this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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Can we agree that Brave:
Is scummy.
Has a shady ceo, and a shady history.
Is possibly a security risk.
Is still orders of magnitude better than using Google Chrome.
And that:
This headline is both true and clickbait-ish.
You can turn these things off in Brave’s settings, for free.
That doesn’t make this feature not scummy.
Basically no one should be using Brave, but no one should be using Google Chrome either, yet here we are.
And the revolving door of “best unabandoned Chromium fork to use” (Helium for the moment, or Ungoogled Chromium if you don’t mind some broken features, just to name two), is buried under so much SEO that it’s legitimately difficult to research.
So… I’m not gonna go out of my way to flame Brave users. If they’re trying to do better than Chrome, good! Not-Google is good. They can pay for this I guess. I’m not installing Brave, though, I’m not recommending it, and this certainly isn’t making me want to.
use vivaldi if you want a chromium browser. its very customizable
Vivaldi concerns me a little, because I keep catching them trying to replace web addresses for major retailers with what appear to be affiliate links. For example, if I start typing the address for Amazon (I know, shitty company, but it's the first page that comes to mind) it will pop up an auto complete to click on. If I click it, I can see that I'm redirected to Amazon through what appears to be either an affiliate or a tracking link. However, if I type the address fully in the browser and don't use auto complete it takes me straight to Amazon, no redirecting or strange links popping up first. They do not disclose that they are doing this anywhere that I have found and I think it's shady as fuck. I don't have any extensions installed and it happens on multiple devices (phone, laptop, PC) and only on Vivaldi, so it's definitely the browser and not an untrustworthy extension or a compromised device.
that might be the search engine you are using. that doesnt happen to me. i use amazon every day
https://vivaldi.com/blog/what-is-direct-match/
This seems to be disabled for me on mobile, but enabled on the desktop. Seems like a helpful feature, though they could've just done something like Firefox where it's an offline search for a website with the same starting letters.
Still, appreciate the writeup and trying to minimize data collection while calling a 3rd party service in the browser and the option to disable it.
Catch it and report it
Report it to who? Vivaldi?
The affiliate program. This is fraud.
Yeah. Or SRWare Iron, IIRC. Or DuckDuckGo or Orion on mobile. Cromite. Firefox, Zen, whatever.
There are tons of good options, certainly more than I know. But it’s a hard thing for the average person to research, especially when forks get abandoned or whatever.