From Firefox To Brave

Why I finally switched from Firefox to Brave

Note: This article only talks about desktop browsers.

Websites compatibility

Now, this point is often exagerated. Most websites work fine on Firefox. At least here in Europe, where Firefox usage is still common in some segments of the society.

Still, I recently encountered issues on some websites. First, it was for a form I had to fill in. The final straw however, came when GitHub stopped working. It just became dark.

Now to be fair, there is a dozen possible causes for this failure. It could be due to uBlock Origin filters, Firefox itself, or the Strong Fingerprint Protection. But this just proves, how a more integrated experience like Brave’s works better.

Slowness/performance

I am a tab hoarder. Sometimes, Firefox is lagging a lot. Or worse, it could be non-responsive. Then I would need to exit my entire session. This is less than ideal. Compared this to Brave which inherits Chromium’s smart tab pausing feature, saving space. Even if I somehow overloads Brave, it’s not going to completely freeze like Firefox. At worst, it will lag a bit, leaving me the opportunity to close tabs and fix the freezing.

Privacy

This is the main reason I stuck with Firefox for so long. Mozilla has long focused on being the most private browser platform, whith features like Real Fingerprint Protection (and FPP), containers, full cookies isolation, and so on. It also doesn’t have features that could be increase the treat surface, such as WebBluetooth, WebUSB, etc. Lastly, it also has containers - which basically allow you to have multiple sessions in the same window. It separates cookies and data, and a website in container A can’t communicate with any other websites not in the container.

But in the recent months and year(s), they didn’t introduce new privacy protections. On the contrary,even Chromium is busy with introducing new privacy features.

This didn’t bother me as I thought arkenfox+uBlock Origin provides all the protection you need. Until it doesn’t. Introduce LocalMESS, a tracking method using localhost, used by at least Meta and Yandex. Firefox only had partial protection to this tracking meta - while Meta and Yandex didn’t bypass Firefox protections, others could have using a technique called “UDP communications to TURN”. Contrary to Firefox, Brave has locked localhost access behind a permission since 2022 and is thus inaffacted by this.

In other aspects, Firefox lags behind too. Firefox leaks your full list of browser languages, which is a big vector for fingerprint. Brave protects this and only share your primary language.

Brave also has a built-in AdBlocker which is nice to see. They are also catching-up with Firefox in the few areas where it still had an edge.For example, Brave is working on adding container support. They also are keeping manifest v2 support, so that is a tie with Firefox.

Ease-of-use

Getting Firefox to a point where it is both usable and privacy-respecting feel like a giant patchwork. user.js for hardening, then user-overrides.js for disabling some hardening. Then installing uBlock Origin. And for spellcheck -you guessed it- yes that is another extension (though well-integrated). Finally, you need to choose which mode of Enhanced Tracker Protection you want (contrary to what its name suggest, this both blocks tracker scripts but also fingerprinters).

And you just hope that one of these elements isn’t going to interfere with another, or even cause the whole thing to break.

Don’t get me wrong, the customisation is what makes Firefox, Firefox. The amount of options in about:config means you can heavily customise it, basically allowing anyone to create their own browser. But the issue is that Firefox defaults aren’t sound, so you need to harden it. It would help if Firefox went all the way in privacy. For example, instead of just blocking some domain trackers, they should just block all trackers and ads using common blocklists like EasyList, similar to how Graphene OS browser (Vanadium)does it.

Web-of-apps

Really, it is just practical to get some websites (Spotify, Whatsapp) in your app list, and also them opening in a separate window. While Web Apps re technically much more powerful than that, in practice most web apps are just that. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn’t support them.

What I will miss

PDF editor

I’ve gotten used to highlighting and annotating PDFs using Firefox built-in PDF editor. I still don’t get why Chromium doesn’t have one. I found an extension that allows highlighting web pages that also allows highlighting PDFs, so that solve it, though it unpractical and slow for large documents.

LibRedirect extension

This extensions redirects privacy-invasive websites to private instances (proxies of sort). While an alternative extensions exists on Chromium called Predirect, it suffers several flaws. The most annoying is you can’t temporarily disable redirects for a website. Also, you can only add one custom instance and cannot remove any instance. Finnaly, it is unmaintained which means it might redirect you to some unmaintained instances (From a security perspective it doesn’t really matter, since this extension just uses MV3’s redirect capabilities)

Firefox Sync

I really don’t like Brave Sync, it’s clunchy and doesn’t work that great. Plus you always need Device A if you want to sync with Device B.

Why intentions, ethics, positions do not matter

The spat between Brave and Firefox usually follows this logic.

Brave: We offer Privacy by default, unlike you Firefox Firefox: But You support Google’s Chromium hegemony Brave: Speak for yourself! Don’t you depend on Google money + encourage Google Search monopoly ? Firefox: But Brave CEO is hompohobic!

I believe this is irrelevant. Both Mozilla and Brave are imperfect companies, and leaders. I make my choice based on what’s the best tool available. At least until Ladydird becomes usable, that’s the best we can do unfortunately.