Brave... A bit flakey for me
I had been using Brave for the past 6-9 months up until very recently. Then, out of the blue one morning, it starting closing after about 30 seconds across a number of desktops. I’d started questioning whether I had closed it my mistake. Each time you'd restart it, 30 seconds later it was gone. No error. Nothing.
Their support forums slowly filled up with people suffering the same issue. The development team did respond quite quickly and tracked the issue down to the sync feature and recommended that people disable it. But the issue or resolution was never really explained and they just kept asking for more and more crash dumps. The issue is still open on the forum with no updates from the development for at least 2 months.
Around the same time, my bookmarks got really screwed up. Moving around and duplicated over and over and over. Essentially becoming a total mess. I tried to fix it but it just kept getting worse. Thankfully I had taken a backup of my bookmarks before all this started - when they suggested disabling the sync to stop the crashes.
After numerous requests for an update or response there was just silence from the development team. I finally gave up last week.
To be fair, it was a decent browser all in all but there was always something not quite right with the bookmark sync. I'd always noticed that from time to time, a bookmark would move or be in a different order. That was a minor thing that was happy to put up with but the mess I ended up with was ridiculous. And the lack of response was disappointing. I just don't have the time or patience for that - I need a browser that just works. So I've moved back to Firefox again. With the right plugins so you aren't loading all the crud, it's seems just as fast to me.
I don't really have a problem with ads. Never have. I appreciate that sites and services need to generate income. The issue for me is the underhanded tracking from site-to-site and the selling and sharing of such information. Plus, the 10-20 seconds or more they add to the loading of any given web page. If sites would cut out all the garbage, I'd happily disable my ad blocker.
I still have Brave on mobile and have recently enabled the 'reward' feature which must have come down in the latest update. The last few ads I received were rather annoying. It appears as an App notification at the top of the screen. It feels like the beginnings of a glorified advertising platform, masquerading as something useful. Where have we seen that before?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
