What I Use: Brave (Premium)

I feel like this was years in the making, but after a lot of back and forth with various web browsers, I’ve moved to Brave.

To be clear, I’ve spent the past several months using different browsers across the Windows PCs I use every day, but also on mobile, via my smartphones (iPhone 13 Pro, Pixel 6 Pro) and my iPad. And I will continue to test browsers as they receive notable updates. That’s a bit part of what I do.

No product is perfect, Brave included. But in the context of modern web browsers, Brave’s issues are both small and less problematic than the issues I have with other browsers. Chrome … well, that I barely need to explain. Microsoft Edge is getting bogged down with unnecessary features and, as bad, has a laggy performance that I attribute to Microsoft’s focus on energy efficiency (and just disabling sleeping tabs doesn’t change that). And Firefox is even worse, from a performance and usability perspective: I really want to support that browser for all the obvious reasons, but every time I try using it, I give up in frustration.

Looked at cynically, Brave is yet another Chromium-based browser, yes. But describing it that way undercuts its many benefits. It being Chromium-based is, of course, a major one: this browser, like Chrome itself and other Chromium-based browsers, guarantees high levels of compatibility and performance. That’s the point.

But Brave differentiates itself from Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers in important ways. Like Microsoft Edge, it strips out all of the Google nonsense---meaning the built-in tracking---but, unlike Edge, it doesn’t replace that with its own nonsense. It blocks trackers and ads, and it doesn’t require extensions do either effectively, and that means that it performs better than other browsers too. (Brave claims its browser is up to three times faster than Chrome.) For those who want to take extra steps into privacy and security, Brave also supports private windows (like incognito on Chrome) but also private windows with Tor for additional privacy. It even has a built-in VPN.

From a usability perspective, Brave delivers the minimalism I’m looking for. This isn’t completely unique---Firefox is reasonably minimalistic as well---but it stands alone among other Chromium-based browsers. And if you don’t like whatever few UI bits it does display, you can remove them. Perfect.

So what are the downsides?

Brave does include some goofy features like Brave rewards, which would make sense if any sites actually used this system, and a crypto wallet. But again, both can be easily removed. It also has some curious and evolving functionality that I’m testing now, like its own private search engine, Brave Search. So far so good on that front.

The biggest downside, to me, and over time, has been Brave’s approach to cross-device sync. Unlike other web browsers, where you sign in with an online account managed by the browser maker, Brave decided to d...