This week, I completed one year with the Brave Browser (and the Brave ecosystem: Brave Search, Brave Talk, BATs in general). I’ve been using this browser exclusively and during this time, I never bothered installing Chrome or Chromium which were my primary browsers before Chromium decided to kill sync functionality and Chrome just totally nuked my privacy.
How it started
I was a Chrome user first (go ahead, report me) and to be fair, Chrome is a nice stable browser but that’s as far as it goes. There’s nothing redeeming about it other than performance, it seems to be a resource hog which might explain (or not) why it’s the #1 in browser benchmarks everywhere.
Chrome has always had privacy issues, it’s one of the least private browsers out there and this bothered me. Most people already know this, it’s always in the back of their mind but they never take any action. I didn’t know any better so around 2018-19 I switched to Chromium instead, at least it was FOSS but later I realized Chromium also had a lot of proprietary Google code, which made me look for alternatives so I switched to Firefox, after a long time.
Firefox, while great, had plethora of issues. Many websites simply refused to work, for frontend development it doesn’t have a lot of features (doesn’t support several webkit functions) and sites like Mega NZ refused to download big files since the browser doesn’t support certain APIs. This was a deal breaker, If I had to keep Chromium with firefox to browse important websites, what was the point in using Firefox at all? Not to mention the horrible Android app, it’s just, bad. The fact that it didn’t have an option to search the history was even more annoying. The only great thing about it was the Sync, Firefox handles Sync amazingly well. I still have kept Firefox, I use it for certain things, it’s a nice desktop browser.
So, After several months of switching between Chromium and Firefox, I decided to move back to Chromium BUT WAIT! Chromium announced they’ll no longer be supporting Google Sync. Which means I won’t be able to sync data between my phone and other PCs, another deal breaker.
And that’s when I decided to use Brave, and at first I absolutely hated switching to it.
Why Brave Sucked
Okay, before you come up with your pitchforks, I just wanna say that I hated Brave initially (in the first week of using it) but I came around it and now love it!
Okay, so first impressions, Brave looked and worked exactly like Chrome and Chromium which was a huge plus point. It supported importing data too so that was great.
What I really didn’t like, was the UGLY GRADIENT EVERYWHERE! (It’s stupid, I know) I opened the settings for the first time and there it was, the ugly pink-purple gradient, I hated it, absolutely hated it. It was annoying that I couldn’t change the colors either, which is as simple as just changing the CSS but Brave doesn’t provide support for that.
Look at the top navbar, this is how I expected it to look but it didn’t and I was disappointed.
It looks great with the dark navbar.
Also I browse a lot of tech subreddits and Brave’s crypto programs all looked shady. I didn’t look into them myself so the headlines were enough for me to start hating on Brave. I also looked into Brave forks without the crypto stuff and I found about Braver, which Brave took down with DMCA so it started looking even shadier.
Initial Opinions? “Brave is a scam browser that injects ads everywhere secretly and its crypto is a scam” and this was not just me, it’s almost everyone’s (at least those who have read those spicy news articles mentioning Brave as a crypto scam) opinion on Brave.
Come to think of it, it really wasn’t my own opinion, but the opinion I formed from others’ viewpoints and experiences, which was totally the wrong approach. People who don’t know any better are not going to know unless they look into it, but here we seem to have several subreddits like r/technology and r/privacy where I have seen that the popular opinion seems to be that ‘Brave = Scam’, not an objectively true statement of course but I’m just saying what I’ve observed.
So these things made me switch back to Chromium until the last straw, in December 2020 when I finally decided to suck it up and move to Brave as my last resort…
Committing to the Cause
Here’s what I told myself, “I’m going to ignore the gradients and the crypto” (It’s just so silly but hey, personal issues). The browser was fast, the ad blocker was great, everything just worked (except the sync, which is still unreliable sometimes). It was the pure Chromium experience without the Google code. True FOSS - Privacy experience with 0 ads. It was great!
A week later, I totally stopped minding the gradient colors and it was totally fine now. I also looked into every single Brave controversy myself and found out that I was lied to by the headlines. The Address bar ‘referral link’ issue, totally blown out of proportions, it was a freaking bug that supposed to be turned off by default and was fixed in a single day and it didn’t happen ever again! Funny enough, Firefox now injects URLs into address bar, where’s all the outrage? The DNS leak thing, again, a simple bug that was fixed in the nightly before it even became a news. Brendan Eich’s personal beliefs? Who the hell even cares about that? I’m here to use a Browser, not become Brendan Eich’s political buddies. The man is obviously a brilliant programmer, creator of Javascript, Co-founder of Mozilla, Founder of Brave, you can respect that at least. So yeah, the person behind a project is never an issue with me, never has been (except for when it comes to Facebook).
So yeah, loved Brave, recommended it to friends, they love it too! (Some of them actually asked me how they could change the gradient colors, I just asked them to ignore it for a week and see if their opinion changes and it did).
My thoughts, a year later…
Brave is a fantastic browser. Now that it’s been a year, I finally can say that it’s a lot better than Chrome in a lot of ways. Sure, Chrome still rules the browser benchmarks but you’re going to have 0 problems with Brave and the difference is not even noticeable. The privacy features are top notch, the resource usage is much better than Chrome and Firefox, the websites load faster than Chrome and that’s all that matters. I can slap Brave onto any machine with default settings and it’s still the most private browser out of all of them. Brave Search is freaking fantastic! Better than DDG and Google in a lot of ways, keep up the good work Brave Team!
But still, Brave is not the end-all do-all browser, and some things are stopping it from reaching its potential…
What’s wrong with Brave
- Firstly, the PR. It’s extremely bad. You’re 100% going to run into someone who thinks Brave is a scam. Brave needs to fix this, the public image is just straight up bad. Most people don’t even know it’s a FOSS browser, that’s a disaster. Manjaro removed Brave from their official repos because they thought it’s a scam! For god’s sake, Please fix your image! Advertise features that 99% of people actually care about (Hint: It’s not crypto)
- Everything should not be about crypto. Go and take a look at the changelogs of Brave browser’s releases. 80% of the ‘changes’ are related to crypto stuff that aren’t even relevant to the browsing experience. Please consider adding more features to the ‘Browser’ not the crypto stuff that the ‘Browser’ comes with, because the amount of work that’s being put into the crypto thing makes it look like Brave’s priorities are different. You have to understand that what’s going to attract new users in the end is the browser, not anything ‘decentralized’ or ‘crypto ads’. So, if you want to become mainstream, focus on the mainstream but also keep the niche since that makes you unique.
- The sync is, lacking (sometimes). Don’t get me wrong, it’s gotten a lot better but there are only a couple of issues left to fix. The Sync chain, okay, a bit complex for the normal folks, most aren’t even going to bother saving the ‘private key’, an account makes everything simpler even though it comes with its own privacy disadvantages but your grandpa is 100% not going to bother with the sync if the whole ‘Sync chain’ ‘Private Key’ confuses him. I’m sure there could be an easier solution for the non tech-savvy folks.
- The sync is absolutely slow. If I send a tab from my PC to my phone, it can sometimes take 5 minutes (for real!), which makes me wonder why that option even exists sometimes, since I can type the URL manually myself in a few seconds. Joining a sync chain takes well over 30 minutes to 1 hour to fully sync, and sometimes even that doesn’t happen and everything appears the next day. This should be a priority as it’s one of the core browser features, this really needs a fix.
- History sync doesn’t exist. Yes, I am aware that Chromium source code is complex and you do not fully understand the sync mechanism (nobody does except Google), but please never give up on it. Currently, history is not synced, only typed URLs are, which is fine but we cannot call that ‘History’ Sync, that would be false advertising.
- Performance. Currently, Brave lags behind standard chromium in terms of browser benchmarks. Not that it matters much but it’s an objective way of comparing browsers.
- Finally, features. I’m happy that Brave has become a lot more popular but comparing to browsers like Edge and Vivaldi, Brave is barebones in terms of extra Browsing features. Vertical tabs, new tab customization, theming are all quality of life addons that can make it stand out from the crowd. I’m not asking to add bloatware to the browser, making it convoluted and cluttered. I’m just saying there must be something that can improve the browsing experience, something that isn’t just 1:1 chromium.
and that’s it.
Sometimes we undermine the power of FOSS, Brave is such a great browser that’s available to us for free, it’s extremely fast and the features really make it one the best browsers out there and yeah, it’s probably the best privacy browser already.
I hope Brave team continues to improve their product so we can finally get everybody to jump ship from browsers that are just glorified spywares.
Love Brave, Love Brave Search, please improve the Sync 
Thank you for the great FOSS browser!