Curious what you mean by this. If you're talking about devtools, Firefox dev tools are also great, although there's nothing to say you couldn't use Firefox as a daily driver and pop open Chrome for developer work to avoid learning a new set of browser devtools.
- Yes, dev work. I generally always need to be testing against Chromium where FF has such a small userbase that code regressions aren't costly. Keeping two browsers open all the time isn't a big deal, but feels like a hassle for some reason.
- There's a barrier to transitioning away from Google Chrome, but I have to overcome that for either transition. Exporting/importing passwords, hunting down extensions, etc. There's likely replacements for everything on Firefox, but there's absolutely everything on Brave as it's compatible with the Chrome Web Store.
- I don't give bonus points to Firefox for its approach to open source. Yes, it's better to be open source, but compelling, interesting features are where it's at for me.
- I don't give bonus points to Brave for being pro-crypto, but I'm not anti-crypto, either. It does seem like Brave has a faster pace of development these days, and I think it would be more interesting in conversations to discuss that I'm on Brave, and those facts, while relatively trivial, cause me to lean more towards it.
So I suppose it's not so much about staying within the Chromium ecosystem. It's mostly that Brave feels more alive and doesn't have such a bad reputation (IMO) to dissuade me from using it.
Vivaldi's definitely great, but it focuses more on customizability than raw privacy protections. Brave's the reverse. Stock Chrome, but top tier blocking functionality.
Firefox is the nobler choice, to be sure, but I enjoy working within the Chromium ecosystem. Brave is built on top of Chromium and will still be affected, but Brave Shields is a native implementation, not an extension, and will be unaffected. They will also work to support v2 as best as possible. This gives them a certain allure!