Also been using Brave for a while. All the crypto stuff needs to be turned off but besides that for me, it's just better Chrome. Firefox always felt slower to me, Safari is just a weird kid from the neighborhood I could never get to like. I LOVED Arc. I think its a near perfect browser, but lack of proper mobile browser and Browser Company dropping Arc in favor of the new rebranded Arc with AI just left me with distrust. Brave just works, I can use it on all my devices, OSes, I can have uBlock Origin on it and vertical tabs. I don't really need anything else at this point.
Agreed. I went from 20+ years of Firefox (back to the earliest days with the .zip files and just dumping binaries into a folder) to Brave a couple years ago.
I'm the same way. Turn off crypto by default (is it these days?) and that's pretty much it.
I like how they host selected Manifest v2 extensions themselves so uBlock Origin latest continues to work and is actively maintained.
Speed of Chromium with privacy focus. Works for me.
> Firefox always felt slower to me
Since Google has proven willing to stoop to bad behavior to lend Chromium the impression of superior performance[0] I don't consider subjective performance to be a meaningful benchmark.
As metrics go, I am more concerned with "demonstrable respect for user-agency", a competition in which a browser from the world's largest advertising conglomerate is forbidden entry.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...
Arc is still usable and gets chromium updates. It's still my daily driver since as you said, it's great.
Edit: I also use it as my mobile browser. I really don't see any problems on their mobile app (iOS)
See also Brave Origin: https://brave.com/origin/
> I LOVED Arc.
I assume you've heard of it, but just in case you haven't: you should try Zen! It's basically Arc, but based on Firefox, open source and, more importantly, actively maintained.
https://zen-browser.app