Firefox vs Brave: The Most Private Browser Debunked.

mozilla firefox vs brave browser if a single question can get a community riled up it is this one so let's tackle it head on this video will give you all the information you need about each project and if one both or neither are right for you yes i need to say this but i don't give a zero what browser you're using seriously i couldn't care less it's fun because these are companies we've both criticized in the past but again this is meant to be objective and not subjective so let's get into it starting with open source i think that's a very good starting point are these browsers open source and the very easy answer is yes brave is open source and firefox is open source a little bit more of a long answer is sometimes you will find small proprietary bits inside of each of these especially in mobile clients but generally speaking they are about the same level of open source and most people's definition is yes they are open source there's also the treatment of the foss community and firefox generally has been very strong about this you're going to hear about some developer who suggested some change and they were like no that happens with almost any open source project with brave there was a fork called braver browser and brave really did not like this in fact they actually sent a legal request against the company saying that the issue was the name and not the fact that they were a four generally speaking bravest had some questionable moments with some other projects that are forked from them and we've seen a lot fewer issues when it comes to firefox so just questionable keep that on your radar as for who's behind the company brave is managed by the ceo brendan who actually used to be a part of mozilla and he was fired due to some of his uh beliefs on the world you should read into this yourself i won't comment on it too much further but you should go ahead and do some research into brendan and some of the controversy there there's also the mozilla chair mitchell baker who also has gone through her own controversies mostly regarding management of the mozilla foundation another important thing is funding and the reason why people care about funding is theoretically the funding is going to dictate some of the decisions made by the organization now it doesn't quite work this way with open source projects it's not a direct translation but it's still something a lot of people want to keep in mind brave has some search deals so they have different search engines that they give you as an option and i assume that those search deals give them a little bit of revenue really the highlight for brave is bat and brave rewards which is their own cryptocurrency and we're not gonna talk too much about this today if you know about it you know about it if you don't know about it then check it out in the description i'll try to leave some resources for that so you can see what it's all about they do have some affiliate links mostly per suggestions in the url search bar when you're making searches and if you click those and you buy anything from those websites you're gonna get a kickback from that by default there's cards that go through companies like gemini finance and some other cryptocurrency exchanges and whatnot and those tools i assume have some kind of benefit for brave as well firefox is in a very similar position which people don't seem to talk about so firefox recently they have a 90 of the revenue comes from google yeah people are like i need to get away from google i'm going to move to firefox and firefox is still pretty much still standing up because of google firefox is as far as i know transitioning over to being now being the default search engine and it's kind of unknown how that's going to impact the revenue firefox does have some other products they have their vpn service which might get us some extra revenue they also include affiliate links recently as well they have some sponsored content they recently started importing just like what brave does in the url bar they're going to show you some suggestions there they also have pockets and some other tools kind of like how brave has its cryptocurrency stuff with the cards and whatnot so very similar funding sources between these two i think the main difference is brave really wet in the crypto route and a lot of it is self-managed by them so they have their own search engine they have their own cryptocurrency it's very much a brave ecosystem firefox has a much looser ecosystem that i guess allows more external influence so again the kind of your decision what you prefer there but that's kind of the rundown brave is chromium-based which i guess is the main way that people associate brave with big tech since it's based on chromium which is the open source uh browser that powers chrome and many other browsers including microsoft edge pretty much every browser that's not firefox and safari is likely running chromium even though it's an open source project there's still concerns about pretty much supporting any browser that runs on chromium because there could be a possible monopoly on all of web browsing i don't necessarily think that you should or shouldn't be using chromium browsers personally i think it's really up to you and what you um prioritize in your life if brave wasn't based on chromium brave is like an anti-big tech company right like they're trying to pretty much create a whole new ad revenue model they're a somewhat smaller company they are kind of the anti-big tech movement in a lot of ways trying to build their own search engine they're doing a lot of cool things there firefox is as of today completely funded by google that really is their main funding source about 90 of their money comes from google so that's something you really need to be aware of either of these options have to do with google in some strong way one of them is a technical reliance on google and the other one is a financial reliance on google so it really is just a matter of preference i don't understand when people get angry at others for using brave and continue to use firefox which probably wouldn't exist without google's assistance or at least to the extent that you can actually use it and it's a great product just keep that in the back of your mind again i'm not saying one's better than the other it's not what this video is about i just want you to think about this and really break it down and really put some common sense into it and really come to your own conclusion browser engine so this is what the engine that powers each browser is based on and this kind of ties into the chromium-based discussion blink is what is managed by google chrome it's what chromium is based on and blink is essentially what brave is based on and blink is managed by google gekko is firefox's own thing and this is why a lot of people choose to use firefox they don't want to give in to that chromium blink monopoly and they want to use gecko because now you're not going to have google essentially controlling all the standards that are going to be passed that websites have to rely on that browsers have to rely on and users have to rely on now in regards to both of these the reason i put not ios is because on ios apple forces people to use webkit which is their own browser engine if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty blink is actually a fork of webkit technically speaking so actually there's webkit then there's blink which is forked from webkit webkit is actually open source by the way so if that's your concern here it's not really that big of a concern both of these are technically using webkit on ios because apple requires every browser on ios to be using webkit brave has had the tom scott scandal so tom scott is a very famous youtuber many of you might have heard of him i recommend checking out his channel he posts a lot of good stuff brave rewards allows creators to set up essentially something on their website or something on their youtube channel and when you the viewer earn bat you can tip them to these creators the problem was brave was allowing you to tip creators who weren't even verified creators they never even knew what brave was they never created a wallet they never did anything brave was just pocketing the tips for themself so tom scott came out and said hey i don't have a brave wallet and people are tipping me hundreds if not thousands of dollars on this platform and they're just keeping all the money so brave really kind of pushed some buttons there and that should have been an obvious issue from the get-go there was the affiliate link scandal which we talked about in another video so i'm not going to get too far into it i really recommend checking out the video if you want to learn more about that scandal there were essentially two problems one of them um they claim was a mistake slash bug which i do believe and then the second one was kind of comboed up with those but it's two unique issues one of them was the fact that it was actually changing the url when you clicked the enter button and the other one is just the fact that there were suggestions in the omnibar now firefox does this now as well so um they're not going to be changing the url when you click enter which was the bug there was a tour window dns problem with brave so if you were using the tour window brave includes a tour window for private windows we've always and a lot of people who know what they're talking about will caution people away from this for several reasons but it's not a bad way to just quickly access an onion site but there was a dns issue and also i'd say the ceo has had some controversies in the past that you may or may not agree with those are the things to look for in brave as for firefox there's firefox for mobile many people don't like the new firefox for android i actually don't mind the interface but i do dislike how minimal they've made it in some areas i'm very unique because i like a minimal experience on my phone but some people are very much not fans of the new firefox ui for android and they were really upset with some of the features and functionality they removed from it my biggest gripe with this is their response this is a tweet from someone who was part of the development team for the new android application and these were her thoughts when people were saying they didn't like it it's kind of an embarrassing thing for firefox to do considering they're losing users every single month and then when people complain about some new changes they implemented they come out and quite literally flip off their community so there's that um which i consider something that should have been really talked about can you imagine if brave did this just something to think about i just want you to think about what if brave came out and literally stuck a middle finger out to their community i think firefox is given a lot of slack for some of the things that they do and some of the issues that they've had to deal with and some of the things they've done there was the new tab ads which are a recent thing that people are not happy about they're essentially going to have advertisements on new tab pages and they're also going to have omnibar suggestions which are also ads pocket has was also kind of a small controversy when they released pocket and they announced that they were going to integrate it inside the browser there's all the layoffs which was a semi-recent issue we talked about that a little bit more in another video and generally speaking firefox makes some very questionable decisions that makes us go okay are you actually here to be the frontier for privacy in the internet when you go ahead and do these other things that completely work against that mission i just ask you to be fair to both browsers look at brave and go wow they've had scandals but so has firefox it's really up to your decision on what you think is more trusted but i think there's not enough discussion on some of the issues that both companies have had to go through we have a brave reward set up on our channel we have it on our website we have it on twitter for all of our platforms that allow brave rewards we have it so it's something that we're that we're using for ourselves um just because we can and we know some people use it and it's a support method for all of you as for my thoughts on it i think it's all right like i think it's a cool idea i think the the issue that they're trying to target with brave rewards and bat is a really unique um issue and i think it's something that needs to be addressed i don't know if their approach to it is the best approach people who immediately dismiss bat i just ask you like why like do you not want them to try to try to like revolutionize the ad industry because i kind of want someone to do that and if it is what brave does i wouldn't mind that it's a fully open source implementation of the current ad revenue industry which i think is great those are kind of my thoughts it's more of a subjective part of this video but i do ask everyone to kind of think critically about like why do you hate that like what's the hate about it i personally hate how bloated it makes the browser so that's why i commonly refer to it as cryptocrap a lot of you might not like the cryptocrap and it does take some time to remove when you install the browser we're talking like less than a few minutes to go ahead and remove everything especially if you've done it before one thing that brave really has going for it though is it's overall very strong by default you install it everything's already good to go all the settings are pretty much good to go and there's very little telemetry data collection there was actually a research paper done that is referenced a lot by brave of course that talks about how they studied all these browsers and they found that brave has the least amount of telemetry data collection out of the box there's also another study about done by some other researchers essentially backing this up and showing hey brave actually has some like really great things in place things that traditionally rely on google like the safe search and whatnot brave actually proxies everything properly in a way that protects everything from google and they actually do a fantastic job of this firefox out of the box collects more telemetry than brave we have to go into the firefox settings and disable some things firefox says this is anonymized but again if a big tech company says that any telemetry is anonymized how do you respond anonymization is a very loose term it can probably be de-anonymized firefox shouldn't be treated any differently in this realm i don't know why they are i don't know why people are all of a sudden okay with it when firefox doesn't they collect telemetry by default more than brave does you have to disable it it's something that could be so easy when you set it up firefox could just give you a quick check mark that says do you want to opt into firefox telemetry during the setup part of the installation they could do that and they don't and it's things like this that make me ask like well why there are some unneeded features there's pockets they recently have the new tab ads and some other things that are built into firefox that i think line up with the crypto crap they're pretty much the same so that's kind of the breakdown i'd say there's really no clear winner when it comes to out of the box concerns they both just have different concerns the cool thing is it is all out of the box concerns which implies that all of these issues can be fixed and they can this is stupid but i hear people call brave spyware and people call firefox spyware and i go no neither of them are spyware i just wanted to put that in there to just set that straight i did want to quickly put in some technical security here so chromium is generally regarded to be one of the most secure browsers out there the sandboxing chromium is supposed to be more advanced than firefox's so generally speaking if we're talking about technical security it's been commonly touted that brave which is based on chromium so it's really a chromium is stronger than firefox this is up for debate though and firefox actually fights back on it a lot and all i'm going to tell you is what i like to see is real world implications um you're going to hear a lot that this is more secure than this but i like to ask okay when will this actually impact users and what users will it impact because it's not going to impact every user the same way i will tell you firefox security based on my own research seems to be fine so again i put strong and fine i really like to caution people away from the is it secure or insecure group because it's very rarely either of those it's normally in the middle it's like this is more secure than this just something to think about so i like to say strong and fine in this specific instance as for fingerprinting brave has fingerprint randomization this is somewhat new and it's very exciting and essentially every time you are using brave it's going to use a new randomized fingerprint meaning even if you have a unique fingerprint it's going to be brand new the next time you use it firefox also has protection and i'm finding a little bit less information on the implementation that firefox uses but generally speaking yes there is fingerprint resistance built into firefox i believe that's on by default now if it's not you can enable it in the settings and it's something you can check in the about config menu so good job to both of them this is something that's somewhat new for both of these services and it's very exciting because this was not an easy thing to protect against in regards to extensions um both have great support i'd say that since brave is based on chromium you're going to find some more extensions in the chrome store but firefox might actually have some more of the privacy security oriented extensions in my opinion i don't use extensions with brave like if i'm using brave i just install it and it's good to go so i'd actually put down that they're mostly unneeded um and actually same with firefox firefox used to be a use firefox if you're going to harden it type of recommendation but recently and this is really exciting because extensions each extension has to be individually managed each extension creates a new privacy and security risk and if there's a way to avoid having to install 10 extensions it also saves time and we're seeing browsers implement more and more of the things that extensions used to do so we're seeing that firefox and brave are blocking trackers by default which makes things like privacy badger a little bit less useful both of them now implement https everywhere by default meaning you don't need to use https everywhere anymore so we're very excited to see this it's something that's very good and it means the browser direction's at least moving somewhat in a positive direction as for syncing the reason i wanted to throw this in is i did want to kind of highlight that you can sync your bookmarks passwords everything without an account with brave technically i would still consider it somewhat tied to you and your devices but there's no account with firefox you need to have a mozilla account with which is an email and a password and you can set up 2fa it's more of a traditional account with brave you just scan a qr code on your devices and they just magically sync without you having to engage with them some people actually prefer the account setup i don't but some people do so this is just something you should consider if you're a person who's trying to avoid having maybe an extra account and something that doesn't even require personal information to sign up for brave kind of has firefox beat there in my opinion as for clients i'm trying to relay to you what i've seen in the community you can strongly disagree with what the community thinks and that's okay generally i have seen very few complaints with braves clients that's just what i've noticed i don't see many people complain about brave as a client on both mobile or desktop it just seems to be a browser that works firefox i hear mixed things about for desktop which seems to be mostly personal preference based i personally prefer using brave over firefox for desktop but that's a personal preference and i see kind of it being 50 50 which means it really is just personal preference however mobile clients seem to overwhelmingly be disliked with firefox recently so again i actually don't mind the new firefox ui myself i'm just reeling that the mobile clients definitely were questionable move and a lot of people do not like the new interface so just something to think about something to try out now we're going to dive into some of the notable features brave has private browsing and on top of private browsing they have private browsing with tor so essentially it's going to route everything inside a private browsing window through tour this is not meant to replace the tor browser they say this on their own website it's not as good as the tor browser what i think this is great for is someone sends you an onion url and it's just a news article and you just want to open it real quick without having to get the tour browser out and also if you're just looking at it as a slightly more anonymous private window then it does that too it's kind of nice i don't see people criticize it and i go well what's the harm in having it um with the exception of maybe people using it in a misleading way and not understanding the limitations but outside that it's just one more thing you can use in your toolbox and i think it's great brave has profiles which is built into chromium and profiles allows you to essentially create multiple users and each of them have their own bookmarks their own settings their own configuration you can sync right with bravesync and it's going not going to sync your profiles it only syncs on a per-profile basis meaning you can theoretically be syncing four different accounts or two or however many you have on your machine to different devices profiles are great we're going to talk about the firefox equivalent of that very soon brave has ad blocking out of the box now braves ad blocker is not perfect by any means but it's a great just out of the box solution it's great that i can just tell people install this browser it'll block ads for you out of the box it'll make you more private out of the box than what you currently have and it'll make you more secure out of the box and it's probably going to be a faster web experience it's great it's a great selling point for brave and also on top of that brave has a very similar interface because it's based on chromium and if someone's using chrome i just go use this it's better in almost every way as for firefox firefox likewise has private browsing that's just every browser has private browsing nowadays now what firefox has instead of profiles is they have containers and you can install this um and you can set it up and it's going to work semi similar to how profiles work personally i prefer the implementation of profiles better than containers but this is completely personal preference they both effectively accomplish the same thing and they're both things that i recommend you implement unless you're looking to have eight different browsers on your machine up next ootb is out of the box so out of the box security features brave shield is like the shield it has the brave logo and the omnibar this includes https everywhere script blocking which you can customize on a per site basis or you can have global defaults same with the https and also their tracker blocker on top of this they have fingerprinting protection and the coolest thing is it's very accessible it's very easy to understand and it makes people feel like they're being more private online which i think is important because i don't think there's enough credit being given when people are doing things you can improve your privacy and not have any kind of visual or understanding you can't see it being improved and i think that this actually really helps and firefox has it to some extent too though i don't think it's as obvious or as prominent and on that note firefox has enhanced tracking protection which also includes https everywhere as well as fingerprinting protection and also trackers and whatnot so they're both going to accomplish very similar things out of the box brave used to be well ahead of firefox in this role but firefox clearly has caught up in most aspects so both of them accomplish similar things out of the box just so you know a lot of people install u-block origin and add a tracker and script blocker that you can install on both of these web browsers after the fact um ubo is kind of a nice thing to implement regardless of what browser you're using as for out-of-the-box privacy features both of them block third-party cookies by default that's what three pc is third-party cookies both of them block trackers and scripts excluding a few and what i mean by that is people harp on brave so much because wait why did they white list social media sites because they don't want everything to break so anytime there's an embedded tweet that's actually whitelisted by brave you can turn this off in the settings it's not a big deal just go into settings there's i believe a google facebook twitter opt-out there might be facebook as well but those are things that you have to go in and say no i don't want these white listed i guess brave could make that an option when you're setting it up but i think for most people they don't want to change that in fact i don't normally change that myself myself either because i don't want things like embedded tweets to break because that's kind of an important part of some websites i'm visiting uh firefox also excludes a few unless you go in and turn on the aggressive enhanced tracking protection brave is honestly accused of doing really weird things that firefox does the same thing for i don't know why where that comes from i think maybe it's because brave has very strong marketing and their advertises like a very privacy friendly and anytime they don't follow that to it like the perfect extreme people like get really upset about it it might be that but either way i'd say they're both similar and very most of these categories are very similar when people use brave i really tell them you don't need to harden it um one because it's not really needed it takes care of most things out of the box for you but also it's kind of difficult to harden brave there's not really like a a community consensus on how to do it there's some chrome flags you can adjust there's some extensions you can get you can use ublock origin as well but there's just less community guidance on where to go with this process firefox on the other hand it's very common to harden firefox and there's a very good community understanding of the way to do that so firefox you can but it's becoming less necessary like i was saying earlier firefox is taking care of a lot of things out of the box for you which is really good because there's some drawbacks to installing extensions which i talked about earlier each extension poses a new security risk a new privacy risk and they increase the ability to be fingerprinted so the less extensions you have generally the better and the fact that we're getting away from extensions recently is i think awesome and now i put some final notes both are great browsers if you're saying brave socks or if you're saying ooh firefox sucks oh terrible hate it if you're coming in with that attitude and just saying brave sucks ignore it doesn't matter what your needs are you're being kind of a dick and you're not really actually preaching privacy in what i think is a productive and beneficial way to the world so that's what i have to say to that i think both are great browsers in their own right i think it's your job to figure out which works for you on that note both excel in different places there are some things brave does better than firefox and there are some things firefox does better than brave it's your job to look at those pros and cons and see which one fits your threat model and your needs better you can use both browsers i don't know why i have to say this people are like firefox or brave and it's like why not both you can literally have both installed again neither are spyware both are open source there's been people who say oh i caught brave pinging this one thing and it's like yes brace updating service like neither of them are spyware there's no evidence that they do any secret spying on your computer it's not a thing people okay if it does become a thing i will gladly come forward and tell you oh my gosh everyone it is now a thing but it is not a thing as of october 24th 2021 when i'm recording this video you can use either so you can choose between them if you don't like one or you can use neither i don't know i have to say this to people it's like mind blowing so devices matter as well right like it's possible you like the ios version of firefox but not the android version so the devices you use can actually influence the browser that you all end up choosing as well keep that in mind um features also matter some people might never open an onion link and they're never going to use brave's tour window i personally use braves tour window a lot and i also use the tor browser bundle but i use them for different things so it really does come down to your use case and what features you personally enjoy and on that note compatibility and your experience matters right if you use brave and you find that it works well for you but someone in the community tells you no it's not working well for you you and your experience is probably correct you might be incorrect on a technical difference you might have been thinking that bray was protecting you in this way and someone is now educating you no it doesn't so now it might be failing you in this one aspect of things in terms of your experience with the browser if you say i enjoy this browser and someone else goes no you don't no you enjoy the browser same thing with firefox as well finally i did want to say that this is just a comparison between these two browsers you can also consider the countless alternatives there's libre wolf which is essentially like a d mozilla firefox right they take firefox they make it a little bit better out of the box they install u-blox u-block origin out of the box they try to keep up with security updates it's something to check out there's the tor browser you can't go wrong with the tor browser there's ungoogled chromium which i'd say is probably a good alternative to brave but people go brave is useless when there's ungoogled chromium and i go no that's not true because on google chromium unless you're on linux you have to find a way to manually update it sometimes you have to build it yourself extensions can be a little bit tricky with on google chromium and also brave has valid features that aren't an ungoogled chromium that everyone just seems to ignore and they're things that we've talked about in this video so feel free to go through this chart again you can get ungoogled chromium and you can customize it in a way to essentially match what you have with brave but not everyone wants to do that so i think it's kind of a weird argument to go brave is useless when there's on google chromium that's like saying firefox is useless when there's tor browser in a way like tor browser is essentially just a better firefox in almost every way so why would you ever use firefox and it's because there's different use cases there's different reasons to use these different browsers there's also others for mobile there's bromide um there's duct go mobile browser and there's just so many things you can use out there and we talk about them a lot in our content you are not restricted to these two options we're not telling you you restricted these two options we're not even telling you that brave is better than firefox or firefox is better than brave this has been an objective comparison and i hope you've enjoyed it and that is the end of the video if you like comparisons like these definitely let me know i want to hear what you guys think about these uh we got a very very positive reception from a messenger comparison and i hope that we're able to kind of replicate what you liked about that with things like browsers and maybe other things down the road like operating systems and whatnot so really just let us know what you think about this i'd love to hear and aside from that leave your comment below on whether you like braver firefox better but in a productive way don't just be like yo me and my homies hate brave brave no like come in and say like i don't like brave because xyz and i like firefox because they don't do xyz come on be productive be a productive part of society i want to hear and i think other people would want to hear some good arguments to go either direction as well i don't think that's too much to ask for but um based on how long i've spent in the privacy community so that's it for this video thanks everyone again for watching i really appreciate it and also make sure to subscribe to us if you are not already and also give us a like share this around really like come on like promote this stuff and also we have a patreon and we also accept manero for donations you can help us spread privacy to the masses by giving us direct funding to do it please we need it to like live so thank you everyone for watching and we'll see you next time on tech lore

Channel: Techlore

Views: 95,764

Keywords: brave firefox comparison, brave vs firefox privacy, brave vs firefox, Firefox vs brave, techlore, Brave vs firefox browser, firefox privacy, firefox security, brave vs firefox security, Firefox browser, brave browser, brave privacy, brave security, browser privacy, browser security, best privacy browser, Brave rewards, firefox review, Brave browser review, comparison, video review, guide, best browser, best security browser, BAT, Mozilla foundation, Mozilla firefox

Id: qkJGF3syQy4

Length: 29min 10sec (1750 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Prime01Reddit]

Hey Henry you should do a tutorial of I2p

[u/BeerLoverNorm]

I want this comparison between operating systems as well: macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Mobile OS as well: iOS, Android, and popular custom ROMs.