Tell HN: I've been using Brave for a solid month | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I've been using Brave for a solid month

11 pointsneom8 comments

I've been using Brave browser for a solid month now, I installed it October 25th and forced myself to use it consistently for a month. Generally I'd say:

- Feels snappier than Chrome, could very well be my imagination but I don't see it killing my laptop nor do I find I get tabs locking up, these things both happen once or twice a week with Chrome.

- Ad management in Brave is very aggressive and frequently have to "turn down shields" (a button to turn off all the blocking) - this ends up being an issue on my brokerage platform, condo management app, stuff like that but it's easy to turn off.

- Google translate support is horrendous. Chrome can real-time-translate a page, even a chat window as it's scrolling, picks up live changes in the site and translate them. tl;dr google translate in Chrome is very good.

- Credit card management in Chrome seems for some reason to be more elegant, I've yet to manage to get it to work well in Brave.

All in all I'm much happier using Brave, it seems like a faster less bloated browser that doesn't destroy my laptop, (and I feel less and less comfortable with google), so this is a good alternative for me, I don't envisage going back any time soon.

More anecdata: Switched to Brave from Firefox after they rolled out their buttons-as-tabs UI. Never used Chrome so can not compare it with that but I can:

- attest to the snappiness. It might very well be imagination with me as well but it feels slightly snappier than Firefox on macOS.

- attest to not destroying laptops. Video calls on Firefox usually had my fans spinning on maximum. They do not even bother to spin up with Brave. (That is likely a Chromium thing in general.)

- not attest to any problems with ad management. Brave has not broken any page functionality for me ever.

They admittedly employ some dark patterns. After the most recent upgrade, for example, a crypto wallet icon appeared on the UI which I had not asked for. After some googling I found a setting to turn it off. That's a level of annoyance I can still live with and it's the price I am willing to pay for a browser that comes with pretty much everything I could wish for: sane design, all basic features, configurable content blocker, open-source development, built-in torrent client, Tor mode. And most importantly, it generally gets out of your way. That is the best compliment I can make for any software.

I have read all the comments here and I think every feature Brave offers is already in Vivaldi( and much more) and those that are not there, can be installed as extensions.

FWIW brave on mobile allows me to navigate websites without half the screen blocked by ads. Pages seem to load faster, battery life isn't randomly drained and helps avoid a lot of dark patterns found commonly on "news" websites.

Sure I guess some combination of pihole + vpn could also work, but using Brave is a lot less hassles.

I really gotta give Brave a shot. I've been accustomed to Chrome for years now. Really nothing great about it honestly.

As I understand it, you can install any Chrome extension (I'm a big user of extensions). Actually developing my own extension to manage tabs.

Might just make the jump and give Brave a shot.

One reason I am finding it hard to ditch Firefox is the password management from Lockwise (which is now going away). How is Brave with passwords?

Brave has "brave sync" - it's exactly the same as chrome sync except instead of an account you generate a sync code and enter it in your devices and they stay in sync, this includes passwords. I took a quick look at Lockwise and it appears that's sorta the jist of it, you can keep passwords syncs across devices easily?

Don't use the built in password management, use somethibg like bitwarden. You can get it as a chrome web store extension, which works on brave natively.

Or you could use something like keepass? Its open and free and intects with browsers just fine. Unsure of brave support though

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