Another Firefox user here (although I'm waiting for a fork of the latest one since we cannot get rid of Mozilla any other way it seems).

I also cannot see what I should get technically that will be worth giving up tree style tabs and also inching closer to full Chrome monoculture.

Stock Chromium (which Brave mostly is, UI wise) is snappier, and has things like tab groups which are amazing. I don't remember the last time Firefox introduced a new UI thing that made the browser nicer to use. Containers, probably? The browsing experience on a mostly stock Chromium doesn't differ much from Firefox apart from containers vs. separate profiles, tab groups and sheer speed.

Edge and Vivaldi have a ton of actually novel UI innovations built in. Microsoft's doing a lot of menus as floating panels that can be pinned, which turns the menu into a sidebar. Very normie-friendly but powerful. They also have vertical tabs and can hide the titlebar if they are in use. If they weren't a privacy disaster, they'd probably be just the best browser on the market.

Vivaldi goes more the tweaker way, their tab strip is an inhouse custom implementation and they have settings for just about everything. They have three different tab group setups alone, can slap tabs on any edge of the window you want or do away with them entirely, etc.

I think mobile is where the bigger differences are: Mobile Chromium browsers have tab groups, and tab groups are just as awesome on mobile. They're also clearly snappier than mobile Firefox IME. Stock Chrome falls behind because it doesn't have any adblocking ability on mobile and no extension support. Most forks do, with varying degrees of power.

> Does Brave still do that ad replacement thing?

Replacement is a bit of a wrong word, in that it implies putting their own ads in place of the normal, usually evil ones. Brave has, separately, a traditional ad blocker (built into the browser instead of being an extension, so it doesn't get nerfed by Manifest v3, and can do CNAME uncloaking like uBO on Firefox can) and an ad delivery system that shows ads from a local catalogue as the background in new tab pages and as toaster popups. Both can be toggled off (and the popups are off by default) and their frequency adjusted by the user.

If you turn the ad stuff off, it's close to being a stock Chromium with a bunch of tinfoil and a standalone sync infrastructure.

> What features do other browsers have that Firefox

this is not a meaningful question. I don't know any major browser that still misses features. If people don't use firefox, it likely that they're not happy with factors such as snappiness, its UI, power usage or synchronization of extensions.

I agree with you. GP stated "feature-wise".

For me, brave comes with built in features (ad blocking, ipfs, tor) so I don't have to install 3rd party extensions... In the end I have zero extensions installed.

Also they are investing a lot into security and privacy (check out the Brave Blog for examples), which is a glimmer of hope for me.

What's wrong with Ublock Origin on Chrome? Or is there other reasons (read:Google) you don't use Chrome?

It is indeed that I will not use anything from Google unless I absolutely have to (doesn't happen often but image search on DDG sometimes misses results Google shows).

I'm fortunate in that I have never bought into Gmail, maps or any other product of theirs. I did however sell my London flat without qualms to a Google employee who offered way more money than the asking price.