Brave
November 2023 update: With a heavy heart I've returned to using Google Chrome as my default browser. A small but meaningful percentage of webpages had performance issues on Brave, which accrued to a real usability cost.
Previously: Harden your browser, Try your phone on grayscale, Delayed Gratification, Surveillance capitalism: definitions
I've been using Brave as my browser on my little laptop for a few months now, and just switched over to it on my bigger machine as well.
I think it's strictly better than Chrome – a bit faster and less data tracking (so it buys you a little space from Google's data hegemony).
The Brave homepage gives a nice overview of its features.
It took me about a half hour to completely switch over – most of that time was re-installing Chrome extensions. (Brave is built on Chromium so every Chrome extension is compatible with it, which is great because I love my browser extensions.)
The extensions I use:
- 1Password: password manager
- Adblock Plus: Brave natively blocks a lot of ads, but I still need Adblock Plus to clean up my Twitter feed
- Decentraleyes: protects against centralized content delivery
- Google Arts & Culture: makes new tabs beautiful
- HTTPS Everywhere: automatically redirects sites from "http" to "https"
- Inbox When Ready: hides my gmail inbox by default. Super helpful
- Newsfeed Eradicator for Facebook: self-explanatory
- RescueTime: time-logging
- Pocket: saves articles to read later (like bookmarking but with better UX)
- TrackMeNot: protects against data profiling by search engines
- WhatRuns: looks under the hood of websites I'm visiting