The narrative Teixeira paints is certainly damning, but with stuff like this it's usually worth waiting a bit to hear the full story before bringing out the pitchforks.
I'd wait for some more details before jumping to any conclusions.
How long has it been around, how quickly does it ship updates after its upstream, how large is the project? In short, how reliable is it and how well is it going to be supported in the future? I don't want to end up on a browser that lags security updates because their patches are so painful to keep rebasing or because there's only one guy who knows how to do it and he's offline this week.
From what I've heard, despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, it often makes requests to “laptop-updates.brave.com” which is actually also used for affiliates.
And on top of that you are directly helping chromium to an even larger marketshare and bringing us closer again to the internet's technical monoculture.
Usage of Brave indirectly helps Chrome become a better product, by significantly increasing stability and security of the chromium-base, sucking up resources that couldve also been spent on a more privacy-friendly browser alternative.
Or you could help us take down Google's abused-monopoly business now, instead of dying on the "make a new engine work with the Web as it is" hill. Choose wisely, you may not get to that new-webcompat-enough-engine hill in any foreseeable future.
Apple has WebKit, which Chromium forked as Blink in 2013.
Apple and Google do not share code post-fork, and Apple denies Google ~30% of the browser market, so using "mono-" is wrong. Google has a search monopoly, but not quite a browser and definitely not a browser engine monopoly.
The KHTML/WebKit lineage is more a monoculture in its older parts, but I say this is evolution in action (cf. successful alleles and haplogroups across many populations).
So we are not "contributing" much to any monoculture or monopoly, and the alternative is dying on the wrong hill, as I just posted. Any substantive response?
The team's affinity for cryptocurrency projects drives me away personally. If you aren't aware, the Brave team have a "rewards" program where you "earn" their BAT token for viewing ads: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
I use scare quotes around rewards and earn because those are my trigger words for projects I should walk away from.
That's always been opt-in (off by default), but suit yourself. Just be careful not to leave a false impression that it's opt-out (on by default). People still smear us with this canard.
You're saying it as if there's something evil in it. What's wrong with paying people who want to see ads for seeing ads? I mean if you personally don't like it, sure, don't do it, but I do not see why you are implying it is something nefarious.
No affiliates, where'd you hear that? Beware disgraced Wikipedia editors bearing false witness.
As for update pings, all browsers automate this to avoid the plague that was IE, layered like sediment from IE6 on across the chart of browsers hitting websites, creating horrendous attack surface that was actively exploited, due to lack of auto-updates.
But I don't want a pointy stick, I want a program that loads web pages securely and quickly and doesn't log my browsing habits and sell them to advertisers.
We don't log anything. Chrome does, but Google doesn't sell it to advertisers, Google hoards the data for its own business interests, at best renting API ad matching access to slices of your data.
Maybe I should donate some time and money to Ladybird...