Brave Ads are opt-in, you have to click on the triangle in the right end of the url bar and enable Brave Rewards, which includes Ads. You can turn off Ads but keep Rewards on and send tokens you buy, or direct tokens we have in a granting pool, toward your favorite creators. Ads pay 70% of the gross revenue to the user who opts in, and by default these tokens flow back to your creators, anonymously. Neither Brave nor any partners see linkable automated contributions thanks to a ZKP protocol (anonize.org based). No user browsing data in the clear goes to our servers or partners’ servers (or of course on a blockchain) for any part of Brave Rewards. Which is off by default, to return to my first point. I hope you give it a try. Thanks for your support.

What’s wrong with Firefox?

Just last week, we found out that they sat on a severe vulnerability for 2 months, only bothering to patch it after someone used it to try to pwn Coinbase[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20233952

They had reason for that, as mentioned in the thread you linked.

And what’s wrong with Safari?

I don't want to pay 2k for my browser.

I don't want to pay 2k to run a proprietary browser.

I do a lot of web development and need the tools.

Which tools specifically that aren't available in Firefox?

It's more about the clunky UX than the tool itself. Eclipse support everything other IDEs support but who wants to use that?

You can use Firefox for browsing and Chrome for development. No need to settle on a single egg.

Too freaking slow.

Have you tried it recently? It has gotten a lot faster, so much so that some people say it's faster than Chrome in many cases.

Personally, I find it more than adequate, and I agree with their mission a lot more than the other browser vendors.

I use Firefox everywhere. I tried Chrome recently and it feels a lot faster, but in the end the ability to block ads and trackers (everywhere, including mobile which is where I do most of my browsing) is more important than a bit of speed. If Firefox is fast enough, then faster is pointless. But as can be seen in this thread, some people believe it's their duty to look at ads so for them the extra speed is probably a nice bonus (and perhaps partially compensates for the extra work their browser is doing).

It's been years people suggest the same "have you tried recently", but it doesn't come even close to the snappiness of any chromium based browser when I use it.

Have you tried using it recently? The quantum rewrite they released last year is incomparable to the previous releases. I use FF at home and Chrome at work and I can tell you that there is no noticeable difference in performance. The only time you'll notice the difference is when you use google apps that are written specifically for Chrome, but I personally prefer to avoid trusting the biggest adtech company in the world with my personal data. Plus, FF supports vertical tabs, Chrome doesn't.

I use both and in my case, new Firefox is snappier than Chrome.