I am surprised there does not exist a community fork of Brave yet that strips out all of the commercial stuff (rewards, AI, own updates), making it suitable for inclusion in the repos of mainstream free/libre Linux distros.
There is quite a lot of costs associated with running a browser (at scale).
Brave is looking to offer something that does what you mention called Brave-origin.
Open source software can be sold for money. For example redhat selling cds with rhel on them, for quite a big sticker price. Free if you build it yourself but you have to pay to get a ready to use version.
or figure out how to build it yourself from source. But you can count on the lazy tax - esp. for windows (as building from source on linux is likely to be much more convenient).
This. I use Brave because it has a great, fast adblocker and is fast generally. Unticking all the wallet/AI crap upon install is an acceptable price, but if somebody is going to release Braveium I'm going to use it right away.
The main reason for people repeating "uBlock Origin + Firefox is best" is because CNAME uncloaking didn't work on most Chromium browsers, even on Manifest V2. It does on Brave.
AdGuard works better simply because there's a bunch of people being paid to work on it. There's more optimization and less bugs. The UI is a whole lot more polished. Blocklists have improved syntax, and the lists themselves are updated more frequently to catch site breakage. EasyList often has breakage on their lists for months even after being reported on their Github, but reporting the same breakage to AdGuard results in the breakage being fixed in days if not hours. And they do adjacent projects like AdGuard Home (sort of a commercial Pi-Hole) too.
FWIW, big names in adblocking work for these companies too. AFAIK, FanBoy (EasyList + EasyPrivacy + his own lists) gets paid by Brave to maintain the lists. So in a way, Brave is funding adblocking for everyone :)
You can disable all of that within seconds. There's no reason for it not to be included because of that, as all the code running on the client is open-source. If distros only shipped software without commercial interests (why even..?), it'd be an unusable mess of barely maintained hobby projects.
Mozilla does not have commercial bits. They do receive money from Google to be the default search engine, and the binaries they build report telemetry, but the versions found in Linux repos often either patch out the telemetry or disable it.
For technical users who are in the know, yes. I would not recommend Brave to less-technical friends and family knowing that they would surely be duped by some dark patterns in Brave's UI/UX.
Even Firefox, which is the best we have currently, surprises us a few times a year with questionable decisions. Still, it's what I recommend to people.
Helium is based on ungoogled-chromium. It enables manifest v2 by simply reverting some code changes made by google. So, if google decides to remove manifest v2 wholly, helium will also lost its ublock original support.
Removing all manifest v2 support is also a code change that can be reverted. Of course, the larger the change, the more work it's likely to require to maintain it in the future.
Brendan talks about this a bit more here: https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/2006412918783619455