Brave is essentially just Chrome with an adblocker, a bunch of bloatware, and a bunch of controversies.
Brave took BAT donations in YouTuber’s names without their consent, with them keeping the money if the YouTubers didn’t claim it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/
Brave’s search engine crawler hides itself from websites by pretending to be Googlebot, and Meta (Facebook) buys API access from them to train their AI. https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
The business model of Brave rewards as a whole is to block all other ad networks to replace them with their own, which is unfair as only YouTubers and websites that have joined can make money from most Brave users.
If Brave actually cared, they would create an acceptable ads style feature which was free for everyone and allowed simple contextual banners while blocking ads which track you, take up most of the page, or have NSFW content.
Their approach is monopolistic as they have full control and can strangle YouTubers and websites by dropping pay at any time.
And Brenden Eich has said on Twitter that he plans to release “Brave Origin”, which is a paid version of Brave without the bloatware. That name is ironic as he is admitting that his browser is commercialised and bloated, which is similar to when gorhill gave uBlock way to Chris Aljoudi who commercialised it, which led him to create uBlock Origin.
If you use Brave, ditch it and look at using Librewolf or Helium instead, which both include no ads nor tracking and don’t have Brave News, Rewards, Wallet, Talk etc bloatware.
If it’s viable for you, slightly modified Mulvad browser + Searxing for search.
Mullvad browser is a variant of the Tor browser, but rather than being used to connect to Tor, it’s built on the stripped away version of Firefox that Tor builds. This means no ‘phoning home’ telemetry to Mozilla or Google. The only default connection Mullvad browser uses – and this might be why I would suggest modifying it – is the DNS gets routed through Mullvad. Nothing wrong with that, as they have some solid adblocking DNS servers. But: having a choice for that is good. The default should not be assumed.
Searxing uses a number of search indexes that have been consistently effective when compared to commercial search engines, and it’s open source and deployable on, say, a home server. There used to be some public instances available. Searxing is good.
Were setting up a Searxing service for yourself somewhere not as viable, and you want to try a service that you pay for (rather than them using your data as ‘payment’), I would recommend something like Kagi. They offer an interesting feature to their service, and this is why I suggest them: they have a privacy tokenized search, which valdidates but obsfucates you as a user when you make a search request. I think it is smartly engineered, and I can appreciate it for what it is.
For privacy and security purposes, alike, I would avoid Zen and Floorp. They do not get security updates as often.
It should. Typically it would be a choice between Mullvad DNS and the unencrypted whatever your ISP uses. People who care about DNS (like me) will change that right away (NextDNS in my case). People who just want something easy may not even know what DNS is, or may not care enough.
Also it’s a matter of trust. If you trust mullvad you are still only trusting them by keeping the DNS unified