2) Perhaps you missed that we are in beta. You are opting-in your email in exchange for being invited to become a beta tester. You do not need to do that. And if you do, we are going to use your email only to send you the invite.
And the reason why there are so many questions in the form is that we want to deter as many people as we can, and get only the most determined beta testers. If somebody finds a 10 question form intimidating, their value to us as an active, contributing beta tester is likely to be small.
When we are out of beta you will be able to download the browser without submitting anything, and enjoy a zero-telemetry browser out of the box. Makes sense?
However we are OK to share it with die-hard fans who actually took the time to complete a non-trivial form, hence invite-only private beta. When we move to public beta, there will be no signup requirement.
> Bullish on macOS?
Yes we believe it is an OS and a platform with a bright future. Personally I enjoy it using a lot as a consumer, and I think it makes for a wonderful host platform for a new browser. Note that we also opted to use the WebKit rendering engine (fastest and most power efficient, at least on macOS) and built the rest of the browser from scratch.
Honestly, this is not what I expected from the "privacy respecting, zero-telemetry, browser" that you've been heralding here.
The Google Form alone is far more alarming than Brave's P3A (which is not connected to any Google Account, doesn't feed the data to a third-party, restricts user answers to category/range values, breaks up and temporally offsets delivery of feedback to prevent fingerprinting, etc.).