- 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.