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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

>\ Hot take:

I tried FF for a long time but finally switched to Brave. Yes, I'll be downvoted for saying this but it's objectively one of my top 3 favorite browsers rn.

1. Brave

2. Edge

3. Safari

I like each of them for different reasons. Brave (after disabling annoying features such as crypto and VPN) is awesome and its iOS app is the only one which can play videos in the background, has dark mode, and syncs really well with the desktop app.

Edge is so tempting esp. with recent Microsoft Copilot which makes it so useful (I can summarize pages right in the browser, organize my tabs by telling so to the Copilot, etc.)

Safari is not a good browser per se and lacks many features and plugins, but it's minimal and doesn't drain the battery like Brave and FF.

I really wanted to like FF but it's just not cutting it anymore.

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Brave is really good and always surprising me with features while largely staying lean and out of my way.

They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It's pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. https://brave.com/leo-release/

Feels like I am alone in thinking the crypto features of Brave are cool. And not because I think that industry generally isn't full of slime. But micropayments for content has been a good, latent idea for a generation, and here they've simply built it as a default feature.

I still use FF and Brave equally because of my experience with the first browser wars and my mistrust of Chrome, having become the new IE.

I have tried Brave multiple times. I find its desktop version as bad or worse than Firefox for things not working or bugginess.

I have used Brave more on Android. I have bounced between Firefox, Brave, and custom builds of Chromium for years. I am currently on Firefox.

Brave opens 99.9% of websites for me and I'm using "Aggressive" mode.

This also where I landed with Brave as it seems to be working great for all of devices. Runs smoothly and I don’t really have a problem full with many sites on aggressive mode. I’ve had the sync’ing feature go flaky a few times, but over all good experience.

My big gripe with FF honestly is the lack for PWA ( progressive web apps) If they resurrect that effort I’d give it a shot. I’m not really interested in running another browser for that feature.

Also the brave privacy settings are remarkably better “by default” across all my devices. I’m sure Firefox can be configured to be hardened I just have other ways I’d like to spend my time. Heck I’d even pay for better option for all my devices.

Brave is my primary also, but Orion is creeping up. It’s still a little buggy, but nested tree tabs is very nice.

I use FF on my desktop and Brave on mobile. I tried FF on mobile and it has too many issues, unlike its desktop counterpart. And there are no good maintained de-googled chromium alternatives on Android other than Brave.

Brave on iOS uses the WebKit engine right ? How can it be so different from Safari ?

Brave and Edge are just chromium.

Bro. You’re still using chrome.

Chromium !== Chrome.

How much do they really differ? Chromium browsers for the most part are just going to appear the same to site owners.

It'll all render the same using Chrome/Blink, but forks might take out tracking by Google (and potentially add other tracking), add adblock outside of plugins, or re-add support for Manifest V2 to name a few. Chromium forks can actually be pretty different.

Chromium is over 20 million lines of code. No Chromium fork is meaningfully different. Come back with that BS when Blink has 25% of its contributions coming from one of these Chrome skins.

That is true, but the Chrome/Chromium ecosystem is largely driven by Google. And Google makes use of this power position to push through web standards that benefit them, but not the users. Therefore I choose to use Firefox, to support a more open browser ecosystem.

It’s literally a technological monoculture controlled by one company that can’t be trusted.

Ironically, focusing on the window chrome does not matter for a healthy web, let alone a healthy open standard.

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