Thanks for chiming in! I do think that Vivaldi is excellent in some regards. However, it seems that they don’t apply all security related updates every release, which obviously affects security negatively. Thus, making me less enthusiastic to use it. I was about to install it when I read up on that…

No Linux, I feel left out 😭. Though it would be awesome if I could get it working in Wine (read: Bottles).

Update: I wasn’t able to make it work in Wine. I assumed the chrome.exe file was the browser. Though, I might be wrong. I would love others to chime in on this!

Most distro repositories don’t work that way, they build the binaries themselves.

Interesting. Is this a matter of trust?

Thanks a lot for mentioning this! I didn’t know someone took over the good work from Bromite. I’ll definitely check into it! Am I correct to assume that (like Bromite), this is a browser exclusively meant to be used on Android devices? I guess I might get it to work on Waydroid as well, not sure if I would like to commit to that yet though. Nonetheless, this input of yours has been much appreciated!

Brave is a buggy browser

Honestly my experience on Brave (on Fedora) hasn’t been great 😅. So I can definitely attest to that. I’m willing to deal with it as long as its merits are substantial, which so far seem to be the case 😭. But thank you for confirming that I’m not the only that has experienced difficulties while using it!

Just a few days ago I tried to pay for flight tickets on flypgs.com. Multiple attempts on Firefox didn’t work, while the first attempt on a Chromium-based one did. It might have been a fluke, but every so often issues like these do happen. And for some reason switching the browser does bear a positive result. YMMV though.

Aight, I’ll look into it. Much appreciated!

Hehe :P . True dat. Maybe one day ;) . Perhaps I’ll just spin up a distrobox in order to get access to Brave through the AUR, but this (excellent) article has worsened my already bad paranoia to clearly unhealthy levels 🤣. So, it seems out of question for now 😅. Though I might be able to spin it up in a Wolfi container. Pessimism doesn’t help though 🤣.

Fair 👍.

on other Linux distros the way to get brave is via flatpak if the provided repos are borked for you.

I would love to use the flatpak if it was endorsed. Privacy Guides says the following about it:

“We advise against using the Flatpak version of Brave, as it replaces Chromium’s sandbox with Flatpak’s, which is less effective. Additionally, the package is not maintained by Brave Software, Inc.”

I mentioned Brendan specifically because people like to lump in his flaws as reasons for not using brave in these discussions.

True. His name didn’t stick with me as his controversies and the fact that he is co-founder and CEO of Brave weren’t necessarily reasons I would forego Brave for. Feelings have to be put aside IMO in favor of merits.

Firefox used to have xulrunner and prism to provide them but now Firefox doesn’t provide a way other than a JavaScript popup via bookmarklet.

It’s really unfortunate that Firefox did this. This is actually one of the reasons why I like to have a Chromium-based browser around. I might eventually switch over to Epiphany for that.

Brendan’s Brave’s controversies

I assume?

app widows

A google search didn’t give me any useful pointers. Did you perhaps meant to convey PWAs?

Did you mean this “chromium-web-store” extension?

firefox/librewolf

“Just use Firefox/Librewolf or any other privacy-conscious browser that isn’t Chromium-based.” I already do, but some websites/platforms don’t play nice on non-Chromium-based browsers due to Google’s monopoly on the web. Sometimes I can afford to not use that website/platform, but unfortunately not always.

😅. Thanks anyways 👍.

because of the built-in adblocker so the fingerprinting is minimized between users and reduces the attack surface

First time hearing that, thanks for mentioning that!

Bounce tracking

TIL.

Fingerprinting

Gosh, I can’t believe I forgot about Brave’s excellent implementation of fingerprint-spoofing.

Also Brave announced on X/Twitter that they will continue supporting MV2, Chromium won’t.

This is a big thing. Thank you for mentioning that!

if you rly don’t like Brave

I’ve actually for the longest time used Brave as my go-to Chromium-based browser, but it seems as if the support on Linux leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t understand for example why it just isn’t included in the repos of Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu etc. Sure; the AUR has it -also available as a not up to date nixpkg-, but the others have to either download the .deb or rpm package (which is undesirable due to inability to keep it updated at all times) OR rely on Brave’s own repos, that somehow borks itself every once in a while. Which actually just happened a couple of days ago on my device*. I’m on Fedora Silverblue, so it was already quite hacky to get Brave from its own repos. But due to the repos borking themselves, I didn’t get any automatic system updates at all for the last couple of days. I only noticed it yesterday when I did my weekly manual update. Perhaps I should setup something that notifies me when the automatic system update fails, but I’ll prefer if the repos I rely on don’t call it quits whenever they feel like it. Apologies for my rant*.

Vivaldi would be a good alternative, but is weaker than Brave, since it includes not all the protections or alternatives which Brave has.

Would you say that Vivaldi is (at least) better than Chromium for security and privacy?