Win: Switched from Brave to BetterFox (My Yearly Browser Switch Due to Frustration)
It’s a much smoother experience on BetterFox.
(If you don’t know what BetterFox is, it’s a user script that cleans up all the telemetry/junk from Firefox.)
GitHub Link: GitHub - yokoffing/Betterfox: Firefox user.js for speed, privacy, and security. Your favorite browser, but better.
LibreWolf feels slow in my opinion (Also their updater is kind of annoying). BetterFox is a great option and does the same thing as LibreWolf without needing to modify anything — all you have to do is download the JavaScript file and drag it into your profile folder and it removes all the clunk.
Reason for the Switch:
I was getting annoyed with the Chromium atmosphere in general.
Link: GitHub - libalpm64/Better-Brave-Browser: A better brave browser guide (remove all the junk Brave comes prepackaged with like AI, Crypto Scams, VPN).
I made a guide on Better Brave Browser — you actually cannot modify the flags in Chrome via an external tool (without patching into the PE). In Firefox, you can, which allows BetterFox to work.
There are also a lot of issues with Brave, like:
- Their Twitch filters won’t let you log into Twitch.
- Their WebNavigator is WebNavigator.Brave (Breaks some sites) instead of the default.
- It doesn’t seem to handle some pages with large data, for example, large listings of queries from a database in an admin dashboard (except PDFs, which they do an exceptional job at).
- The Web Render engine is primarily reliant on the CPU rather than the GPU. In Firefox, it’s the opposite, so your YouTube videos will be offloaded to the GPU, which is better in general.
- The Memory Saver in Chrome barely works; my tab cache still remains roughly 100-200 MB per tab even when paused. (This could be the fact I’m a developer and I read lots of documentation, but Firefox is substantially lower).
- It uses an unholy amount of RAM/CPU (Despite “benchmarks” saying differently).
- Their Adblock filters aren’t overridden when you apply custom filters; they use the generic Brave ones, which allows ads to slip through. (Even if you disable them and apply your own!)
- You have to use registry entries to fully get rid of the VPN options, Sync, etc., in the options.
Synopsis: I don’t think Brave is a bad thing, although I do have “Browser Problems” where I switch between browsers frequently. I will still use Brave, but it will not be my primary browser until I get tired of Firefox lol.