Although the issue(s) described below could be coincidental, yesterday I changed many Brave settings, following the advice of a well-known commenter at ghacks.net.
Since then, all of my Google Docs documents show text corruption, inability to select text, cursor remaining at the left margin, etc.
So far nothing else than Google Docs appears to be affected.
The recommended settings were detailed in a comment he (“Iron Heart”) made to an April 2022 article at:
Location in the comments is at: “Iron Heart said on April 9, 2022 at 11:22 am”
Can any team members suggest which settings I need to return to their defaults to fix this?
This is major. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Brave v.1.58.109 Chromium: 116.0.5845.163 (Official Build) beta (x86_64)
Mac OS 10.14.3 (Mojave)
How about both? Fingerprinting isn’t really such a big issue and the protection based on language settings is questionable. What it does is, that instead of your language preferences Brave sends only your primary language in the Accept-Language header. That’s uncommon and not the default. It stands out, which makes fingerprinting easier instead of harder. I don’t know what general fingerprinting protection does, but it can be configured per site, so you can just disable it for Google docs.
All that I could find (which was most of them), according to the recommendations of the mentioned user in his comment to the article.
However, since posting I seem to have managed to solve the problem, as an Internet search turned up an article noting that many users have had trouble with GDocs based on adblock settings. I had definitely been busily engaged in changing those (in general, maxing them out).
So I either turned all of them off or chose a less aggressive setting and since then things seem back to normal.
I’m puzzled as to why adblockers would have such a dramatic effect on Google Docs – and, as far as I can tell, only Google Docs! (Nothing else seemed to have been affected by the ‘settings’ changes.)
Well, fingerprinting would have a substantial impact. So if you had it set to aggressively block, it will have issues. This is especially true of things like font and everything. It’s because it randomizes data sent and it may communicate that you don’t have a particular font on your device, your screen is different size than it is, etc.
For this purpose, Aggressively block fingerprinting is not suggested, whereas Aggressively block trackers & ads tends to be safer to use without breaking much content.
Thanks, @Saoiray. So aggressive fingerprinting would only affect things in Google Docs (and maybe other web-based word/document processors like the web version of MS Outlook, etc.), but not other kinds of web-based apps or websites? (It was the only thing that the altered settings broke.)
I did go aggressive on the fingerprinting and adblocking. Maybe I’ll experiment with going aggressive with the adblocks but not the fingerprinting and see what happens.
Clearly, Iron Heart (the poster) must not use Google Docs. He is, by the way, a big fan of Brave. His posts at Ghacks are too deep for me – an advanced programmer for sure, who seems familiar with just about all the browser software that’s out there.
Here’s a sample screenshot of the gobbledygook I ended up with.
@mk7z Aggressively block fingerprinting breaks all sorts of sites, tbh. It’s one of those things where you rarely, if ever, will want to use it. Kind of the same with Block Scripts… I used to have it all the time but then things wouldn’t load and I remember Fanboynz telling me to switch it to just block.
As to what is specifically done differently, I’m not quite sure. What I will say is we do have other reports, even from this year, of Aggressively block fingerprinting as breaking sites like Google Maps, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. You can see that at https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/28938 on the final post.
Also know in places like Reddit, it’s been answered like below:
Guess can tag in @fanboynz to see if he might help break it down on the difference between Block fingerprinting and Aggressively block fingerprinting and if there’s any real use for the latter.
