Brave is a well known and well regarded browser, especially for its privacy and ad-blocking abilities. It's quite popular, and I mean no disrespect to those who prefer it. My trial of Brave was brief, and it might easily be said that I did not give it a fair chance. It's a good browser, it's fast, and it has features that many people appreciate, although I think that everyone interested in Brave (or using it) should read the
Brave Wikipedia page in full. But try it... by all means, explore Brave yourself. Give it a better test than I did. You may love it.
The turn-offs for me...
I don't want my browser to be a "financial device"... a tool for financial transactions... baked into the browser itself. Not even if I can disable it. The Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), Brave Rewards, Brave Wallet, and Brave Swap are too much for me. It speaks too much to Brave's priorities in this direction. I simply want my browser to be my
secure access to financial tools, my
means of connecting to money... and not the tool for moving money. It's a hook I don't want Brave, or any browser, to have.
I am skeptical of the Brave installation method. Why are they not in the repos of the major Linux distros? Sure, someone may find an explanation, but that's not really my point. It's a strong preference for me to use apps from repos rather than snaps, flatpaks, appimages, PPA's, and so on... and Brave falls into these categories. These are widely used methods and are gaining more and more popularity, but not for me. I will use these other methods when necessary, but mostly at a minimum to meet my needs.
I'm not really a big fan of
Brendan Eich, Brave's creator and CEO.
And lastly, this is just a gut feeling... I sense too much "hype" around Brave. I've seen tons of articles and YouTube videos singing its praises. Too much of this can have the opposite effect on me and causes suspicion. As the old saying goes,
"If something seems too good to be true, it probably is." Again, I would suggest people carefully read the
Brave Wikipedia page to consider both its attributes and its criticisms.
I am rather "old school" in my thinking, I guess. Other people want their browsers to do more, while I prefer less. I can install a brand new Firefox and complete the changes in Settings that I want in just a few minutes time. I much prefer Firefox's simplicity in this respect. The Settings in Chromium based browsers takes me far longer to finish, digging into layer after layer, and I probably miss some.
I am even more "old school" with my smartphone (no, not a flip phone! not yet! haha). I uninstall every app that my phone will let me uninstall. I disable many or most of those that are left, including Google Chrome. I do not install any apps that move money... no banking apps, no Venmo, or others. I install very few apps, but Firefox is one of them, used daily in private mode for news, weather, etc. I use some Google apps, but they too I try to minimize... Gmail sits unused, but I don't install other email clients on the phone. All email and money activities are on my desktop or laptop only, where I have far more trust in Linux than Android.
A lot of people complain that Firefox is slow. But, luckily, for whatever reason, that has never been a problem for me that I can recall. I don't care about speed benchmarks, only that web pages load in a reasonable amount of time, which may be more influenced by my internet connection quality than the browser.
Most people won't use NoScript. Most people won't use Tails or Tor. And, well... we all know which browsers most people use, and which operating systems most people use. It's a wide, wide range between what some folks will trust with their online privacy and security versus what other folks will trust. There is no right or wrong, just your own comfort and trust levels.
