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 do things differently: in keeping with its privacy-first ways, Brave didn’t create an online account system that it manages because it wants to keep your data safe from outsiders. Instead, Brave forces you to make encrypted device-to-device connections, and the initial implementation from a few years ago was a bit hard to use. Today, it’s much easier, but there is always the possibility that you could reset every device you own running Brave and lose that data because it’s not backed up to the cloud somewhere, as is the case with other browsers.

I’m OK with that, but I’m also cheating: having long ago synced my passwords across each of the major browsers, all I really need to do is install Brave on a PC or device and then sync the data (which includes all the usual suspects) from another browser to Brave and I’m up and running. In fact, the only usability downside to this is that Brave doesn’t need most of the extensions I use on other browsers, and so I spend a few minutes immediately uninstalling them in Brave.

I’ve moved all my daily-use PCs to Brave as the default, and I’ve installed Brave on my iPad and iPhone and am working towards that change on mobile as well. As noted, I’m happy with the minimalist look and performance, and while I’m inherently untrusting, I’ve not noticed any issues running the browser with no anti-tracking/ad-blocking extensions. It seems to just work.

Better still, Brave sports a news feed that I really like on mobile. (I replace the New Tab display on desktop, as always, with Momentum.) If you read my recent post, What I Use: Reading (Premium), know that Brave has been added to the mix for reading on mobile. It’s a terrific feed, and it is highly customizable.

Ultimately, what Brave is to me is what Firefox used to be. Or, perhaps more concisely, it’s what Firefox should be. And that’s what I was really looking for: a browser with the ideals inherent in Firefox but with better performance and compatibility. The built-in privacy and security controls don’t hurt either.

Perfect? Again, no. But it’s exactly what I was looking for, and what I’ve been moving towards for years.