I'm a bit distrustful of the current french political scene and macron's involvement in their phasing out of American tech (which is in principle good but it's the actors here that are sus).

That's my take as well. You can also remove AI results from Google by adding the &udm=14 string to force web results only, but it doesn't absolve them of blame for how much they push AI. DDG deserves equal criticism.

It's like old Reddit. Sure it still exists, but it only gets worse and worse as they double down on the version everyone hates until the majority don't even know there's another option. And there's no guarantee they keep supporting the option that makes them less money.

Possibly, though as another commenter mentioned, using the noai URL for the moment is a good way to voice discontent. Not using it just falls into the "everyone uses google" narrative in a different way.

You really do either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...

Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I've been playing browser shuffle...Good catch!

Several useless slop paragraphs in that article - seems to have been written by LLM.

Human summary: Brave is a Chromium-based browser that is recommended by some for privacy. It's created by homophobe and Republican donor Brendan Eich, who was asked by several Mozilla employees to resign and led to half of Mozilla's board to step down. After OKCupid started pointing out his homophobia to Mozilla browsers users, he finally quit.

After that he created Brave with millions of dollars from amongst others Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.

In 2016 the "Brave Ad Replacement" was announced which would replace ads on pages with ones injected by Brave, paying in crypto.

Brave collected donations in their crypto on behalf of people like Tom Scott without asking them, and when Tom found out and told Brave to stop, Brave said "refunds are impossible".

In 2020 Brave Browser silently injected referral links into URLs of crypto wallets containing Brave's affiliate code.

By default they display sponsored images as the background for the home and new tab pages.

In 2021 Brave Browser exposed the .onion domains people visited as part of the DNS traffic so their ISPs could track users.

In 2023 Brave announced that they'd be selling their search data to AI companies, and prevented sites from opting out of this even if they asked not to be scraped by Brave.

In 2024 Brave deprecated their option for Strict fingerprinting protection.

Brave also paid for advertisement whenever users searched for "Firefox" in the Play Store, displaying "Forget the Fox", which Brave's VP (who promoted NFTs and FTX with AI) denied - meaning he was lying or didn't find out before denying it.

Nice to find an up to date article, thanks

I'm so tired of the insistence that you have to agree with everything that the CEO does or says if you use a piece of software... You can turn off the ai and crypto in browser settings with a couple clicks. Also I'm talking about the search engine not the browser. I don't use the browser purely because the Linux builds split mode doesn't work nearly as clean as Zen, plus i prefer Firefox forks

I use it cause it's a search engine that gives good results and that can disable ai answers... Until I'm able to get my server PC finished to selfhost searxng

Edit they actually slopped up the browser to the point it's beyond disabling it. Literally just garbage