I like Brave browser mostly for one thing - built-in ads-blocker. Yes, I know this isn't super nice, especially for all those people who live from advertisements, and I'm genuinely sorry about this.
The flood of ads
Although looking on the current web world from the perspective of typical consumers, the users of those websites/services - in last several years the advertisement market grow so insanely large, that you may find yourself as this would be kinds flood of initial popups or ads on many website, operating systems, , game, , or even on . If your use some of the internet daily via phone, or laptop, you must have noticed when you start surfing, you see more subliminal advertising that you want, and your brain slowly cooking itself. This is ads brain wash.
My only concern is that this phenomenon is to some awkwardly high level socially acceptable. Beside me feeling this proceder I can only think and try guessing why this is happening. My best guess would be the ordinary users of these services usually either lack the energy or are focused on something more valuable in their life to gave their personal attention to address this problem. This is sad.
Brave, your imperfect companion
Brave isn't perfect, but it's good enough to stay with it. In brave, what playing on my nerves is also their internal marketing of digital wallets by watching ads via browser spaces. For god sake, this fortunately still can be turned off - thank you devs 🙏.
From one perspective - the owner - ads policy can be understood to some degree as this is how they want to earn money. However from typical user consumer perspective, if you have to setup you browser for the first time, you almost ALWAYS have to remember to turn off all those marketing spam, and in each new version of software it's modified, so the places to turn it off it's never in the same place. Additionally you also almost ALWAYS have to it manually, because there isn't any default option to disable it all, due to previously mentioned internal marketing locking practices!
In Q3 of 2026 selecting a browser is hard and it's feels more like you pick the lesser of two evils. There is nothing primary good, or if it exists, it's less popular (Chromium) - The browser usage ranking of 2026.
As web developer you must support most of major browser, and to some degree you have to use them anyway to test the apps. In either choice you make, you either sell you private/usage data (Google Chrome, even Mozilla1), or you allow for exposing yourself for advertising practices (Brave, Edge). The Edge browser is actually ok, but the amount of setup you have to do, and everything it points to Microsoft services can frustrate. The Safari is also kinda ok, but it's primarily only for macOS, and lacks some good plugin systems, that exist in Chrome-based browsers.
Nevertheless, except of few "understandable" marketing bull****, the defaults setup from Brave are actually really good. I Here I will only mentioned the things, that change from defaults:
Enable my bookmarks to always be only for new pages (it's useful to not share personal links in the screenshots 😉)
Return YouTube Dislike - I want to see what people honestly think about some youtube videos before I wacht it. This actually help me breaking a bit the current web trend of toxic positivity seen in Youtube - generally never expose/inform about bad things despite the things they are how are.
Footnotes
Previously Mozilla was the web developers oasis, the good guy that honors user and pro consumer practices, but even recently they decided differently - Mozilla decided to sell personal data. ↩
Since years I observe that w3school service spreading a pure coding disinformation. Mainly this was for programming clickbait obvious examples - this was in the time before AI-Chats, LLMs where the primarily why to find information was some search engine like for example google). I don't accept this disinformation practices therefore I don't want to have it in my search feed. Maybe this was also the reason why those plugins has been created in first place... hmmm 🤔... this is definitely something to thing about. ↩