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Most of these responses talking about experiences with Brave sound like you’ve never used Brave.
Empty vessels make the most…

Brave is my secondary to Safari, both have strengths and weaknesses. Brave like Safari takes a minute or so to customize. I don’t use Google other than gmail which is being phased out in my use.
 
Google’s search has devolved into results from news websites. I’m not sure if that’s representative of Google steering people’s thought-lives or if the content of the internet in general just sucks these days. I’m now dating other search engines in hopes that one of them has a brain that doesn’t just regurgitate fluff. So far, they all like telling me about popular media.
 
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who tried brave?
I did. Cool concept, but strange at the same time.

Their focus is really on your privacy, but so far it relied on Google (glad they changed it), and there's a feature to give you random ads that distract you from time to time and give you some spare change. Doesn't seem very aligned with their mission.
 
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Developing Chromium alternative would take a crazy amount of resources, and time. And what's the downside to using Chromium? Do you want them to feel guilt on using tech from a company, whose product they are competing with?
They could switch to the render engine used in Firefox - Gecko.
 
"privacy focussed" doesn't mean blocking ads, it means keeping your details private and not exposing and sharing them with anyone, so I suspect you won't get targeted ads you'll just get generic ads. They've got to pay for their servers, developers, electricity somehow you know, they can't do it off of good will and unicorn wishes.

I sometime get tired of the self-entitled "I expect you to give me stuff for free" mentality.
That's the old "out of sight, out of mind" mentality... you just don't realize just how much information is being gathered and how much they are making off of you from it. Why not let them have your social security number to boot? After all, nothing is free. What's a social security number when you can get great search engine results for "free***".
 
Only an idiot would use Safari. If you embed n videos in a web page, n videos will autoplay in that abominable ********. Not so in Brave.
 
I use AdGuard and the sheer number of trackers it intercepts even with browser-based tracking prevention on is pretty sad.
Nothing works like Ublock when it comes to ads. I use Safari for anything work related or personal (banking, medical, etc). I use FF with Ublock to do any "surfing". I never see an ad on YouTube with FF and Ublock. Wipr on Safari, will get rid of most of the ads but I still see them.

I would 100% Safari if Apple allowed real ad-blocking.
 
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Only an idiot would use Safari. If you embed n videos in a web page, n videos will autoplay in that abominable ********. Not so in Brave.
Wow....lots of idiots out there then. Its the second most popular browser on the planet behind Chrome (all OS's combined). Safari NEVER auto plays any video or audio on the Internet for me. I can white list stuff so it will. Safari was the first and so far the best at blocking auto-play.
 
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Only an idiot would use Safari. If you embed n videos in a web page, n videos will autoplay in that abominable ********. Not so in Brave.
There are a lot of reasons to not use Safari including, nanny restrictions like not working with self signed certs, not loading perfectly good web sites, reporting every site you visit to Google, not allowing http without jumping through hoops, etc.

Now Apple has convinced you that they are doing this to protect you, but it's not for protection if you cannot easily turn these features on and off. It is for control. I'm tired of Apple's nanny forced restrictions.
 
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Love brave on iOS and Android, but prefer MS Edge (Chromium-based version) for the desktop.

As much I try to use other search engines, they all pale in comparison to Google.
 
DDG is terrible, great for not tracking because you'll never find what you're looking for anyway...

Been using it for years without issue. It always finds the right results to any exception that pops up in my code and always returns image and video results for my queries. Goggle on the other hand returns a absolute mess with the results I am after often being 2-3 pages in so it got relegated to being the third search as even bing does a better job than it on many queries.
 
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I’ve used the browser here and there but haven’t actually used their search yet. Bold move. Anybody like their search? I tried DuckDuckGo’s search for a while but I didn’t like how “inspired” by Microsoft Bing it was.

They could have really preserved privacy and switched to DuckDuckGo’s search.

later ad-supported. humm.

Reminding me the look of Google back in my college time using it for reseraches. I am not saying that free lunch will sustain and work as great as giant powerful unethical ones we inevitably rely on these days, instead, I would say that Brave is just another one of them at their starting up stage.

I use both, FYI.

I have never tried Brave, and I don't think I will anytime soon, as quality results are just too important for me.

However, I really like their approach. Of course they need revenue, how else could they survive. But the big difference is transparency:
  1. No tracking (unlike Google)
  2. You decide if and how many ads you want to see in the browser (and get paid 70% ad revenue)
  3. You can get rid of ads in search results (by paying)

I haven’t tried them all, but I did try DuckDuckGo. I wanted to get rid of as much of Google as I could, so I really tried to give DDG a shot. Stuck with it for about a month but too many times I had to switch back to Google for certain searches so I wound up just switching back to Google completely for search.

There wound up being only three things I had to keep Google for: search, YouTube, and street view.

I've tried Duckduckgo and all the other alternatives. They all suck compared to Google in terms of search results.

Do I like Google? Not at all.
Do I want the best search results? Absolutely.

If you want google results you can use startpage.com or via the bang !s in ddg and brave search. its a google proxy

There is a new paid search engine called Kagi that pulls the best results from everywhere including google, not a single ad or sponsored result, its free for use now since its still in beta. It has a lot of cool tricks up its sleeve like editing the css and filtering domains you never want in search results , signup for free access.

Brave afaik is different because its trying to be google independent , mean while everyone else is either a proxy for Bing or google index.

@henzpwnapple
even so its in the best interest of everyone to have more competition and less decentralization

I use Edge and DuckDuckGo. Couldn’t be happier.


i actually did some testing and ddg results are worst between many, not bad but the worst in comparison. ddg shines with their widgets


Can you use Brave search in any other browser?


yes search.brave.com

Many Chrome plugins do the exact samething as Brave.

Brave uses Chromium, which is built by Google, and adds ad blocking/tracking to it by default.

if you think plugins on chrome are saving you from google eyes i feel sorry for you. The tracking code is built into chrome.
 
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Not brave enough to ditch Chromium?

not sure why they went chromium not FF as base but story has it most sites built to work with chromium browsers (chrome, edge, opera i believe) and myth has it chromium is actually better at security…whatever that means

They could have really preserved privacy and switched to DuckDuckGo’s search.

same privacy measures made by ddg can be made by brave, qwant, ecosia, or a new up coming one called Kagi or even neeva… got to lookup their privacy policy

I use it for YouTube, as it blocks all those annoying ads that Google sees fit to force upon me. My normal browser is Safari, using Wipr as an adblocker, and that doesn't block all ads on YT.

I wouldn't use Brave as a primary browser, as I prefer Safari, but it's great as a companion to Safari.

there is a new browser called Orion that uses webkit like safari and allow use of of ff and chrome extensions if you are interested
 
Apple’s the biggest scamming company out there. Brave used to pay 30 bucks in Basic attention token every 2 months to have ads enabled until Apple took that away because they are greedy. A Large part of Apple died w Steve Jobs. Now the company’s all brains no heart. don’t get me wrong the new m1 is great but as far as tech innovation in hand held apple always leaves something out that would benefit it’s users.
 
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