Brave browser and its no-ads promise – too good to be true? 

I’m a Mac user and recently, I’ve been having issues with my Safari browser when using Facebook. It’s a small thing but Facebook messages aren’t responsive at times. My messages would be stuck at sending and I’d have to refresh the whole tab and type my message again for it to be sent. Chat history will also take a long time to be restored, if it will at all. It will also have a hard time adjusting Google sheets if I resized my window. It all becomes haywire. 

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So, I sought to go back to my old partner – Firefox – only to find it has betrayed me. Mozilla, the owner of Firefox, is now pushing for digital ads. They say they are intent in maintaining the privacy between advertisers, publishers, and users. However, that remains to be seen. Facebook alone already plays with my data, I was hoping I can use something with more secrecy. Not to mention another issue they had regarding the terms and conditions.

Enter Brave. I chanced upon this as I searched for new web browsers to replace Safari. It promises an almost anonymous experience while browsing as you will have an ad-free experience. With not much to lose, I went ahead and tried it. 

Using Brave is like having a facial for the first time. Everything is just clean. It’s a euphoric experience to watch long and popular videos on YouTube without a single ad in between. No multiple video ads before playing the intended video too. Facebook and other websites, including my own Manga source, looked so neat.

It’s working hard in the background to block ads but its speed is just as good as Chrome. It has the same downside though in hunger for resources but I can give it a pass this time around for the ad-blocking. It also has better User Experience in the MacOS compared to Chrome, as the upper bar slides downward smoothly unlike the jerkiness in Chrome. The downloading of files from any website or email is also faster for some reason. Might be because Brave is using Chromium, which has an advantage with Google products like Gmail. 

It also has unique features like new tabs open with beautiful images. You can choose not to see them, but why not? They don’t slow down the browser, and there’s a lot of them so it takes a while before things become repetitive. There’s also a built-in VPN service that makes cross-regional content easier to acquire, though it’s still a subscription-based service. 

While the majority of my experience with Brave was stellar, there are a few hiccups that made me move back to Safari. First, there are websites that won’t work with it for a time. It encounters a security flaw that isn’t there when I go to the same website with Safari, Chrome or Firefox. It mostly happens on retail websites and a few manga sites I go to. I checked again after a few weeks from my initial assessment and the sites are working already with Brave. The browser is too strict with security certificates of websites that it won’t allow access to them if it’s outdated even by a day. 

I’ve said before about its power draw being the same as Chrome but in addition to that are some weird quirks. For example, clicking Open in New Tab makes the browser download the whole webpage instead. I’ve searched the settings and haven’t found a way to correct it to my intended action. They have already corrected this with an update but it says one thing about the team behind the browser – they didn’t have a proper Quality Assessment with their product. 

The breaking point though is the promise itself – being ad-free. It is doable in many sites but it cannot bypass stricter websites like news and other media channels that have an optional paywall. You can click ‘Continue Without Blocking’ if it’s present but for international websites, that’s not an option. Either you pay or turn off your ad-blocker to access their content. For a product that promises an ad-free experience, things should be absolute. Otherwise, include an asterisk and fine print in your main marketing materials that it won’t be for all websites. 

Overall, the Brave browser experience is fun. It’s fast and ad-free for the most part. Reliability is where it takes a hit. I encountered issues that had no immediate fix and took weeks before being updated. Some of the issues are mind-boggling too like why would it download a webpage when I clicked Open In New Tab, right? 

If you need a second browser for leisure and don’t want to upgrade to YouTube Premium, the Brave browser is highly recommended. Ads are seamlessly blocked in all forms so you can go directly to the content you want to see. It’s available in MacOS, Windows, Linux, even Android and iOS.