if it does break something just turn it off.
- The UI is somewhat clunky and it feels half dead.
  I really wish Mozilla would rethink there business.
Firefox lacks a ton of features and its default settings have terrible fingerprinting protection to start.
- Then customize it. Honestly they aren't all that bad and by using Firefox you ate not supporting google.
- What features are missing?

Whenever people tell me to use Brave, I know they fall for marketing very easily

- Tim Pool uses Brave...
- Le lion shills? I am unfamiliar with this.
Braves default fingerprinting protection is better than the one that librewolf uses, or at least it is according to the EFF.
I use it. I don't get marketing because I use brave, which has a fucking indestructible adblocker. Like while everyone was panicking from the YouTube issues, I've never seen a single message to turn it off on YouTube. And there was a bunch of other things that users has reported, like slow videos, that brave just didn't have problems with.
- Firefox with ublock origin and you will unironically have an near identical experience
- In this case, you are the marketing.
- ublock origin works fine for me on firefox. i use freetube (desktop client), but when i use the youtube website i don't have ad issues.
Brave is simply usable Chromium. On GrapheneOS it is not the most secure as it has its own Chromium engine which is not as hardened poorly.
On Linux it works well with hardened_malloc while Firefox straight up does not run. This is probably because Firefox has memory issues.
It sucks relying on Chromium as Firefoxes UX is top tier. I have no idea why normies are using Chromium Browsers, they all suck for UX, especially Chrome.
But on Android and Linux Chromium is very secure, while Firefox is at least questionable.
Brave sets very weird priorities though, they dont focus on many features people need and instead bloat everything with news or crypto stuff that doesnt even support Monero.

Brave to end 'Strict' fingerprinting protection as it breaks owns ad revenue.

No it literally breaks sites. I was using Firefox with Arkenfox user.js, basically Torbrowser, and nothing broke unless the site told me "your browser is not supported". Braves strong defaults broke Github and more.
- Was strict the default? I'd assume the standard would be the default.
  I'd imagine if you were using strict you want the sites to break because you absolutely do not want fingerprinting. That kindof restriction usually comes with the breaking being expected.

Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave's users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.

How are they getting this data? If it's with telemetry this data doesn't seem reliable, I doubt that people who change the fingerprint setting don't disable telemetry.

Alternatively, lol

I used brave for a while, but left as I felt there was something fishy about them. Seems I was right

Brave is shite

Not that brave after all.

I'd rather have the sites break to be honest

I'd ask why they don't make it optional (I'm not a Brave user) but it seems it was.

Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave's users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.

This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.

Given that, I'm inclined to agree with the decision to remove it. Pick your battles and live to fight another day.

Unless there’s a strong correlation between those who set fingerprint protection to strict and those that disable telemetry
In that case they’re about to piss off a much larger portion of their users than they realize
- but if they have all that disabled, they probably have their ads disabled too, which means they are not making Brave any money. So they don't care.
So rather than fixing the issue they just removed it entirely.
That's kind of a joke from a "privacy" based browser.

I don't like brave browser from first use. Something seemed off.

Damn I didn't hate on brave before for all the dumb crypto hate, but this is fuuucked