Readers of this august website may recall that a year ago, I lauded Firefox and its progress toward becoming a genuine alternative to Google’s dominant Chrome browser. As much as I liked where Firefox was going, however, I couldn’t stick with it over the long term. It wasn’t compatible with everything the way Chrome was, its extensions were different, and, for my way of using a browser, it was slower and less responsive. So I returned to Chrome after a few weeks of Firefox, but the urge to decouple my browsing habits from Google remained.
This year, I’m pretty sure I’ve found the ideal Chrome alternative in the Brave browser. If your reasons for sticking with Chrome have been (a) extensions, (b) compatibility, (c) syncing across devices, or (d, unlikely) speed, Brave checks all of those boxes. What’s more, it’s just one of a growing number of really good options that aren’t made by Google.
I first used Edge for a while on my desktop and laptop while using Chrome on my phone, but recently I’ve switched everything over to Firefox, and it’s been a delight.
Isn’t Brave one of the chrome clones that comes with a bunch of spyware bundled in?
I did find quite a few hits when searching for https://www.google.com/search?q=brave+spyware
This one seems to sum up a lot of issues quite well: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html
This is what Brave has to say about that themselves: https://brave.com/faq/#concerns
Braves answer doesn’t give me much confidence and the neocities article seems entirely factual. So my short analysis is that Brave isn’t better for privacy than Chrome, but also doesn’t seem worse
Why do you say that? They collect information about which domains your browser visit if you opt-in to their Brave Rewards program. You can just not opt-in to that if you’re uncomfortable with their privacy policy.
I can also opt to just not use their browser at all, because perhaps the spyware portion is opt-in today, perhaps not tomorrow. That, combined with their tie-in with a dubious cryptocurrency (BAT), makes it a terrible choice for anyone with an ounce of common sense. It’s a cash grab scheme selling your browsing data and nothing more.
I find flaws with most of the modern browsers as part of these browser wars, they are so focused so heavily on new they are frequently throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Have developers lost focus on the utilitarian aspects of the web browser in an effort to make them the next killer app?
Switching back & forth from Chrome to Firefox on Windows 10, Android & MacOS… Right now I am managing to stick to Firefox only. I didn’t really get Brave sync yet… I’ll have to look into it..
Using a chromium based browser to avoid the browser monoculture doesn’t really avoid it, it just fools yourself. Edge, Safari, Firefox, they are all good choices, and if there is incompatibilities, that’s likely not their fault, but the web developers. Using Brave, or Vivaldi or Iron still encourages web developers to only test in chrome. it is a useless gesture.
Exactly. Every time I hear people saying they don’t use NONCHROME_BROWSER because USER_APPLICATION only works in Chrome, I cringe. If everyone thought that way, we would still be using IE6 today.
Any web developer who doesn’t test their work on multiple browsers doesn’t deserve the title; they should honestly just call themselves Chrome developers.
So somehow using a downstream of Chrome is breaking your dependency on Chrome?
This seems pretty silly to me. This isn’t even a different vendor’s WebKit browser.
I use Brave as my primary browser now. I’m not concerned about the Spyware concerns, as almost all of them are the same for Chrome. The rest can be easily mitigated (e.g. use an ad-blocker) or flat out aren’t issues for me and others (e.g. autoupdating).
On the other hand, it’s fast, it’s stable, it doesn’t eat RAM like Chrome, Opera, and other Chromium based browsers, it looks native (unlike Firefox), and it supports tons of add-ons (looking your way, Safari).
Hey Adam, how does the sync feels? You know, between your phone and your laptop…
Another Chrome clone. No reason to do it. Firefox is the way to go (with no disadvantages at all?)