Does Brave still fail fingerprinting tests in a comically bad fashion? Last time I looked at Brave, it appeared to be pretty bad for privacy fingerprinting-wise compared to Firefox and (surprisingly) Chrome.
Speaking of Brave, how does it perform in terms of web standards compliance, amount of trackers and ads blocked, and RAM and CPU usage compared to Firefox + uBlock Origin and/or uMatrix?
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Edit: I decided to do a quick test using panopticlick. Here are the results.
- Firefox with uBlock Origin and uMatrix: fingerprint appears to be unique. fingerprint conveys at least 17.47 bits of identifying information.
- Brave: fingerprint appears to be unique. fingerprint conveys at least 17.47 bits of identifying information.
- Chromium (plain): fingerprint appears to be unique. fingerprint conveys at least 17.47 bits of identifying information.
- Tor Browser Bundle: one in 77.02 browsers have the same fingerprint. fingerprint conveys 6.27 bits of identifying information.
Will say as well that Brave is much, much better out of the box for privacy than Firefox. Even with uBlock Origin and other privacy-friendly extensions, Firefox doesn't offer much in the way of anti-fingerprinting.
Whoever uses Brave for "privacy" reasons should understand that Chrome offers more privacy due to fingerprintability.
I see the downvotes coming yet it is true check it for yourself. Brave is so easy to fingerprint compared to Chrome it defeats any purpose ever to use Brave in the first place if privacy is your main goal. Removing all the Google bits from the Chromium base doesn't help since you are so fingerprintable.
Brave beats Firefox on the EFF test because it randomises parts of its fingerprint, which the Tor project seems to reject as a strategy for anonymity [1].
I find the claim that Firefox is less privacy focused than Brave a bit questionable. Brave certainly seems to have good and probably better defaults in that regard, but remember that Firefox is basically developed in collaboration with the Tor project and as a result has various significant (mainly non-default) privacy features architected in such as first party isolation, containers, and Tor-project-approved fingerprint resistance. Easily-disabled telemetry seems like a small hassle compared to such concrete privacy features which do not exist elsewhere.
And for example with something like first party isolation, it is unclear whether Brave would even want or be able to to maintain such a patch set on top of Chromium when it requires quite deep integration with the browser engine.
There’s also the manifest v3 stuff which will presumably end up in Brave at some point.
Hmm, I get identical results from Chrome and Brave on my Ubuntu desktop in Panopticlick, which doesn't disprove your argument, but it looks like Chrome is fingerprintable-enough that the difference may not matter.
I'm uninformed. By what metric is Brave better than Firefox on privacy? I did some quick research and could only find clearly biased (and poorly-written) sources making that claim.
Control-F for "canvas" - it's not discussed in the article. Canvas fingerprinting undoes all of these "protections" which Brave is talking up. Their mitigations are about as effective as changing your UA string these days - not at all. Most of Brave is like this - sounds technical and impressive, but it's mostly meaningless gibberish when viewed in full context. I mean, a "privacy browser" based on Chromium - I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Brave is just snake oil. They couldn't ever implement true canvas or audio protection or prevent font or window decoration fingerprinting even if they wanted.
If you want that stuff you use Firefox and enable resistFingerprinting its the only possible way
Can you share examples of Brave having a poor privacy record?
I've recently switched to it as my main browser, enjoy using it and have recommended to others who want to opt-out of the Google ecosystem. However, if there are examples of privacy abuse I may revisit.
Out of genuine curiosity. What does brave do that’s so privacy focused and how is it better than Firefox on this front? Is it beating Firefox at the privacy pitch somehow?
Brave’s market share seems to be siphoning off Firefox users primarily more than Chrome’s…
As a privacy driven tech person, I find brave to be semi cringe yet at the same time one of the few companies that is actually trying to innovate on an approachable set of mainstream, privacy focused tools, a web browser, search, and a (more) privacy preserving ads platform for the web.
I don’t like everything that they do, but I respect the fact that they are actually trying things.
Saying flat out that a privacy driven tech person wouldn’t use brave at all is reflective of the counterproductive discourse within the community, where every tool in existence fails someone’s purity test. Firefox, ddg, protonmail, etc have all had their scandals.
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