I've tried Brave a few times. Doesn't seem significantly different from Chrome. Chromium will likely still dominate future choices for web standards and Google will still control what implementations work on the biggest properties.
Edge maintains more not-Chromium code on its Chromium browser than Brave does on its Chromium browser and both further encourage websites and users to strengthen Google's web monopoly.
The 'crypto grifting' is something you can turn off completely, it's there as a way to make the browser sustainable without accepting payments from Google to make it the default search engine.
I'd argue its far more trustworthy than modern day Firefox/Mozilla, they're not exactly the second coming these days.
That's kind of like saying "yeah this is a mafia pizzeria but you can come eat at hours when the goons aren't there". Besides, why does Brave need that much funding? All they make is a Chromium wrapper, Google does all the work for them. They're not really an actual alternative in that sense, they just stuff it full of adblock, crypto, and god knows what. There was even a thing recently where it autoinstalled a VPN.
Yeah it's true that Mozilla's mostly financed from Google's anti-antitrust payments, but at least they actually made something of their own and have a trustworthy track record three decades long as a non-profit and Netscape before that.
That right there sours your whole argument. Your entire reasoning here is based on "they're probably doing something dodgy", ignoring the bit about it being opensource, or that Firefox and Chrome are at the very minimum on equal terms of "dodgyness", as you'll no doubt already know.
By that logic you'd have to extend the same argument to Firefox, Chrome and Edge. All have a bunch of "evil" (which by your own definition evil = thing that makes a business money) things that can be disabled.
Once you've done that you're back to the same old question - why is <other browser> any better/safe/trustworth than Brave, which is arguably the only one that's gone out of their way to make sure its sustainable and not reliant on farming user data to the highest broker.
I'm gonna follow your lead on goal post moving for my response.
I'm sure no user data is shared with Brave's search partners (and don't pretend they don't get paid by Google and others for all the users who abandon the not-great Brave Search for a more capable service.) Google just pays them whatever they pinky swear to Google was their traffic, no reporting at all, no search telemetry, none of that. Right?
And I'm sure zero user data makes it to big advertisers who pay for full new tab takeovers. I mean, why wouldn't big advertisers throw tens of thousands of dollars a day on ads with no proof of reach or return.
Oh, it's anonymized, you say? So, just like all the other browsers?
Also, a quarter of a billion VC dollars have to be paid back at some point. You can't claim anything is truly sustainable when VCs still own a quarter of its value and it's taken VC money 7 of the last 10 years.
