I've been whinging about wanting to move away from Firefox for nearly a year now. It started with Mozilla's announcement about their AI strategy and my initial thoughts. Then they doubled-down and it raised my heckles even more. Then I had a long old whinge about how fucked they seem to be.
I took Vivaldi for a spin, but I couldn't get used to it. It just tries to do too much, and has way too much going on with the UI, and dark/light theme switching still doesn't work despite it apparently being fixed. So I made my peace with Firefox and stuck with it.
I kept Vivaldi on my machine as a backup, and over the last 6 months or so, I've found myself having to open it more and more due to something not working in Firefox. This was far from a daily occurrence, but it happened often enough for it to become annoying. But I still couldn't use Vivaldi full time.
It's worth stating that things not working isn't the fault of Firefox. It's developers not testing their web apps with Firefox, since it has such a small market share.
Switching to Brave
I decided to install Brave a couple months ago just to see how things went. I had some messing around to do up front, like hiding all the crypto and AI nonsense, but once that was gone, it's been fine.
Everything works how I expect, both on Ubuntu and Android. The UI is similar to Firefox, and most importantly, it doesn't try to boil the ocean. I renders webpages, then gets out of my way. I don't need it to check RSS feeds, or emails, or have toolbars on every edge of the screen. Even dark mode switching works!
I haven't felt the need to open Firefox since starting this exeperiment, so I think Brave is gonna stick.
The elephant in the room
Yes yes yes. Brave was founded by an absolute scumbag. But there's scumbags everywhere, in all walks of life. Contrary to what some people on the internet will say, my use of Brave doesn't mean I agree with, or support, Bendan Eich's world views. I consider his personal views to be separate from Brave.
You may disagree, and that's fine. But Brave is objectively a good piece of software that does what I need it to do, and does it well. So I'm gonna continue using it for the forseable future. If Firefox get their act together and become relevant again, I may jump back, but for now it will remain my secondary browser.
I do still have Vivaldi installed too. So I will continue to check in on it now and then, and if I decide they're on a par with Brave on Linux (mainly light/dark theme switching is what's missing), then I'll definitely make the switch as I feel their moral compass is far more aligned with my own.
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