If Brave and Firefox are in the same league as Chrome for you your sleaze alarm is a very very bad guide to the modern world and seriously needs upgrading.

There are different levels of sleaze; I use firefox not chrome so don't try to put words into my mouth. While firefox may be a better choice than the other two, that's not saying much and Mozilla is very sleazy. If you don't see that, maybe you're acclimatized to it.

> While firefox may be a better choice than the other two, that's not saying much and Mozilla is very sleazy.

Rather than take such statements at face value, here's an example of one such instance that probably hurts its credibility: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

Also, they're not exactly a world apart from Google in some respects either, for example: https://killedbymozilla.com/ vs https://killedbygoogle.com/ (though i guess the amount of projects also illustrates the difference in their sizes)

However, that's not to say that we even have many viable alternatives to Firefox either: https://batsov.com/articles/2021/11/28/firefox-is-the-only-a...

Personally, i think that we're past the peak of Firefox and are currently in the midst of it fading away, which i expect will come to its conclusion in the following decade. Apart from that, we basically have just a bunch of browsers that are all similar to Chromium.

Essentially, Chrome will have probably lived long enough to kill IE by becoming the next IE.

Who knows where the web standards will go when there will only be Google backed browsers: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

How do you recommend Mozilla generates the millions in revenue necessary to develop a browser?

In Brave you can just turn the adds off. They're optional for if you want to earn their token.

You're still supporting the cryptocurrency ecosystem by using it though. It's not completely unreasonable to want to avoid doing that if you're opposed to cryptocurrencies in a wider context.

You can do that but they will eventually add a new ad.

One day they added a small widget to buy crypto in the new tab page. That was the breaking point for me. Like it happened with Firefox ads, I started to understand that Brave was working against me too.

Brave even in the discussion is atleast a big improvement in affairs. I couldn't name a single chromium privacy fork from 5 years ago or whenever they started.

It's also like a few clicks to turn off brave settings. It's less setup for brave than I go through on any new video game settings lol

Yes, high-quality free products tend to try to find ways to fund themselves that involve appeals to their users. It's beyond ludicrous to find this a "sad state of affairs".

If only there was some sort of "free high quality product" operating system that existed and proved this asinine defense of capitalism wrong

That'd be nice.

But all we got is Linux on the desktop...

Comedy is truth and pain.

>If only there was some sort of "free high quality product" operating system that existed and proved this asinine defense of capitalism wrong

The only reason Linux is popular on servers is because it has huge corporate sponsorship. Big players figured it it's more beneficial for their bottom line to commoditize the backend infrastructure and invest in OSS. Same is happening with developer tools.

It's not happening with anything consumer facing because everyone wants to take their angle at capitalising on the market. I can't think of quality user facing OSS that isn't aimed at developers or isn't trying to capitalise on the users somehow. Scratch that - blender is the only one I can think of - these guys are an amazing exception.

Keepass, Calibre, and 7-zip come to mind.

I won't argue these projects aren't quality because they certainly do the job, but they obviously lack polish of commercial software. Eg. despite looking into kepass I still chose to pay for 1password, just for the convenience.

VLC and OBS as well.

VLC is a good point I forgot about it. AFAIK OBS is sponsored by streaming platforms - I think it's another case of comoditizing the infrastructure.

Another free product is the online dictionary! You may want to look up the word "tend", and the lack of universality it implies.

I use Edge. It works on Windows, Linux and Android.

This is the worst option, Microsoft has consistently show they have the lowest ethical standards when it comes to products like Edge. They packed in a 3rd party payment tool in the browser ! It's like browser with crapware built in.

The only reason they aren't worse than Google is that they've been so shit at capturing the market share they don't get to make the same kind of moves, but Bing/Edge are not good alternatives for Google/Chrome.

I'm not one of those people that screams "M$ evil boooo", I actually use .NET day-to-day on a current project. But they have a really shit track record on Edge, it's the first browser I would avoid.

Your M$ evil boooo mentality is somewhat out of date.

Microsoft is making great strides in open source and Linux. A decade ago, you wouldn't have believed MS would publish SQL Server for Linux, release something as great as VS Code, create Windows Subsystem for Linux (and Android soon), acquire npm and github and make them better rather than destroying them, etc.

Your "Microsoft <3's open source" mentality is also out of date[1][2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975856

[2] https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794352

What 3rd party payment? I enjoy Edge because it blocks ads on Android, supports Chrome extensions and it is not controlled by Google.

There was a post here recently about it [1]. After shipping this with browser I would have 0 trust in this product.

I gave up on Edge because it didn't support uBlock origin on Android, I view bundled add blockers as just another way for the browser to block competition while still serving you their own "respectful" ads.

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-la...

Edge is a quality product, but sadly a privacy disaster. Their new tab page is chatty as hell, they do run their own sync backend, but that backend is not fully end to end encrypted, only some data types are. Their session IDs are hardware-based, while many other browsers' are more transient (some don't persist across browser restarts, some do).

Vivaldi?

I've started using Vivaldi to break away from Chrome because the features just drew me in. It has a its quirks and flaws, but I really like it!