I think Brave is interestingly positioned, they sort of sound like a dream come true from a technical perspective, chromium with manifest v3 but still with fully functioning adblocking.
But I mean Brave has PLENTY of skeletons in its closet and is a dark horse that really doesn't seem to have the momentum. Firefox had TONS more momentum and they're still hardly relevant nowadays.
Well I do not have the numbers on Brave, and they themselves do not have them because it identifies as Chrome with its user agent AFAIK. So there are actually no stats on market share!
I would bet Brave has the same if not MOVE "momentum" as Firefox. Mozilla's things the old monetization model of the web should stay that way. They think ad blocking is bad, that is why they will never offer it by default. They also think the web should be even more censored than Big Tech wants. Used to be a big FX fan, but:
1. The above. And they were in bed with Google from day 1.
2. Chromium is just faster.
3. I am a web dev, and it feels extremely silly to use a browser engine that nobody uses as a browser.
Not sure when I made my switch to Brave, but it was like 1 or 2 years ago. I was holding strong on Firefox. Their Servo was promising, but then they ran out of money and laid off the staff working on it.
Brave also has their BAT going, that I find utterly stupid if not a straight scam. They advertise "no ads - no tracking" that is true by default. But then they want you to sign up for their stupid token to "get paid to look at ads that TRACK YOU" it's kind of hilarious how they market this shit. They do more or less exactly what Google is doing, except that the advertisers will probably get the real names of people who are this BAT BS. But the funny thing is they do not care, they get behavioral data of all kinds of browsing habits and that is EXACTLY what they want. Brave sells it as this great "privacy" thing, yet you have to give them your data for the payouts, so they know exactly who you are I am pretty sure. Not done it, will never do it but with all the Crypto regulation and KYC and so on they're just building a tiny "competitor" to Google that more or less does the same thing, maybe a little bit more privacy-friendly. I detest this idea. But a small community of people is all over this crap. Anyway, I stop my rant. Just deactivate the symbol for display on the address bar, thankfully they have a setting for that. Without BAT Brave is a great Browser.
>I would bet Brave has the same if not MOVE "momentum" as Firefox.
Five years after Firefox officially released, it was used by a third of the internet. People had a religious fervour around Firefox, Microsoft was the great satan for unleashing IE6 upon the planet, it was a great evil for sites to not support Firefox or god forbid actively block Firefox user agents.
For about two straight years Firefox after release absolutely slaughtered IE in almost every way (extensions, tabs, customization, performance, web standards), it was still clearly the best browser for the next two years, and Chrome had to create a bleeding-edge world-class browser and promote it with a gigantic large scale global ad campaign before Firefox started to falter.
By contrast, brave was released 6 years ago I've never seen a non-tech person use Brave in my life. It's biggest technical advantage seems to be a souped up adblocker. It really doesn't compare to Firefox's momentum.
But I mean Brave has PLENTY of skeletons in its closet and is a dark horse that really doesn't seem to have the momentum. Firefox had TONS more momentum and they're still hardly relevant nowadays.