Posted: January 5, 2021

Today, I decided to try the Brave browser. Firefox has been circling the drain for some time now.

Reader mode is what pushed me over the edge. Firefox has a reader mode, but there’s no way to enable it automatically on all websites, ie you always have to click the button. unfortunately it turns out that SpeedReader only supports a few websites: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045031392-What-is-SpeedReader-

Firefox has been mismanaged so badly that I almost wonder if it’s deliberate. At every turn they have messed things up. I should have switched as soon as they had the addon debacle.

How am I supposed to trust a browser with a track record like that? Imagine living in a country where the government might execute you for what you read online. And then imagine that your VPN addon stops working because an organization with hundreds of millions of dollars let their certificates expire.

Thanks Mozilla. You are dead to me. I could list many more mistakes but I don’t feel like it.

Settings

• Set default search engine to DDG
• Appearance > Show top sites in automplete suggestions > OFF
• Appearance > Hide Brave Rewards button> ON
• Appearance > Always show full URLs > ON
• Appearance > Use system title bar and borders > ON
• New Tab Page > New tab page shows > Blank page
• Social media blocking > Allow Google login buttons > OFF
• Social media blocking > Allow Facebook logins > OFF
• Social media blocking > Allow Twitter embedded tweets > OFF
• Extensions > Hangouts > OFF (really?)
• Extensions > Private window with Tor > OFF (really?)
• Extensions > WebTorrent > OFF
• Site and Shield Settings > Permissions Notifications > Sites can ask to send notifications > OFF
• Site and Shield Settings > Permissions > Autoplay > OFF
• Autofill > Passwords > Offer to save passwords > OFF

Extensions

• Bitwarden
• uBlock Origin (enable Fanboy’s Annoyance and Fanboy’s Social filters)
• No Playlist Autoplay For YouTube
• Old Reddit Redirect

Complaints

I don’t have many, but I’m a nitpicker.

• No support for middle-click-scroll on Linux (this one will be tough)
• Brave doesn’t support ESNI yet
• Right click context menu opens on mousedown, instead of mouseup, causing me to mistakenly click things in the context menu when I right click quickly by accident
• No multi-account containers like Firefox, though it might be added

Simple surprises

I was overjoyed to see that I don’t need to enable a setting to warn on close with multiple tabs - the absolutely insane and bad shortcut of Ctrl+Q does not close all tabs like it does in Firefox.

I’m also glad that they support HTTPS everywhere by default.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that SpeedReader only supports certain websites, I’m going to stick with Brave for a while and see what happens. I’m tired of Mozilla’s garbage.

A part of me is sad, because Firefox was an important part of keeping the web more open and free.

But their market share is already so tiny, and whoever is in charge has failed big time.