There's a comparison halfway down wallet page. Seems the main benefits are:

* Browser native (obviously)

* Open license (not familiar with MetaMask license)

* Live market data via CoinGecko

* Reduced resources (seems to fold in to browser native integration)

Also quote from the FAQ:

> Q: What makes Brave Wallet better than other wallets?

> A: Most crypto wallets are browser extensions. These extensions have inherent security risks, and are much more susceptible to account spoofing and asset theft. Extensions also require extra CPU to run, creating performance issues on your device.

> Brave Wallet, by contrast, is browser native. With Brave Wallet, there’s much less risk of account spoofing, phishing, and other scams. It requires less CPU to operate, and is overall much more performant and reliable. Brave Wallet allows you to connect other self-custody or hardware wallets and other web3 DApps, see live market data, and manage your portfolio all in one place.

Iirc, Metamask ised to be MIT, but transitioned to a commercial license with public source a couple years ago.

Metamask is begging to be disrupted. It's not like the UX is even close to being as good as it could be.

Ten years ago the software wallets were crude, generally for individual projects/networks and not exactly easy to use. MetaMask is so cool comparatively; you can switch between networks, testnets and mains, add your own networks, interact with sites built to use it and it's a browser app. That said I think you're right and this is pretty common in the space as a whole still but it is becoming better. Security is still a huge issue IMO and I would never use metamask as anything more than a means to an end.

Why would someone use metamask? I read over the web site and I still don't know what it gets me over not having it.

Edit: Here are my guesses:

It's a crypto wallet?

It's an alt-dns?

It's a keystore?

It's a crypto wallet with a javascript API, so web apps can do crypto things.

Is it useful to me if I don't have any crypto to put in it? Because I'm interested in the IPFS access etc, but I don't hold any crypto.

Yes in that you can access web3 sites “authenticated” by your wallet, but you couldn’t transact on them.

Thank you for helping me through this, I'll play with it tonight!

iirc: originally brave embedded metamask but with their own branding, metamask then changed their license so that other companies couldn't do that without paying a license fee, so the brave version stayed on the older version without the license fee and slowly became outdated and less useful. I guess this is them updating their fork from that point and adding some features back.

This is a new rewrite built into Chromium from scratch. No shared code with the original MetaMask fork.

There's a comparison chart halfway down the page.

Personally, I'm excited for the mobile launch.