> I had some messing around to do up front, like hiding all the crypto and AI nonsense...
Switching to Brave from Firefox due to AI and ethical concerns seems like a lateral move at best if being generous.
Right, I felt the same thing. Switching to Brave because Firefox "isn't ethical enough" is like switching to McDonald's because the farmer's market produce isn't organic enough.
I'd like to switch friends and family over to brave, but trying to avoid ads that might confuse them was kind of the point...so....
Just as a counterpoint, I switched to Brave because Firefox no longer holds the technical or moral high ground. Brave is an open-source browser which makes it different from Chrome and Vivaldi. Brave is a privacy-focused browser. Brave is the only browser that is open source and also lets me pay for it so I can have a clean, uncluttered, fast experience. Brave is the only chromium-based browser that I'm aware of that continues to support Manifest V2 for UBlock Origin, which is critical for my use case.
Mozilla has been distracted by a million shiny things around them. They've been mismanaged almost criminally and they have changed their terms of service to be much less privacy-oriented than they used to be.
In my humble opinion, Brave gets far too much hate on this site and is actually the best browser made today in terms of open source availability, a focus on privacy and empowerment of the end user, while maximizing site compatibility.