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Comment by prettyStandard | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Brave as my daily driver for a while now. I like it. I understand people don't like crypto blah blah blah but you don't have to use it.

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I am so used to seeing websites rendered in Brave (both mobile and desktop), that whenever I am forced to use a standard Chrome/Edge/Firefox I am appalled at the experience. The ad bombardment is unrelenting, and I my mental reflexes to tune them out have atrophied to the point where I don't understand how anyone can use the web with a "normal" browser.

The crypto stuff I just ignore.

Very occasionally a web site will break in Brave but work in Chrome, but those instances are converging to zero based on about 5 years of use.

> I don't understand how anyone can use the web with a "normal" browser.

uBlock Origin and Sponsor Block work fine for me. Some use pi-hole or a similar DNS-based solution (I use dns.adguard.com on my phone.)

I should have specified "normal browsers out of the box."

I've considered setting up a pi-hole at home but never got around to it. Same with browser extensions... Getting the ad blocking without additional effort appeals to my lazy self. :)

Spending a few minutes downloading, installing, and setting up a new browser is so much quicker than installing an ad blocker in 5 seconds. I believe it

Switching to a new browser seems like far more effort than installing uBlock Origin, and has much further-reaching security/trust ramifications, but to each their own. :)

Me too. I mean I use several browsers at the same time, but Brave has become the "main" browser I use for all my personal browsing (work shit, I leave in Chrome).

But the thing is I don't like Brave, either. I don't like the crypto, and I don't like the business model (replace websites' chosen ads with their own ads). And, in that way we judge people whom we don't know personally based on the set of things we do know about them, I don't like Brandon Eich.

Nevertheless, for around a year and counting, I use Brave the most because it's just the best browser. It's fast, and blocks a lot more of the shit I don't ever want to see in my browser without me having to configure anything. (I will note that I do have to turn off all sorts of annoying shit in Brave, like the news and the crypto and the "better" ads, but you only have to do that one time and then it syncs across your other devices.)

It's funny to me that for web browsers today, blocking things has become arguably more important than rendering things, but there it is.

They were the first browser AFAIK to build in blocking for those cunty "we had to smear our web page with feces because of mean old Europe and their GDPR, please please click this to give us permission to let our advertising cabal spy on you using your own hardware" notices.

This is another one in that vein. Allowing any and all "unwanted first-party reidentification" is a nonsense default. I get how it happened, that it wasn't designed for the surveillance capitalist hellscape that the web has become, but whatever; inverting the default on that is definitely how I want my browser on my computer to behave.