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Oh shit. Someone finally called my "I'd pay not to have to use AI" bluff.
Brave, and Brandon Eck are shit anyway, with or without AI.
Thanks, but I'll just stick to Firefox
Firefox+Betterfox is whatever brave is trying to do here, but free and open. Fuck brave and their scummy practices. Module isn't perfect, but in comparison is clear.
Unless you absolutely want to contribute to the chromium monopoly, Firefox is right there and still free. If you're concerned about the telemetry, LibreWolf is worth looking at.
Mandatory note: you cannot contribute a dime towards Firefox. Google contributes, not you. Money given to Mozilla will find its way into AI experiments (https://www.mozilla.ai/) and AI grants (https://mozilla.vc/).
Clarification: You can disable all the AI stuff with one switch.
Furthermore, the hardened forks of Firefox don't have it.
Still better than contributing to the chromium monopoly.
Please take this clarification to Mozilla: AI should never have been in their browser in the first place. If they felt it was necessary to waste donations on, they could have offered it as an actually optional extension.
Firefox has implemented many of the same features that Chrome has recently (groups, split tabs, vertical tabs, reading mode etc.) but has also consistently been implementing them earlier and better. There are just so many small annoyances with these features on Chrome that aren't there in Firefox, and Chrome is always late to the party.
The golden era of Chrome is long gone, probably because the most competent people working at Google have moved on.
I'm extremely cautious around Mozilla (a bit aggressive, even), and don't have much trust in them for the future of Firefox at this point. And yet, it's only worries for the future; as it currently goes, there's some major annoyances in Firefox, but they still give most/all the settings needed to have a privacy-enabled browser (at least enough for most users).
And, obviously, I'd rather take "it currently works well but I'm worried about a potentially bad thing in the future" over "it's broken now and operated by crooks".
Gonna call it now: that 60 quid 'one time' purchase is not gonna be the end of it.
In, at most, a couple of years, one of these things will happen:
- the model will be switched to a monthly subscription
- features will be cut and sold separately
- 'limited, non-targeted' ads 'from trusted partners' will be introduced
- the thing will be buried completely because it's not financially viable
Don't forget the "major" version increment that breaks "lifetime".
- Oh, you're mistaken. The license is for the lifetime of version 32. To use version 33 you must upgrade. But no rush, you have until version 33.1 before we activate the kill switch.
Or they rebrand it, and pull the "lifetime is only to the end of the product lifetime" trick.
The fact that they have to charge $60 to not have all that crap in there should tell you everything about why they have that crap in there. Taking it out kills their revenue stream from their “free” fully-featured version.
Huh, funnily enough, Ive introduced my own $60 fee if they want me to read the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy agreements that come along with their browser.
Good news for me! I don't have to pay since I don't use brave at all. Yay me!
It's so weird to me that people go nuts over Brave or Opera GX or whatever when Firefox and forks like Zen or LibreWolf are around and do their job so well.
Brave is something I never wanted in the first place.
It’s free on Linux. Still, I find it difficult to justify paying for a browser unless you want to directly support it.
Don't give bigots your money...
You can go into the settings and manually disable (nearly?) all the features that are removed in the paid version without paying anything. That’s what I did. They aren’t paywalling the ability disable the features.
It doesn’t matter to me whether someone uses Brave or not, but the headline is misleading, though pedantically accurate.
Donate to LadyBird.
The idea behind ladybird is great. I just just wish someone else was at the helm. Kling seems to be kind of a huge douche.
Yeah I really don't care about that. There's another part to this story and people just want to hate.
Care to elaborate? I personally wouldn't "cancel" Ladybird as a project, but I do think it's worth pointing out when shitty prople do shitty things.
They didn't do a shitty thing. Somebody raised a PR for a useless change regarding a developer document.
You clearly did not read what I linked. There's more than that to this situation.
Yes I did. Twice now to make sure I didn't read over something. But I also read the original GitHub PR while it was still open. And what you linked is just an opinion on the situation.
I'm on the side of the maintainer. Always have been, always will. You want to be politically correct? Go into politics. Or at least wait until they start translating and branding. There's no need to go and change something that meaningless. It shows you actively went and searched for it, instead of actually helping out the project or staying out of their way.
That's what you get for using a broader called brave. We all knew we'd end up here.
Honestly I don't hate that at all
If you really want to use a chromium-based browser, Vivaldi does all this and for free. It's not bad, definitely a bit faster than firefox but that's the nature of the beast for the web these days. I also like having my tabs on the side rather than the top. I think you can do that with Firefox via an extension, I'll have to play around. But I much prefer using Firefox in my daily life
Vertical tabs is a built in function of FF. I think you just right click on a tab and there's an option on the context menu to switch maybe?
Only since like last year, so it's not a huge surprise someone would be unaware.
I wasn't trying to belligerent, just informative. I might even be wrong, just riffing from memory.
Oh no, I didn't take it that way. In fact your first sentence could very well be my reply back to you!
Vivaldi's ad blocking is far worse. I'm not sure how they built it, but even after you disable the whitelists for their paying partners, it misses things Brave and uBO on Firefox don't.
Vivaldi still supports Manifest V2, doesn't it? So you should be able to put UBO on it as well.
While I'm not 100% sure about UBO, I've been happily running Ad-Nauseam (based on UBO) on Vivaldi since the Manifest V2 troubles. It does require jumping through a minor hoop, but if you're tech savvy enough to use adblock, it won't present you any trouble or take much time at all.
you don't see a problem with giving money to cryptobros?
They are endorsing linux, what a good company asking users to indirectly move to linux for their browser.
Mozilla take note. You can actually get money from your users for a change, and not just through Google.
Especially when your userbase, the people you're supposedly building your browser for, keep telling you to keep AI out of it.
Brave is actually listening to their users. Mozilla should feel humiliated that they never do.
Mozilla, the company that recently added a "disable AI" toggle to Firefox?
It's not as good as not implementing the things in the first place, for people who don't want it, but making it a paid model for removing features would net them more flack, I feel. They'd be accused of trying to squeeze their user base, when Firefox is traditionally free.
I saw that toggle for the first time today. Made me feel a little better about all the AI stuff and that sometimes my telemetry settings reset. I don't know if the tele thing is ff or just my config to be clear. Today my wife asked me for how to get rid of the ai search summary in Chrome. That leads me to believe that even some "normies" aren't thrilled with AI everywhere. I agree with you that a paid version of ff would rankle the community.
It's not as good as not implementing the things in the first place
Then you understand exactly why Mozilla is so problematic.
Mozilla wrote the playbook that said "Defaults matter!!!" and then Mozilla made their defaults shit. Mozilla should be apologizing to you for requiring a switch to begin with. If they had any semblance of morality, they would be endlessly contrite.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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