Constructive Feedback for the Brave Browser

Intro

To be in support of decentralisation, I decided to give the Brave Browser a go. After playing with it for 2 weeks, I’m now impressed and disappointed at the same time.

In a nutshell, the sell is similar to the experience. You do get ad-free browsing, and the algorithm is smart enough to avoid those “Please disable ad blocker” banners.

However, there are a couple of small issues which added up together forced me to switch back to Chrome. Let’s have a look on both the pros and the cons.

Pros

Decentralised

The biggest benefit of all! There’s a big community around the project and they’re doing fantastic work, and I can’t wait to check out the BAT rewards for viewing ads.

Privacy by Design

Brave also prevents bots from tracking you. You are in control of your privacy.

Ad-Free

10x better than a normal ad blocker, as there’s no extra extension and it avoids troublesome banners.

Slightly Faster

This is solely based on empirical evidence, but I noticed a slight increase in loading times.

Cons

Occasional Freezes

Many times, when I launch a new tab, Brave simply stops working. No clicks or key strokes recognised for more than 5 seconds. This doesn’t happen on any other browser, as I have more than enough RAM (16GB).

Extensions

There isn’t native support for all other Chrome extensions, and you have to follow a specific tutorial to add another one. I don’t have enough time to do that + there’s more entropy which usually means more bugs.

Pinned Tabs New Window

New windows include previous pinned tabs! This is rather annoying, as when I research a completely different topic (which doesn’t have any ties with the current window) I don’t want to have my email etc in there.

There is a GitHub issue tracking this and, unfortunately, it won’t be fixed before Brave Core is released.

Pinned Tabs Reordering

On Chrome, I pin my frequently used web apps in top left corner (Inbox, LinkedIn etc). That’s also doable in Brave, but there are serious bugs in the ordering algorithm.

Sometimes, you cannot even reorder them and other times it simply drops the pin wrongly.

This specific con might sound a little bit OCD, but my reflexes are deeply rooted and I need to be able to tap the first tab and open my email from there.

Medium Session (Login with Twitter)

The most significant problem so far! After I login with Twitter on Medium, the session is dismissed on the next page refresh.

As a Medium superuser, clapping and making notes all the time is paramount to my cognitive well-being.

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to use Brave again, but currently (as of June 2018) the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, at least in my case.

Anyway, I applause the team for what’s been done so far!! If you want to check out the browser, get it from here.

This article is simply intended to help the project flourish, as a decentralised browser could pave the way to a plethora of cool dApps.