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I can't remember why I moved from Firefox to Brave. I'm curious if I should move back again. Can anyone sell me on/off this idea?

stavros 5y ago
I use Firefox as my main browser, and have done so for years now. I really like it, I've had no problems with it, and I like the fact that it's the only major non-Webkit browser.
- cxr 5y ago
  "The only major non-WebKit browser", if it exists, is a title that would have to go to Chrome, and it would require you to consider Firefox a "minor non-WebKit browser". At <5% (on par with Opera circa 2012), that wouldn't necessarily be an inaccurate way to describe it.
moray 5y ago
I am in the same boat and I was just thinking about it after upgrading to a Mac M1 pro. One plus point for Firefox is the dev tools, especially for grid and flex.
cottager2 5y ago
I use Firefox. Honestly, some sites are broken, like my brokerage account and Zillow. Having uBlock work at blocking 100% of known-bad requests is worth it to me. Chrome only blocks something like 60% due to the asynchronous nature of the extension API.
- foepys 5y ago
  > Chrome only blocks something like 60% due to the asynchronous nature of the extension API. Let's not kid ourselves. This is clearly a 100% deliberate design decision, aimed at making content blockers less effective. This has nothing to do with the API being asynchronous. It is just the excuse Google went with.
  - cottager2 5y ago
    I didn’t express an opinion on the motivation for the API, I just mentioned why uBlock doesn’t work as well.
  - MinorTom 5y ago
    On my smartphone uBlock Origin adds ~10 seconds in startup delay, which is fairly annoying. Having the Adblock be asynchronous but the browser start a lot faster would be an reasonable trade-off for me.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
Well it hides website ads, which is fine, but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not. It has a history of injecting its own affiliate codes into your URLs. It has a history of accepting "donations" for people who cannot claim them, and pretending to represent those people. Many of their more egregious issues have been "fixed", but the pattern is clear. Their CEO provided institutional support to the proposition 8 campaign (to ban same-sex marriage), and they get consistent placements on the far-right's pet hardware projects. I'm not here to promote Firefox (indeed, I use Safari and, on Linux boxes, Falkon), but no-one should be supporting Brave.
- basch 5y ago
  >but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not. To be clear, the software pops up OS level ad notifications, whether you visit sites with ads to block or not. The two features are independent of each other. It may still be a gray area, but its unfair to paint it as what its not.
  - Kerbonut 5y ago
    Doesn’t the user have to specifically turn that option on?
    - basch 5y ago
      I was replying to >but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not. While conceptually sure they offer ad replacement, technically they sort of dont. Ads support their product, and their product blocks ads. You can turn off the support ads, you can turn off ad blocking. They are two independent unrelated features.
- prohobo 5y ago
  What are "the far-right's pet hardware projects"? We shouldn't use Brave because the CEO, not the company, has a particular political (and moral) position you don't approve of - one which has no chance in hell of ever becoming law. This is the guy who invented JavaScript, should we also stop using that? Are you saying he's a neo nazi or neo nazi sympathizer? I noticed that Mozilla is making decisions that work against cryptocurrencies, while Brave is embracing them. Does that have anything to do with your dislike of Brave?
input_sh 5y ago
It's simple, do you want to contribute to the Webkit dominance or would you like to support the last remaining engine not in the hands of Google (or Apple if you happen to use their hardware)? For me the answer will be Firefox as long as it's a thing and I have no intention of switching to any Chromium derivatives.
- cxr 5y ago
  > do you want to contribute to the Webkit dominance There is no WebKit dominance. This is not 2012. WebKit, used in Safari et al, accounts for <20% of browser usage. The majority comes from Chrome, which uses Blink. (Every time you conflate WebKit and Blink, you harm the cause you're ostensibly pledging yourself to.)
iszomer 5y ago
I use them all for specific purposes.
ajxs 5y ago
A large reason why I have not moved on from Firefox is that Gecko remains the only independent full-featured browser-engine. If Firefox were to be discontinued by Mozilla, Google would gain even more control over web standards than it already has. I'm aware that there are other independent, open-source browser-engines available, I'm not aware of any others that are equally usable as an everyday browser for ordinary users though. This fact alone has remained enough for me to continue using it in the face of a continually declining quality, and Mozilla's totally misguided corporate leadership.
- cxr 5y ago
  > I'm aware that there are other independent, open-source browser-engines available, I'm not aware of any others that are equally usable as an everyday browser for ordinary users though. Safari is both usable for everyday users and is used every day by more than those that use Firefox, which means WebKit is a viable alternative to Blink.
  - lmedinas 5y ago
    except that Safari doesnt have a decent adblocker like ublock is for me a big issue. Plus Safari 15 must have some kind of a bug or something it drains my battery just like Brave.
    - cxr 5y ago
      That's beside the point. I didn't recommend Safari. Safari is a Web browser. The discussion is about alternatives to Blink and Gecko—browser engines, not browsers. The fact that WebKit is in Safari and Safari is used by millions of ordinary people means that Webkit meets the commenter's criteria and is a viable option as the basis for building a (perhaps yet-to-be conceived) Web browser.
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    Only on Apple hardware though.
    - deleted 5y ago
hpoe 5y ago
Biggest advantage for me is the container tabs. One clicka nd I can be logged into the same service as 3 different users (regular account, test account, admin account) plus puts a firewall between work stuff and personal stuff. Really love the container tabs.
- jotaass 5y ago
  I never used this feature personally. Do you think it’s better than a separate profile which you can launch with -p flag or a profile switcher extension?
  - maccard 5y ago
    It's a ux improvement over manually managing profiles. You can tell it to always open certain tabs in their own containers for example, or you can reopen your current page in a new container all from the same browser window
curt15 5y ago
Does Brave have the resources to maintain a fork of Chromium once upstream moves to Manifest v3 (which would kneecap uBlock origin)?
wenc 5y ago
I moved from Chrome to Firefox a year ago, because: 1) Multi-account containers - open each tab in an isolated container with its own session cookies etc. Use case? Login to multiple Google/Azure/AWS/etc accounts at the same time on different tabs. This is a game-changer if you have to login to multiple cloud accounts because you work for a multinational and each subsidiary you support is on a different tenant. 2) Firefox Lockwise - (though they are deprecating this on Dec 13) standalone password manager that syncs with Firefox's passwords, and which works on any iOS browser/password window. (I would use Keychain except I don't use Mac desktops). There are some downsides: 1) Some plugins don't exist on Firefox (e.g. Language Learning with Netflix), and those that do don't compare well to their Chrome cousins (Google Translate -- doesn't do popup translations). Most mainstream plugins however work extremely well (uBlock Origin etc.) 2) Some pages don't render because webpage author targets Chrome (but this is very very very tiny % of pages that one would normally encounter -- I encounter them because of poor web authoring practices on the company intranet). The render/Javascript performance is pretty darned good. Benchmarks say it is hair slower than Chrom(ium), but in practice, it's pretty snappy even on older hardware (I run Linux on a 2014 Dell) so I'd say it's a non-issue.
- usrlocal1023 5y ago
  Also, one more thing to note, uBlock Origin works better in Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
- weikju 5y ago
  > 2) Firefox Lockwise - (though they are deprecating this on Dec 13) standalone password manager that syncs with Firefox's passwords, and which works on any iOS browser/password window. (I would use Keychain except I don't use Mac desktops). Deprecated only in that it's being integrated with Firefox on iOS and Android, which (at least on iOS) will then show up as a valid password provider...
- ct0 5y ago
  Bitwarden's firefox plugin has been flawless for me.
giords 5y ago
Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden. Firefox is truly multiplatform, open source, committed to privacy, security and an open web and Mozilla is an authority on these topics. Sure, they're not perfect, but so far they proved to do a great job most of the time. Firefox is updated, alive and vibrant, very performant, welcoming and produces the ONLY remaining alternative to Microsoft/Apple/Google's joint effort to own the web with Chrome.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  Killing off the competition? Enormous walled garden? If that is Brave's business model, it's a delusional pipe dream. Brave trying to kill Google, or even merely match with the scale of Google's garden let alone surpass it, is like trying to cool down a volcano by pissing into it. The scale discrepancy between these two organizations is off the charts.
- therios 5y ago
  "Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden." So has anyone using an Adblock in the past 20 years. Also what do Ads have to do with market competition? And what is "toxic" about having a browser that promotes alternative revenue models?
- mthoms 5y ago
  I'd argue the worse "toxic business model" is the advertising model you're advocating for. I'm not saying Brave's solution is correct, but I'm glad someone is at least trying something different.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    To me it's not the advertising that's wrong or bad per se. It's the tracking. The personal privacy violations. That's what I find toxic and ultimately unethical.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
never got into Brave because I found their growth-hacking techniques to piggyback on gullible crypto-bros coin-peddling highly questionable, perhaps even predatory if you get randos believe that they can earn money by clicking on ads. https://twitter.com/NoNameGladiator/status/1258916702806368256 https://twitter.com/NoNameGladiator/status/12589167028063682... they disappeared from my radar the moment they mentioned tokens.
Lammy 5y ago
> Can anyone sell me on/off this idea? It's open source Free Software so if you try it and don't like it you can switch back with no loss? Personally I've never used anything but Mozilla since the days of the Suite 1.0 milestones, through Camino (RIP) on OS X, through Firefox today. Nothing else has as nice a UI as Firefox + Tree Style Tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
ncphil 5y ago
Like others have already written: Firefox is the most effective at suppressing ads, _with the uBlock Origin extension_. Ironic that most of Mozilla's funding comes from ad king Google. M's corporate leadership has really driven the project into the ground, and still... Firefox is the only browser that makes mobile Internet usable for me, and so I stick with it everywhere to take advantage of sync for bookmarks (bookmarks being something that someone with influence at M must really hate). Brave's credulous promotion of crypto currency turned me off, as did what I perceived to be a terrible UI design (being a long time Mozilla user, back to the days of Netscape Navigator 1.0, my bar is clearly set pretty low).
- fartcannon 5y ago
  The fact that I can't have a new tab open with a list of all my bookmarks on Fennec is still just ludicrous. What's the problem with bookmarks, Mozilla??
haha_lul 5y ago
I find the way Firefox handles displaying lots of tabs in the top bar really intuitive - instead of trying to cram them all within the width of your display they overflow, allowing you to scroll through them while still being able to see favicons and some title text. Can’t remember if Brave uses the same approach as Chrome for this Also if you’re hardcore about managing your tabs I hear people swear by tree-style tabs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- ksec 5y ago
  Chrome has seen have an option for fixed width Tabs along with Tab overflow. But yes in terms of Super lots of tabs Firefox still wins in terms of resource usage and UX.
artdigital 5y ago
I was a Brave hardcore user but decided to just try Firefox again and really liking it so far. Can't really say why though, it just feels nice. For extensions, Multi account containers and uBlock origin are nice. You can also hook up the containers with proxies so that when you're in container A, all sites in that container get loaded over that proxy connection. But there wasn't a killer feature in Brave that kept me there, and there also isn't a killer feature in Firefox that's keeping me here though
fleaaaa 5y ago
Probably mentioned here but its UI customization is pretty much limited to your css skill. You can go dense as much as you want or elegant with much paddings as usual. I tried almost every chromium variants but can't bear the touch friendly paddings and scaling.
syockit 5y ago
> I can't remember why I moved from Firefox to Brave. You moved from Firefox to Brave because of the cosmetic change that made tabs look like buttons, detached from the content it's associated with. There were many other straws (random freezing, memory bloat etc.) but that was the last straw that broke the camel's back. You tried Brave, and found that it offers pretty much anything you'd expect from a web browser.

stavros 5y ago

I use Firefox as my main browser, and have done so for years now. I really like it, I've had no problems with it, and I like the fact that it's the only major non-Webkit browser.

cxr 5y ago
"The only major non-WebKit browser", if it exists, is a title that would have to go to Chrome, and it would require you to consider Firefox a "minor non-WebKit browser". At <5% (on par with Opera circa 2012), that wouldn't necessarily be an inaccurate way to describe it.

moray 5y ago

I am in the same boat and I was just thinking about it after upgrading to a Mac M1 pro. One plus point for Firefox is the dev tools, especially for grid and flex.

cottager2 5y ago

I use Firefox. Honestly, some sites are broken, like my brokerage account and Zillow. Having uBlock work at blocking 100% of known-bad requests is worth it to me. Chrome only blocks something like 60% due to the asynchronous nature of the extension API.

foepys 5y ago
> Chrome only blocks something like 60% due to the asynchronous nature of the extension API. Let's not kid ourselves. This is clearly a 100% deliberate design decision, aimed at making content blockers less effective. This has nothing to do with the API being asynchronous. It is just the excuse Google went with.
- cottager2 5y ago
  I didn’t express an opinion on the motivation for the API, I just mentioned why uBlock doesn’t work as well.
- MinorTom 5y ago
  On my smartphone uBlock Origin adds ~10 seconds in startup delay, which is fairly annoying. Having the Adblock be asynchronous but the browser start a lot faster would be an reasonable trade-off for me.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

Well it hides website ads, which is fine, but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not. It has a history of injecting its own affiliate codes into your URLs. It has a history of accepting "donations" for people who cannot claim them, and pretending to represent those people. Many of their more egregious issues have been "fixed", but the pattern is clear. Their CEO provided institutional support to the proposition 8 campaign (to ban same-sex marriage), and they get consistent placements on the far-right's pet hardware projects. I'm not here to promote Firefox (indeed, I use Safari and, on Linux boxes, Falkon), but no-one should be supporting Brave.

basch 5y ago
>but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not. To be clear, the software pops up OS level ad notifications, whether you visit sites with ads to block or not. The two features are independent of each other. It may still be a gray area, but its unfair to paint it as what its not.
- Kerbonut 5y ago
  Doesn’t the user have to specifically turn that option on?
  - basch 5y ago
    I was replying to >but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not. While conceptually sure they offer ad replacement, technically they sort of dont. Ads support their product, and their product blocks ads. You can turn off the support ads, you can turn off ad blocking. They are two independent unrelated features.
prohobo 5y ago
What are "the far-right's pet hardware projects"? We shouldn't use Brave because the CEO, not the company, has a particular political (and moral) position you don't approve of - one which has no chance in hell of ever becoming law. This is the guy who invented JavaScript, should we also stop using that? Are you saying he's a neo nazi or neo nazi sympathizer? I noticed that Mozilla is making decisions that work against cryptocurrencies, while Brave is embracing them. Does that have anything to do with your dislike of Brave?

input_sh 5y ago

It's simple, do you want to contribute to the Webkit dominance or would you like to support the last remaining engine not in the hands of Google (or Apple if you happen to use their hardware)? For me the answer will be Firefox as long as it's a thing and I have no intention of switching to any Chromium derivatives.

cxr 5y ago
> do you want to contribute to the Webkit dominance There is no WebKit dominance. This is not 2012. WebKit, used in Safari et al, accounts for <20% of browser usage. The majority comes from Chrome, which uses Blink. (Every time you conflate WebKit and Blink, you harm the cause you're ostensibly pledging yourself to.)

iszomer 5y ago

I use them all for specific purposes.

ajxs 5y ago

A large reason why I have not moved on from Firefox is that Gecko remains the only independent full-featured browser-engine. If Firefox were to be discontinued by Mozilla, Google would gain even more control over web standards than it already has. I'm aware that there are other independent, open-source browser-engines available, I'm not aware of any others that are equally usable as an everyday browser for ordinary users though. This fact alone has remained enough for me to continue using it in the face of a continually declining quality, and Mozilla's totally misguided corporate leadership.

cxr 5y ago
> I'm aware that there are other independent, open-source browser-engines available, I'm not aware of any others that are equally usable as an everyday browser for ordinary users though. Safari is both usable for everyday users and is used every day by more than those that use Firefox, which means WebKit is a viable alternative to Blink.
- lmedinas 5y ago
  except that Safari doesnt have a decent adblocker like ublock is for me a big issue. Plus Safari 15 must have some kind of a bug or something it drains my battery just like Brave.
  - cxr 5y ago
    That's beside the point. I didn't recommend Safari. Safari is a Web browser. The discussion is about alternatives to Blink and Gecko—browser engines, not browsers. The fact that WebKit is in Safari and Safari is used by millions of ordinary people means that Webkit meets the commenter's criteria and is a viable option as the basis for building a (perhaps yet-to-be conceived) Web browser.
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Only on Apple hardware though.
  - deleted 5y ago

hpoe 5y ago

Biggest advantage for me is the container tabs. One clicka nd I can be logged into the same service as 3 different users (regular account, test account, admin account) plus puts a firewall between work stuff and personal stuff. Really love the container tabs.

jotaass 5y ago
I never used this feature personally. Do you think it’s better than a separate profile which you can launch with -p flag or a profile switcher extension?
- maccard 5y ago
  It's a ux improvement over manually managing profiles. You can tell it to always open certain tabs in their own containers for example, or you can reopen your current page in a new container all from the same browser window

curt15 5y ago

Does Brave have the resources to maintain a fork of Chromium once upstream moves to Manifest v3 (which would kneecap uBlock origin)?

wenc 5y ago

I moved from Chrome to Firefox a year ago, because: 1) Multi-account containers - open each tab in an isolated container with its own session cookies etc. Use case? Login to multiple Google/Azure/AWS/etc accounts at the same time on different tabs. This is a game-changer if you have to login to multiple cloud accounts because you work for a multinational and each subsidiary you support is on a different tenant. 2) Firefox Lockwise - (though they are deprecating this on Dec 13) standalone password manager that syncs with Firefox's passwords, and which works on any iOS browser/password window. (I would use Keychain except I don't use Mac desktops). There are some downsides: 1) Some plugins don't exist on Firefox (e.g. Language Learning with Netflix), and those that do don't compare well to their Chrome cousins (Google Translate -- doesn't do popup translations). Most mainstream plugins however work extremely well (uBlock Origin etc.) 2) Some pages don't render because webpage author targets Chrome (but this is very very very tiny % of pages that one would normally encounter -- I encounter them because of poor web authoring practices on the company intranet). The render/Javascript performance is pretty darned good. Benchmarks say it is hair slower than Chrom(ium), but in practice, it's pretty snappy even on older hardware (I run Linux on a 2014 Dell) so I'd say it's a non-issue.

usrlocal1023 5y ago
Also, one more thing to note, uBlock Origin works better in Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
weikju 5y ago
> 2) Firefox Lockwise - (though they are deprecating this on Dec 13) standalone password manager that syncs with Firefox's passwords, and which works on any iOS browser/password window. (I would use Keychain except I don't use Mac desktops). Deprecated only in that it's being integrated with Firefox on iOS and Android, which (at least on iOS) will then show up as a valid password provider...
ct0 5y ago
Bitwarden's firefox plugin has been flawless for me.

giords 5y ago

Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden. Firefox is truly multiplatform, open source, committed to privacy, security and an open web and Mozilla is an authority on these topics. Sure, they're not perfect, but so far they proved to do a great job most of the time. Firefox is updated, alive and vibrant, very performant, welcoming and produces the ONLY remaining alternative to Microsoft/Apple/Google's joint effort to own the web with Chrome.

Eelongate 5y ago
Killing off the competition? Enormous walled garden? If that is Brave's business model, it's a delusional pipe dream. Brave trying to kill Google, or even merely match with the scale of Google's garden let alone surpass it, is like trying to cool down a volcano by pissing into it. The scale discrepancy between these two organizations is off the charts.
therios 5y ago
"Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden." So has anyone using an Adblock in the past 20 years. Also what do Ads have to do with market competition? And what is "toxic" about having a browser that promotes alternative revenue models?
mthoms 5y ago
I'd argue the worse "toxic business model" is the advertising model you're advocating for. I'm not saying Brave's solution is correct, but I'm glad someone is at least trying something different.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  To me it's not the advertising that's wrong or bad per se. It's the tracking. The personal privacy violations. That's what I find toxic and ultimately unethical.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

never got into Brave because I found their growth-hacking techniques to piggyback on gullible crypto-bros coin-peddling highly questionable, perhaps even predatory if you get randos believe that they can earn money by clicking on ads. https://twitter.com/NoNameGladiator/status/1258916702806368256 https://twitter.com/NoNameGladiator/status/12589167028063682... they disappeared from my radar the moment they mentioned tokens.

Lammy 5y ago

> Can anyone sell me on/off this idea? It's open source Free Software so if you try it and don't like it you can switch back with no loss? Personally I've never used anything but Mozilla since the days of the Suite 1.0 milestones, through Camino (RIP) on OS X, through Firefox today. Nothing else has as nice a UI as Firefox + Tree Style Tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

ncphil 5y ago

Like others have already written: Firefox is the most effective at suppressing ads, _with the uBlock Origin extension_. Ironic that most of Mozilla's funding comes from ad king Google. M's corporate leadership has really driven the project into the ground, and still... Firefox is the only browser that makes mobile Internet usable for me, and so I stick with it everywhere to take advantage of sync for bookmarks (bookmarks being something that someone with influence at M must really hate). Brave's credulous promotion of crypto currency turned me off, as did what I perceived to be a terrible UI design (being a long time Mozilla user, back to the days of Netscape Navigator 1.0, my bar is clearly set pretty low).

fartcannon 5y ago
The fact that I can't have a new tab open with a list of all my bookmarks on Fennec is still just ludicrous. What's the problem with bookmarks, Mozilla??

haha_lul 5y ago

I find the way Firefox handles displaying lots of tabs in the top bar really intuitive - instead of trying to cram them all within the width of your display they overflow, allowing you to scroll through them while still being able to see favicons and some title text. Can’t remember if Brave uses the same approach as Chrome for this Also if you’re hardcore about managing your tabs I hear people swear by tree-style tabs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

ksec 5y ago
Chrome has seen have an option for fixed width Tabs along with Tab overflow. But yes in terms of Super lots of tabs Firefox still wins in terms of resource usage and UX.

artdigital 5y ago

I was a Brave hardcore user but decided to just try Firefox again and really liking it so far. Can't really say why though, it just feels nice. For extensions, Multi account containers and uBlock origin are nice. You can also hook up the containers with proxies so that when you're in container A, all sites in that container get loaded over that proxy connection. But there wasn't a killer feature in Brave that kept me there, and there also isn't a killer feature in Firefox that's keeping me here though

fleaaaa 5y ago

Probably mentioned here but its UI customization is pretty much limited to your css skill. You can go dense as much as you want or elegant with much paddings as usual. I tried almost every chromium variants but can't bear the touch friendly paddings and scaling.

syockit 5y ago

> I can't remember why I moved from Firefox to Brave. You moved from Firefox to Brave because of the cosmetic change that made tabs look like buttons, detached from the content it's associated with. There were many other straws (random freezing, memory bloat etc.) but that was the last straw that broke the camel's back. You tried Brave, and found that it offers pretty much anything you'd expect from a web browser.