I've been using Brave Search for years and it's fantastic. I haven't used Google since and it supports Bangs! like DDG. It's free so you can give it a try.

It's not good for images, unfortunately. Bing is way better for images.

Yes, for images I just do !gi

Did Brave give up on their cryptocurrency stuff?

Unsure, but I don’t see anything related to it these days

It's a decent alternative to what Mozilla was doing to earn money.

They've kinda realized that it's not going anywhere. So now they're focusing on products that can earn them revenue. Like AI features and search ads.

How to make sure Brave (the browser) gets some money if I'm not using their search engine? (I use Kagi)

I still use Google; however, Brave Search has been my default and it is good in most cases. Better than Bing (and DDG).

I really liked Brave Search but unfortunately it started giving me captchas on every search after 11 pm Pacific or so for some (unknown) reason. They’re not even image captchas, you just click the button and wait 15-20 seconds which is pretty inconvenient.

Hi, Brave engineer here,

May I ask when you switched away from Brave Search? We've been doing work to reduce the amount of captchas a few months ago and we stopped getting feedback about this issue at that point. If it's still happening, it's something we will look into again.

Also, are you a user of ProtonVPN by any chance?

Thanks for your help,

Hi pythux, off-topic question but do engineers directly read the feedback or is it filtered for you by someone else?

It can be both, we have people who look at community feedback on a daily basis, but engineers also tend to be out there on HN and Reddit, etc. and today it was the case that I saw the comment and could jump in straight away.

Excellent browser. One issue with it though, when I close the browser I am expecting my history to be deleted as I set it up that way, but it turns out I have to manually close every tab before closing the browser for it to actually delete the history and that seems like a mistake. Otherwise, great browser. Though you should rip out all the Google stuff from it, literally every single thing that connects or touches that pos company.

Hey, let me forward that to someone more knowledgeable about this topic. We'll get back to you. Thanks for the feedback!

Sampson here, from Developer Relations at Brave. Would you mind telling me a bit more about how you have Brave configured, so that I can make sure local testing and troubleshooting on my end reflects your scenario accurately? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

You are presumably using the "Clear on Exit" feature, located within settings at brave://settings/clearBrowserData. When you select the "On Exit" tab of that view, which options do you have selected? Do you find that none of the data types are cleared when you close the browser (via › Exit), or only some of them are cleared?

I'm also curious about the state of two options within brave://settings/system, namely "Close window when closing last tab," and "Warn me before closing window with multiple tabs". Are both of these enabled?

Thank you in advance

I'm relieved to see someone stating this. I get ignored (and dvoted) every time I criticize ddg, but I have no vested interested -- I simply find precisely what you mentioned and that it tends to suck in general.

(Kagi, for anyone willing to do the same. It's great!)

Feels nice to know that I am literally a paying customer and at least in theory incentives should be somewhat aligned.

I've started using Kagi for any "important" searches and I have to say it works very well, quite a contrast to what DDG has now become.

I use kagi for everything

Kagi is my one and only search engine for few years now. What a breath of fresh air. It was, "back to sanity" for me.