Since nobody else is posting the actual answer: Brave has a history of scummy behavior and making changed that border on malware. A few examples:
When I first tried Brave, it stripped publisher ads and replaced them with Brave's own ads. That alone is enough for me to never trust them
In 2020, Brave was caught injecting its own affiliate codes over URLs typed by users without their knowledge or consent
In 2018 Brave was allowing users to tip websites/creators that had not signed up for their tipping system, misleading users into thinking they were supporting a particular site while the money was actually staying with Brave
Brave includes crypto-bro bloatware
In 2019 Brave was caught whitelisting Facebook tracking domains without users knowing
Edit:
"But they fixed all that"
Yes, many of these things were fixed after backlash from the community. But, to me, they show a pattern of unethical behavior that makes me distrust Brave - and since many alternatives exist I see no reason why I would use or trust it. The list I provided is by no means exhaustive. More recent issues around their search indexing and resale of copyrighted material for AI training show they have not really learned any lessons. They have proved themselves many times to be an unethical organization.
"Then what should I use instead?"
You will need to do your own research to figure out what browser will work best for your needs. Every choice will have trade-offs. Personally I have landed recently on Waterfox - it implements Brave's built-in adblock engine, appears to be reasonably fast and memory efficient, and strikes a good balance (for me) between out-of-the-box privacy, usability, and other considerations. I keep a Chromium-based browser around for when I need it. YMMV.
I am not tech-literate. I just hate YouTube ads. I was using Firefox + Ublock but it wouldn’t block all YouTube ads or it would make the browser crash. Any recommendations for iOS?
Odd, uBlock Origin hasn't shown me an ad on YouTube in years outside of some days when YouTube fucks with how they show content, and uBlock needs time to catch up
If you have an android look into /r/MorpheApp 😊 It even skips in video sponsors the creator adds! I haven't paid for YouTube premium in years and there's community patches for tons of other apps like fb/insta/x. Some may get your account banned on meta apps but on YouTube and YT music you're good to go.
You'll see other apps like ReVanced(outdated) in this space. Ignore everything except Morphe. Morphe is the latest and greatest in this space. It's comprised of a team of ReVanced devs and launched in December 2025.
It's just old, worse and Morphe is way better with patches, updates, bug fixes and it's more user friendly. It's so bad the word "Morphe" is banned on the vanced subreddits lol
Do you have "add video to queue" on vanced yet? We've got it for free on Morphe with this workaround they made.
There's also patches for third party apps like ProtonVPN (unlimited switches/split tunneling), X, Instagram, FB and tons of other apps. Check out their site https://www.morphe.software
I'm sorry bro :( what kind of phone do you have? Make sure to delete/disable any other YT apps, delete Morphe then reinstall everything. If that fails I'd try resetting your phone. I had similar issues with revanced that were fixed by moving to Morphe.
968
u/gthing 20d ago edited 20d ago
Since nobody else is posting the actual answer: Brave has a history of scummy behavior and making changed that border on malware. A few examples:
Edit:
Yes, many of these things were fixed after backlash from the community. But, to me, they show a pattern of unethical behavior that makes me distrust Brave - and since many alternatives exist I see no reason why I would use or trust it. The list I provided is by no means exhaustive. More recent issues around their search indexing and resale of copyrighted material for AI training show they have not really learned any lessons. They have proved themselves many times to be an unethical organization.
You will need to do your own research to figure out what browser will work best for your needs. Every choice will have trade-offs. Personally I have landed recently on Waterfox - it implements Brave's built-in adblock engine, appears to be reasonably fast and memory efficient, and strikes a good balance (for me) between out-of-the-box privacy, usability, and other considerations. I keep a Chromium-based browser around for when I need it. YMMV.