I use both. Brave is better for the "chromium only" wonky websites/webapps. But the whole altruistic privacy thing is kind of undercut, at least optics-wise, by all the crypto/gamification upsell present by default. Not good when your supposedly privacy-focused browser requires extensive fiddling in the settings to shut everything off on initial install a-la Windows 11...

Honestly its very easy to ignore all the crypto crap. And its much better for your average user, since he/she will be private by just using brave, without any tinkering.

It's a little odd to be concerned about privacy focus on a post-Windows 10 os.

They said Brave behaves like W11...

Why did you enable the crypto features if you don't want them?

Oh. You didn't? Then what are you complaining about?

They're everywhere by default. When I tried Brave out they had a wallet that popped up in the toolbar you seemingly can't uninstall, there's some sort crypto token reward thing (that you can't get rid of on mobile), on the new tab page there's sponsored crypto ads, and disabling this stuff, intentionally I suppose, is the only thing that does not sync so it always pops up on every new device.

Not since the early 2000s when browsers were infested with random toolbars have I seen so much shady spam in a web browser.

The crypto stuff is opt-in only, including on mobile. If you accidentally enabled it, you can disable it by clicking on the settings icon and going to 'Brave Rewards' and turning off 'Brave Private Ads.'

This comment was completely incongruous with my previous Brave experiences, so I went ahead and did a fresh install on a clean system.

* The wallet is enabled by default.

* The new tab page shows crypto ads by default. I couldn't figure out how to opt-out of these despite a couple of minutes in the "customize dashboard" menu. I know the option exists, but it's well-hidden.

* The BAT rewards icon is enabled by default, as well as the new tab card, as well as injected tip buttons on Github, Reddit, and Twitter.

* BAT rewards itself is not enabled by default, but there are no less than 3 distinct notifications asking me to enable it.

* Brave news is not enabled, but again there are multiple requests to enable it hidden throughout various menus. It's also not clear how Brave news interacts with Brave rewards. If I only enable news, do I still get the in-feed ads without the reward sharing, or is the news feed ad-free, or will only certain ad channels be shown?

So no, the crypto stuff is not opt-in. It's mostly opt-out with the BAT rewards program specifically being opt-in.

So your complaints seem to come down to 2 icons, and a what's shown on the new tab page. To disable icons, right click on them and select hide. To change what new tab pages show search for "new tab page shows" in the settings and change it to your homepage, or a blank page - as preferred.

Most people referring to the "crypto stuff" are talking about that program where you get an ad every once in a while and get some crypto for viewing it. Certainly not a fan of it myself and would not use (let alone recommend) Brave, if it was imposed.

The Crypto shoehorn means I will never use Brave the browser, I'm just not interested in supporting the idea that every tiny action can be monetised. I use and support Fixefox for browsing.

Now I have no problem with their search engine if it is good. Alternatives are definitely needed. If they start pushing their token through it or weighing results based on the token in some way I might think again.

> * The new tab page shows crypto ads by default. I couldn't figure out how to opt-out of these despite a couple of minutes in the "customize dashboard" menu. I know the option exists, but it's well-hidden.

Customize->Background image. Has a total of two switches. One for background images at all, the other for sponsored background images. Turn the second one off.

The discussion is about the default setting; not the ability to turn it on and off later.

The person I was responding to said it was "well hidden". It's literally one of a grand total of two toggles in the relevant settings screen, which is also the first one that opens if you click the customize button.

So it's not part of the "dashboard" with all the other UI elements on the new tab page despite having its own HTML elements and the option is hidden in the seemingly unrelated background image menu? That certainly is well hidden.

What areyou even on about? There's a clear customize button on the new tab page, that has a clear background image customization. If you want to change it where else would you look?

You can literally disable the ads in Brave. I've never seen any other advertiser offer that option.

I would say defaults matter, and say a lot about priorities. I don't want to be judgmental about their funding model, but to have all of that turned on, after a fresh install, and in your face, by default...

Have they sorted out the bookmark syncing? When I tried Brave a few years ago I went back to Chrome (and now FF) as the bookmark syncing functionality would frequently go out of sync for hours on different browser installs.

This submission is about a search engine, not a browser.

What's to be like the Brave browser for you? You don't say much.

This is all downstream of firing Brendan Eich.

Today, Mozilla's co-equal primary products are DEI and Firefox.

It is ergonomic until you want to send more than one tab using Brave sync.

Also Ctrl + B to show the bookmarks sidebar would be nice, for those of us who nest their web clippings deeply.

On the iOS app, it also forgets usernames I’ve stored using password sync. For some sites (criteria unclear) I have to type the username before it inserts the password, which is frustrating to a privacy conscious user who will not use the same email address everywhere.

I want to like it but there are power user pleasing areas where it certainly lags behind Firefox.

In Brave, you can select the Bookmarks panel from the side bar, and then toggle it open/closed from then on with Ctrl+B.

Regarding iOS, it's entirely possible there's a bug in our code. I'll definitely take a closer look and speak with the team regarding this report. That said, it's also not entirely uncommon for users to enter a site through a slightly different URL, or form, which complicates the credential-autofill logic. If you have an example or two of sites where this behavior is consistently observed, that would be much appreciated.

Ah, tried Ctrl+B with the mini side bar already open and found it works. Thanks.

The two recent culprits that didn't toggle password autofill were eBay.co.uk and Gumtree.co.uk. I'd be grateful it if this could be investigated; the latter prevented me from checking an address in the Gumtree PMs whilst on the road delivering a purchase.

On the issue of sending multiple tabs, it is frustrating enough that it prevents me from adopting Brave as my main browser. I often open a few sites that interest me on mobile then decide to read more on my desktop. If you could pass the word along for someone to investigate that, all the better.

With that said, it's commendable being the only browser on iOS with first class advert blocking & sync with every other platform.

I don't see why anyone would pick Brave over Vivaldi, especially on mobile.

Because brave is open source and Vivaldi is not.

I do really like Vivaldi on mobile - customizes perfectly for my needs. Have no reason to mistrust them regarding their proprietary chromium gui.

Vivaldi user here. Excellent browser.

But I still really miss Opera from the old days. Vivaldi is the next best thing.

I used Vivaldi for a good year or two on my machines, but after some point Vivaldi was so slow to launch and to navigate. Maybe it was my setup, but other browsers were quick launch and use. Been using FF for several months now, maybe they fixed the issues in Vivaldi since.

Vivaldi has this issue with many tabs slowing down the whole UI, but the new v6 feature of workspaces allows you to move some tabs to a WS group, that improves UI performance

But yeah, that's one of their biggest issues

Vivaldi is not available on mobile (ios)

Vivaldi on android still does not support adding custom search engines.

Brave's blockers are better, the browser performs better, and I like the native Chromium tab groups more than Vivaldi's tab stacks. Brave also had background media playback on mobile long before Vivaldi, who only got it in the latest update.

Vivaldi's fine, and it's what I'd use if Brave didn't exist, but I just like the experience of using Brave more, especially on desktop. Vivaldi's new mobile version, from what I've seen, has clarified their old mobile UI a lot and got background media playback, so that's less of an issue.

The Mozilla CEO is to blame for the chaos they caused around Firefox, and them losing market share to Chrome for the past 14 years.

Mozilla is so dysfunctional that the CEO is rewarded a massive bonus for running the company to the ground and laying off their employees.

They are not interested in competing against Chrome; instead they are chronically dependent on Google's money and on life support, making over 80% of their revenue despite the Mozilla CEO saying that they would not fully depend on Google's money. in the future. [0]

I hope Brave makes Firefox (and Mozilla) even more irrelevant.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

Mitchell Baker's salary is outrageous.

Wow, think of what just a little of that 5 million could buy in terms of bug fixes!

Mozilla Foundation Total revenue: 600 million

Salaries and benefits - management & general: 81 million

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

> I hope Brave makes Firefox (and Mozilla) even more irrelevant.

I get that you hate Mozilla, but from the perspective of an end user of browsers, this is a deeply irrational position. Less competition in the browser space is uniformly bad for end users, as we've seen very clearly in the past.

My dislike for Mozilla the non profit is rather intense but I still agree with you: nothing good comes out of playing into Googles hand here and shortening and simplifying the path they have to try to go to corner the browser market and become really problematic.

I still hope we can manage to break up Google before that happens so anything that delays Googles cornering of the browser market is a win in my eyes.

Note that competition in the browser space is different from competition in the engine space. Even then, Chromium remains open source, we already see things like Brave committing to not shipping the adblock-killing extension changes that Google is pushing.

As to Mozilla, their combination of incompetence, user-hostility, and complete dependence on Google renders them controlled opposition at best. They are not a serious player in the browser space, continuing to treat them like one is directing limited resources and mind share into a failing enterprise.

Firefox usage is abysmal on Desktop (from the Cloudflare usage stats which doesn't depend on JavaScript being enabled) and practically inexistent on mobile. My tech friends gave up, and normal users just use the defaults: Edge (which is good enough for them), Safari or whatever browser default browser comes with their smartphone. Mozilla needs to figure out how to attract new users, and focus.

A lot of us are running with modified UA strings to combat fingerprinting.

Specifically because of Cloudflare in my case.

Having stopped Firefox users from browsing the net with infinite verification loops, Cloudflare finds their unbiased estimation of internet browser usage shows Firefox is in decline.

This ignores the fact that Google is the/a dominant player in at least mail, search, ads, and mobile. That both funds Google's browser and they can nag users to switch.

It's more surprising that Mozilla survives at all (and likely at Google's mercy with default placement payment) since the only other browsers who can hope to compete have massive subsidies from a larger business.

How would a nonprofit expect to compete against Google? It's not exactly evenly matched is it?

Firefox on desktop has been more than good enough anyway.

Firefox competed against fairly successfully against Microsoft for a decade.

They still spin off massive amounts of cash -- they just piss it away on their foundation, and not improving the product.

> Firefox competed against fairly successfully against Microsoft for a decade.

My recollection was that Microsoft had stopped innovating on IE6 almost entirely during that decade, right? Or at least for the few years that enabled Firefox to get a foothold.

> They still spin off massive amounts of cash -- they just piss it away on their foundation, and not improving the product.

Hard agree on this. So many side quests when the main quest is not done.

No they didn't. Microsoft was just asleep at the wheel. The difference between an incumbent who doesn't care (MS) and an upstart that cares (Google) is easily visible by how rapidly IE market share crashed after Firefox arrived -- and then later, how FF crashed as Chrome grew.

4% share according to our Google Analytics (higher education). Of course, FF users might be more likely to run an adblocker that blocks GA, but either way it's a pretty dire figure.

It seems we're all relying on Apple/Safari to provide that Chromium alternative.

> I hope Brave makes Firefox (and Mozilla) even more irrelevant.

Let's not go this far. Mozilla getting its shit together will only benefit us.

My experience has been the opposite. I wish Brave was more like Firefox.

I have Brave installed as an alternate browser (originally because sites like Twitch and Netflix performed poorly on Firefox, not so much the case anymore). And there's a noticeable lag when switching tabs that's absent in Firefox. And the memory usage - Brave uses as much memory with 10 tabs open as Firefox does with 100. It seems like "unloaded" tabs are not really unloaded at all, and continue to take up memory (which makes you question what unloading does) as long as the browser remains open.

I'm not sure what you mean by ergonomic, but I've been spoiled by Firefox's openness to customization, it was shocking to find that you can't even customize the toolbar on Brave to have your frequently used features handy.

You can always check the internal task manager to see which tabs/extensions/child-processes are using the most resources. To do so, visit › More Tools › Task Manager in the browser, or press Shift+Esc.

Well the guy who started Brave used to head up Firefox before the employees revolted and demanded he be fired over politics.

"politics" is one way to describe him donating a large sum of money to a bigoted anti-gay cause and losing the trust of his employees.

Yeah, but ... It was a political effort.

It was a movement that used the existing mechanism to promote a law they wanted, not a mob trying to get their way by shouting down others.

You may not like how the process works, but it works the same for everyone. Trying to smear the ones you don't agree with as not legitimate doesn't work, because it's the process that you're smearing.

I don't think this comment is internally consistent. I don't see any difference between "using the existing mechanism to promote a law" and "shouting down others to promote a law."

It sounds like your biggest priority in determining ethicality is legality: did anything illegal happen in the "cancellation" of the Brave founder? (I know nothing about this event, I'm just commenting within the context of this short conversation).

If not, how then are you determining one method being better than another?

> I don't think this comment is internally consistent. I don't see any difference between "using the existing mechanism to promote a law" and "shouting down others to promote a law."

If there is a legal and approved method for getting a law, why is forming a mob the same as using the official method?

Forming a mob is also called protesting, and many of the laws that define our society were written after popular protests.

I'm actually not even sure anymore what you mean by "legal and approved method for getting a law." Maybe you're talking about how some places like California have a process for petition > law proposition > law being put directly on the ballot? Not all states have that and as far as I know the usa congress has nothing like that. In fact when it comes to federal law the only way I'm aware of for citizens to get a law they want in the end always comes down to some kind of mob formation.

Anyway the meaning of the word "official" matters as well. The USA's founding documents state an intent that the authority of the government derives from the people. There's thus no difference between a government's rubber stamped "official process," and a crowd of people in city hall shouting.

Bigotry is not a legitimate political position, no.

In a democracy, that question is literally up for debate.

If you can vote on it, itsta legitimate political position

A cause on which the majority of Californian voters agreed with him at the time.

Yes. Politics. Stuff that's irrelevant to the development of Firefox. Which is the only thing Mozilla should be focusing on given how far behind they are.

Perhaps people don’t like to support people actively working against their rights.

By using Firefox you support Mozilla, so you support the CEO financing political campaigns you don’t agree with. The CEO is a special role that represents Mozilla.

It’s simple, the guy had to go.

Do I have to keep tabs on the CEO of every company I interact with? Come on, that’s ridiculous.

The company you work for perhaps. If you work for a company. Then it’s up to you. Most people don’t care but some do. You aren’t requested to check every CEO, no one said that.

You don't have to do anything lol. If you claimed to be progressive you might be called out for being hypocritical, but it's up to you whether that matters.

I do think choosing to live in a society does come with SOME social responsibilities though, don't you? Most we probably don't think about all that much, like not farting in public or whatever. Not scratching our crotches in public. Not cutting in lines. Stuff with no legal boundaries but are just general social responsibilities.

> By using Firefox you support Mozilla, so you support the CEO financing political campaigns you don’t agree with.

I use Firefox because it's a functional browser with the best uBlock Origin support. Whatever political campaigns the guy in charge contributes to is not a factor, it's not even something I think about at all. I shouldn't even have to know who's in charge, if that information ever comes up it's probably a sign something's wrong.

> It’s simple, the guy had to go.

Mozilla is clearly worse off for it. Looks like the guy went and made another browser and now it's eating at Firefox's market share. Kind of ironic.

I understand that you don't care and it's fine. Some people do care.

I do care -- about the impact this guy leaving had on Firefox. Given the state of Brave today, one's gotta wonder what Firefox would've been like today had he not left.

He was attacked for donating $1000 to a majority supported proposition 6 years before he became CEO. Not only that but he had made ensuring that his actions as CEO would be fair and inclusive a major cornerstone of everything he had planned [1]. That is a post made almost immediately after his appointment after CEO. Nonetheless he was forced out after less than 2 weeks.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20200708202554/https://brendanei...

Sounds like a blog post wasn't enough.

But was he doing a great job on Firefox before being fired?

I really like Brave, and use it on mobile, but container tabs is still the killer Firefox feature for me on desktop. Hopefully one day Brave will get the equivalent.

just make new profiles

For every tab I open? Nah