I've been trying Brave for a few days. What I think so far.
On the plus side:
- It's fast and sleek.
- It has built-in TOR for "secure" browsing. I haven't got much use for it, but some people may like it.
- The ad/track-blocking seems quite clever.
- It has "https everywhere". Which doesn't really work too well, but at least it tries.
- It uses Chrome extensions (which could be on the down side, but debatable).
On the down side:
It still needs a lot of work.
- It looks like it "loses" stuff. Cookies, saved logins, preferences, sometimes seem to disappear or reset to defaults.
- It's about as customisable as my grandmother's mantelpiece.
Case in point: the New Tab Page. You can't do anything with it.
You look it up, the replies are: Sorry, nothing to be done for now, but you can use extensions.
Now, I personally find it quite annoying - especially the "top sites" part. Limited to six, uses favicons for the sites, blows them up to the ugliest resolution. Like, yuck.
But even the "mandatory" images, come on. They may look good - or not. Irrelevant. I choose my images/looks, you don't.
This is like Microsoft philosophy, multiplied by Apple, divided by Unity, with a tinge of the Spanish Inquisition, a dash of Daesh and a pinch of the IPCC on top.
Or maybe the coders are so happy with their Chromium optimisations, they just forgot it's meant to be used by actual people...
So I look at extensions. There's basically two.
One (most recommended), it wants permissions to measure the length of your pinkie finger against all of your neighbours'. To start with, 'cause it's a long list.
I try it anyway - I can always remove it (which I did right away). It starts by asking "what's you name". Then goes on to ask you for your email address and password.
It then proceeds to make your NTP look so annoying it would take a lot of effort to make it worse - and that's all it does.
So I try the second. It asks for permissions to "change your New Tab Page". Period. Well, that's more reasonable.
It actually lets you choose an image of you choice for it (after a bit of digging) but
- You can't do anything with it - like add Top Sites.
- It sticks a huge clock in the middle of it which you can't get rid of, unless you edit the java class files. Which I did, after which I ditched that one too.
So, in the end... I'm back on Firefox and happily losing half a second at app startup.
Because I'll hazard a guess: by the time they've added the necessary code to make it useable, it may not even be all that fast and sleek anymore.
On the plus side:
- It's fast and sleek.
- It has built-in TOR for "secure" browsing. I haven't got much use for it, but some people may like it.
- The ad/track-blocking seems quite clever.
- It has "https everywhere". Which doesn't really work too well, but at least it tries.
- It uses Chrome extensions (which could be on the down side, but debatable).
On the down side:
It still needs a lot of work.
- It looks like it "loses" stuff. Cookies, saved logins, preferences, sometimes seem to disappear or reset to defaults.
- It's about as customisable as my grandmother's mantelpiece.
Case in point: the New Tab Page. You can't do anything with it.
You look it up, the replies are: Sorry, nothing to be done for now, but you can use extensions.
Now, I personally find it quite annoying - especially the "top sites" part. Limited to six, uses favicons for the sites, blows them up to the ugliest resolution. Like, yuck.
But even the "mandatory" images, come on. They may look good - or not. Irrelevant. I choose my images/looks, you don't.
This is like Microsoft philosophy, multiplied by Apple, divided by Unity, with a tinge of the Spanish Inquisition, a dash of Daesh and a pinch of the IPCC on top.
Or maybe the coders are so happy with their Chromium optimisations, they just forgot it's meant to be used by actual people...
So I look at extensions. There's basically two.
One (most recommended), it wants permissions to measure the length of your pinkie finger against all of your neighbours'. To start with, 'cause it's a long list.
I try it anyway - I can always remove it (which I did right away). It starts by asking "what's you name". Then goes on to ask you for your email address and password.
It then proceeds to make your NTP look so annoying it would take a lot of effort to make it worse - and that's all it does.
So I try the second. It asks for permissions to "change your New Tab Page". Period. Well, that's more reasonable.
It actually lets you choose an image of you choice for it (after a bit of digging) but
- You can't do anything with it - like add Top Sites.
- It sticks a huge clock in the middle of it which you can't get rid of, unless you edit the java class files. Which I did, after which I ditched that one too.
So, in the end... I'm back on Firefox and happily losing half a second at app startup.
Because I'll hazard a guess: by the time they've added the necessary code to make it useable, it may not even be all that fast and sleek anymore.
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