Goodbye Brave

I have been using the Brave Browser for almost 2 years I think. @logic introduced it to me at some point and it has been my primary browser both in Desktop and Mobile, home and office computers since then.

I got my first heads up when I came across a post on HackerNews about Brave misbehaving due to the “Brave backend servers” being unreachable. It struck me as strange when a comment on the Github ticket mentioned that Brave servers need to be up for Brave to function.

This is a big design NO-NO for something as essential as a web browser. But then, the inertia of it being a daily driver, its amazing ad-blocking and tracker protection, Chrome extension compatibility, and the fact I haven’t faced any such issues prevented me from doing any changes.

Today I was looking to install an extension to manage the browser tabs and I ran into this

Can’t install any extension

I thought maybe the extension was buggy and tried a couple more and the same result for everything. And searching for the error led me to this Github Ticket, which again describes that it is a “server-side” issue and it was fixed.

Well, it is not fixed for me. But that’s beside the point. This amount of dependency for a browser to have on “backend servers” is ridiculous. For software, as important as a browser, through which I have come to access almost everything digital for me is unacceptable. So with this post being the last thing I will do on Brave, I will bid goodbye.

Exploring options…

1. An interesting alternate is Vivaldi – It is trying to do what Opera was doing pre-Chrome. It rolls email, calendar, RSS reader, browser all into one and also provides built-in ad-blocking.
2. Open source Chrome aka Chromium – This used to be my primary dirver before. So I am thinking of going back to it with the usual extensions like Ghostery, AdBlock+..etc., Not sure how much things have changed there.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3dk9r9I