I switched from Firefox on Android to Brave. Not because I like Brave, but because I disliked the new UI in Firefox. Brave also had much better performance for JavaScript and CSS animations.
I tried brave. But I constantly had ads on it. It would block trackers and ads on websites but if I was to open a few tab it would have crypto ads or some other nonsense.
I copied the following from one of my other comments since it's a lot of text, but these are the reasons I moved off Firefox for Android (Fenix) to Brave. Also, Chromium-based browsers for Android have none of the following issues.
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- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
- Startup time is noticably slower than Brave, taking at least a few seconds to show the UI and begin loading the page. It isn't much, but it impacts the user experience every time you start the app again.
Are you sure you're talking about Firefox? For example it doesn't even have pull to refresh so you can't trigger it unintentionally :)
I use it all the time now because it supports uBlock Origin and Dark Reader and I think it's good. And I have all my bookmarks on Firefox sync. I have some minor issues with it like the tab list that doesn't always scroll right but they're not deal-breakers.
UI is fine but
1. Battery consumption is at least twice the one of Brave
2. There is no option to always get the desktop site which makes it useless for tablets
Main reasons I also moved to Brave on all my devices. If these are fixed and Mac battery consumption is fixed I'd go back asap
Brave is a decent browser but I won't use anything from Brendan Eich. I also don't really agree with their BAT token stuff. I just want adtech to die at this stage, not to find an alternative model. Direct payments to sites I do support however and I'm a member of several.
I guess both opinions aren't popular :) But that's my reasons to use Firefox despite not being fully happy with it.
Fair enough. The whole gay marriage thing just really annoyed me. I have some close friends who are struggling with such prejudice every day. And that's in a country where marriage isn't a problem for them.
It's one thing for an employee to have private views but another for a CEO to actively try and influence the law. Especially for something that's in my opinion totally a private matter between people. I don't want to support the brand because of that.
But I'm not doubting his skills as an engineer. It's more about the brand and its values. For a public figure like a CEO these things are hard to separate, I understand that. But we live in a world where a brand is more than just a name on a sticker. If I'm using it I'm also supporting the associated values.
For me it's exactly that Firefox is actively activist in more than a web standards and privacy type sense that made me drop them. I don't need a browser maker to be interested in telling me what I should see.
> It's one thing for an employee to have private views but another for a CEO to actively try and influence the law.
Which he did not. He wasn't CEO at that time. He made "small" donations from his own money under his own name years before his appointment. And at no point did he abused Mozilla for any personal political goal of him AFAIK. He just was an employee supporting his own private views. Just that he is a bit more famous than your average employee.
I'm trying to use brave search as an alternative to google, since it is an actual search engine that does indexing as opposed to DDG, and I don't want to use bing either.
What upsets me is that there's no way to add it as default search in a browser, on purpose, because they want you to have to install brave browser to do that. Nothing upsets me more than when someone deliberately makes their product less useful. I do not like Brave, but I will use the search engine for now.
We do not prevent you from adding Brave as default search to other browsers. I'm not sure why you think we would, so please tell me more. Thanks.
To make Brave Search default in another browser, please load https://search.brave.com/help/default. In Safari, there's no way we know of to add an alternative default. Apple controls the dropdown list's contents. But try this link in Firefox or Chrome.
So I tried. The link you give just gives you a link that says "read instructions specific to your browser" and when I click that link I just get "instructions not available for such and such browser." The instructions do not have to be specific to the browser. Why doesn't brave just implement OpenSearch?
When brave search was first released there was no way to add it, I haven't tried since, and there was some material saying get brave browser to make it your default search engine.
Exactly, unless you turn off javascript and limit yourself to a very limited subset of sites you are a sitting duck. I would have thought HN general consensus would be that this is a very very bad idea.
Totally agree. It's not intrusive, gives lots of options organized well, it's fast... great browser. I assume it's still safer than Chrome as well, seems like the best option for now
You can also switch in built in adblocker in Vivaldi. There's no reason to use Firefox.
In AdGuard, you can add "extensions" that extend the functionality of the browser. Its simple. For example, playing youtube in background or bypassing paywalls. Extensions are little javascripts.
It replaces the millions of ads and trackers on the web with exactly one ad, which is as you say on the new tab screen, that you can turn off in the settings.
There is also Brave Rewards, something that pays you for viewing ads but is disabled by default and can be totally hidden through another setting.
This straightforward set-up isn't something I feel deserves the number of negative comments I see on here. The benefits far outweigh the minor inconvenience of changing two settings.
Because it took lots of fights to get the Brave team to 1) allow disabling ads and 2) allow disabling Brave Rewards, neither of which anyone wanted and went against the whole concept of "Brave, the ad-free browser" to begin with.
There was no fighting—Brave's Ads were (and are) off by default. The New Tab Page's Sponsored Images (a later addition) is on by default, but only appears on every 4th new tab, and can be turned off with 2 clicks.
This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles. The user is in control. Trackers and their ads are blocked by default as these harvest user data and more.
Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent. The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree. And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
I'm talking about the new tab ads. Those shouldn't exist. Period.
> This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles
No but it goes against the notion of "ad free browsing" that Brave kind of marketed. Perhaps they toed the line with exactly what they consider "ads" but at the end of the day users installed brave wanting ZERO ads.
Replacing someone else's ad for your own is not what I'd call "ad free" nor "ethical", regardless of the use (or lack thereof) of trackers.
> Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent.
I never consented to ads. Period.
> The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree
And I never decided that I wanted ads in my browser, yet here we are.
> And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
And what if I don't want a browser that has all of this fancy mining crap in it? Braves stance is "it's okay to add bloat as long as we preserve privacy". Nobody seems to see the problem with this.
It's such a middle finger to users, in my opinion.