There seems to be a strong belief here that it isn't reasonable to use OSS software written by people with alternative political opinions. That is silly. People who write software have really diverse and frequently deviant political positions that are too variable to audit.<p>The people who are making choices and citing the one time Eich gave $1,000 to a political cause <i>totally unrelated</i> to his OSS contributions are just misguided (especially since the vote outcome suggests it was a mainstream Californian position). Spend your outrage on something relevant. That attitude is doomed to irrelevance because nobody is ever going to be ideologically pure enough. There'll be people who have already failed the test, people who are going to fail the test in the future and people who nothing is known about their private life.<p>"This man has opinions that are roughly held by half of California!" is not the criticism to lead with. I imagine a remarkable amount of software would fail this test.
When I use Brave it's so I don't have to see ads.<p>That simple feature seems to be overlooked in a pile of stuff most people won't care about. This doesn't read like a neutral article.
I'm not aware of a good alternative right now. I used to use Firefox but the performance was abysmal on Linux, and they blew up the android experience - might be fixed now. There's no built in ad block and something about the sync has always given me pause. Chrome obviously has no ad blocking built in, now they're removing the best extension ad blocking, and I very much dislike how they tie it to your Google account. Safari only works on macos.<p>So if I want to recommend a browser to people that has easy ad blocking, is very likely to work on their device, and is fast and works as expected, then it's Brave. It could be Edge if only MS could bring themselves to not fill it with gumph nobody wants to see.<p>Everything on the list is pretty much who cares tbh. I don't like the founders political position but I probably don't like a lot of CEOs political positions if I knew about them. The other things are all mistakes, bugs, or stupid ideas in the crypto features that I would guess only a tiny tiny percentage of Brave users even turn on. And even then... creators being up in arms about overwritten affiliate links, cry me a river. As an Internet user, fuck affiliate links, just another way to track me and an incentive to try and persuade me to buy shit.