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.
I don’t like it, but I just recently switched to Brave on Android coming from Firefox.
I’ve been using Firefox on Android for years, but the same problems kept bugging me. Tabs would instantly close after putting the browser in the background, effectively making it impossible to e.g. get the 2FA out of my Authenticator without restarting the login flow. Also sometimes the browser would right out refuse opening websites on fresh tabs.
This were likely problems with my OEM, but I could never get it fixed. There are some threads online claiming battery optimization, but I disabled everything possible.
So on Android, I’m stuck with Brave for now.
No, those are known issues with Firefox for Android. They’ve been around for years now, but are not common enough for Mozilla to actually address them. The blank tab thing is what forced me to switch. Sometimes an existing tab would break permanently, had to close and undo close, lose all the page state.
And it’s slower, and it doesn’t have a tablet UI… sucks but it’s not an option for me.
If Brave is the only thing working, that sucks, but If its chromium and not specific to Brave, there are other chromium forks for android.
Cromite is popular: https://github.com/uazo/cromite