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.
For me it’s a combination of Mozilla making strange business decisions (removing of the “we never sell your data” policy) and the fact that a lot of websites take forever to load on Firefox.
I’ve tried forks, LibreWolf pisses me off. Too many settings to change just to still have a broken browsing experience in the sake of privacy. If I need that level of privacy, I’ll use I2P/Tor.
I hate the fact that chromium has won, but it’s getting difficult to avoid the fact that web developers don’t give a rats ass if the website doesn’t work well on Firefox.
Brave was my primary for a while, but I switched to Vivaldi after reading about some of the BAT bait and switch.