2025 has already been a year to forget for many in the social media and general internet world, with less privacy and security for many and yet another rise in hacks and scams with some very notable and newsworthy (at least in the UK) organisations suffering, yes I am looking at you M&S.
Now I have long regarded Firefox as my default driver web browser, but recently there have been more and more issues with it, Threads recently stopped working and yes Threads on a web browser is very good because it supports multiple columns meaning you can see pretty much everything in one view like Mastodon has done for years. I have always come back to ye olde faithful Firefox despite flirting with the others, but for the first time I think I’ve found a new, reliable and more importantly an ad-blocking browser that improves things and is fast! I access the tinternet on my “work” pc (this one) via a VPN quite often which removes some ads but things like Youtube have become pretty hit and miss and Facebook – well that is at best substandard and at worst useless without several things being done, but here is Brave and it blocks most youtube ads and facebook ads by default. There are also a host of other tracking that is disabled, and plenty of nice features for added protection, yet it is built on the underlying technology of chromium that powers many browsers, thus plenty of sites just work as well if not better in Brave!
Above is a quick comparison between Brave and Chrome, for example. However this doesn’t show how fast or how much better a lot of sites are with Brave – youtube is quicker than on Chrome and Firefox and yes, no ads! Facebook is miles better, no ads, no suggested posts and only a few sponsored ads and posts – but generally speaking it is way, way better and again FAST!
The changes here almost make FB bearable again! But to be honest for me the best is Youtube as that gains a new lease of life as it is way, way faster on Brave and very few ads without any messing around. Changes the platform totally for me at least! Other streaming services also see a reduction in ads, and being based on chrome there is hardware acceleration of videos too so watching 4k videos is great. All in all the performance is excellent right now, but of course, as a browser becomes more popular then things will doubtlessly change (thus I’ve not uninstalled any of them yet). You can easily import your bookmarks, passwords etc. and be up and running in no time. Brave also has its own search engine, though you can go back to others if you so desire, and even this is focused on privacy and security and works pretty well most of the time. I have left it as is currently because I can see how results for websites etc. I admin work. Currently they seem perfectly fine and there is less AI than say Google search. Opening a new tab gives you some quick stats about how many things have been blocked etc. and this seems to be rather large, but again, it shows how much you are giving away to the world using a browser without ad blocking etc. Below is the stats for a weekend use by myself!
You can see that there are setting for a VPN as well – if you don’t have one this seems perfectly reasonable, and a search bar. All in all I’m impressed, and as a bonus it appears that Brave uses less memory and is more cpu friendly than the latest Firefox to boot! I really cannot see any downsides yet – I have been using it off and on for ages, but a whole weekend useage has proved enough for me to swap!
Brave Browser
Review of Brave Browser on Windows – a secure and privacy focused chrome offshoot that has become my new goto browser! Bye bye Firefox (for now). Worth it for FB and Youtube as it makes them way better!
Pros
Drop in replacement for your current browser
Works very well, blocks most ads – makes browsing a lot nicer!
Just works with zero setup unless you want to tweak
Cons
I have not come across any cons so far in my testing!
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