Brave is essentially just Chrome with an adblocker, a bunch of bloatware, and a bunch of controversies.
Brave took BAT donations in YouTuber’s names without their consent, with them keeping the money if the YouTubers didn’t claim it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/
Brave’s search engine crawler hides itself from websites by pretending to be Googlebot, and Meta (Facebook) buys API access from them to train their AI. https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
The business model of Brave rewards as a whole is to block all other ad networks to replace them with their own, which is unfair as only YouTubers and websites that have joined can make money from most Brave users.
If Brave actually cared, they would create an acceptable ads style feature which was free for everyone and allowed simple contextual banners while blocking ads which track you, take up most of the page, or have NSFW content.
Their approach is monopolistic as they have full control and can strangle YouTubers and websites by dropping pay at any time.
And Brenden Eich has said on Twitter that he plans to release “Brave Origin”, which is a paid version of Brave without the bloatware. That name is ironic as he is admitting that his browser is commercialised and bloated, which is similar to when gorhill gave uBlock way to Chris Aljoudi who commercialised it, which led him to create uBlock Origin.
If you use Brave, ditch it and look at using Librewolf or Helium instead, which both include no ads nor tracking and don’t have Brave News, Rewards, Wallet, Talk etc bloatware.
I’m kind of surprised to hear you say that. I’ve been quite happy with Firefox mobile. I haven’t experienced any of the lag or whatever you mentioned. The ability to use extensions far outweighs any updated visuals in the UI department for me. It does everything I need a browser to do.
What is it that you need that isn’t already there? (genuinely asking)
If Firefox used a more modern Material UI and fixed some of the gestures (the expanding website menu makes no sense, it doesn’t follow your finger) it would be much more appealing. As it stands now chromium based browsers naturally use standard material components and feel a lot nicer to use on my phone.
When I scroll in Firefox, there’s quite a lot of stutter and it struggles to maintain 120 fps.
If any 1 of these 2 issues were fixed I’d switch to Firefox in a heartbeat, ublock origin is great
Tab grouping is the killer feature for me. Chromium lets me group tabs into boxes, color code and name those boxes, easily switch between tabs in that boxed group with icons on the bottom, close all the tabs in the group, and reorder the groups. Here’s a video showing this awesome, intuitive, actually valuable feature that many people have begged Mozilla for for years only to be ignored: https://youtu.be/P6mcduJFSsM
It allows me to keep lots of tabs open, social things, shopping things, travel research, etc etc. Without needing to bookmark everything (a lot of stuff you only need for a few weeks, and bookmarks are kinda supposed to be forever).
If you haven’t used that feature on mobile, it’s hard to see how life changing it is. Like actually life changing in the sense that it allows me to keep an eye on much more things, remember about them, follow up on them, and easily get rid of them when their usefulness is over. If I’m looking for information on some event I can have a group for that and with just one tap access any of like 10 tabs and quickly cross reference them. If I’m shopping I can have products in different tabs, groups for the different things I’m shopping for.
There are no Firefox extensions that provide this functionality, which, to me should be an absolute baseline feature for any web browser now that’s been awhile since its been introduced. Especially for mobile browsers where screen real estate is so limited, and where we use our browsers for all sorts of sudden brief things that are ephemeral enough not to bookmark but also longevitous or time-consuming enough that I want to have them open for more than a few minutes.
Compare this with firefox, where all I get is this clumsy two column list of tabs which quickly becomes navigable, and the worse-than-useless “old tabs” feature or whatever they call it that automatically hides tabs I’ve had open too long. On Chromium I will literally have hundreds of tabs on there at times, and it’s great because I can quickly access a “workspace” of things depending on what I’m doing right now. On Firefox the best I can do is roughly reorder them, and even then it takes two taps instead of one to switch to one of my choice, in addition to scrolling if it’s more than 4 away. It’s such trash that it makes me mad every time I use it and every time I think of it, because I KNOW the Firefox team could replicate the Chromium feature, but instead they fuck around adding AI doodads, while ignoring this silver bullet feature that single handedly keeps me from switching to them as my only browser. Keep in mind this functionality has existed in Chromium browsers 5 years ago, albeit slightly less usable than it is now. It has been this great for probably 4 years. I just can’t go back, for certain things.