Jack of random trades at random times that randomly catch my interest for a random amount of time.

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 12th, 2025

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  • There’s many options for browsers that can sync with your phone. I used to love Brave until all the shifty moves they pulled. Installing paid propietary software without consent, switching the telemetry on without saying anything and claiming it was an accident…

    And their ad block is like a leaking sieve compared to uBO/Ad-Nauseum. Not to mention useless when they’ve been known to put ads on the homescreen and in the browser itself. Then underneath all that you have Google lurking in the shadows, ready to take your data and sell you advertisements tailored to your interests.

    I had had enough of both Brave and Reddit when my umpteenth Brave search was being advertised to me on Reddit.

    Librewolf might not sync due to how pure and barebones it is, but you could check out Zen or Floorp or Firedragon. Any FF fork that lets you login with a Mozilla account will work. I never sync, myself, but from what I’ve seen you should be able to.

    I do like the Brave browser itself, so I get it. But even plain old Firefox might be the lesser of two evils here. Just search up “brave browser drama” and check things out. It gets kind of nasty. The devs are not the most trustworthy people…

    Sorry if this sounded pushy. I’m not trying to be. I got burned with Brave and it still stings a bit, lol.







  • Zen is still buggy, unfortunately. It was great when it was hot off the press, but they slowly pushed UI changes. They’d give you options to roll back the changes, but I would have preferred if they made the changes and gave you the option to opt into them.

    I checked it out again the other day, and the newest update caused compact mode to disable every time I restarted the browser. Now I just use Floorp with in-line tabs activated. I love having one hybrid URL and tab bar, but I’ve never been a 100 tabs kind of guy so I have the room. I don’t save my previous tab sessions.




  • Ah, no that’s not it at all. I gotta see if I can look back to what happened. I think it was the Brave Rewards auto-contribute, though I’m seeing things like it accessing webcams without explicit permission. Ah, wait, it was the VPN. In 2023 they made an update that installed a paid VPN service on user’s computers as well as turning on telemetry even for users that had turned it off. That caused a huge stir.

    They also have a long loooong history of putting ads into their browser and their homepage and keeping the revenue, selling scraped data, and leaking DNS queries in their built in TOR browser from what I’m reading here.




  • I’m on vanilla Arch as well (btw), but I had similar experiences on NixOS and CachyOS. I think its hardware related when it comes to Vivaldi. On Windows I’d BSOD and I had huge memory leak issues on NixOS.

    I have to mess with Zen a bit more and see if its something I can fix. The lag isn’t bad, its bog-standard for a browser, but after using Floorp and now Librewolf, I can definitely feel it.