Brave is awesome. Brave is also pretty bad at adopting simple functionalities that make browsing the web a nice and smooth experience.
For context, I started using Brave some years ago but then moved to Vivaldi as it provided much more customization options. Now that MV2 is gone along with the nice ad blocking extensions, Vivaldi isn’t efficient enough blocking ads on its own. So I moved back to Brave once again. I missed Brave’s performance (youtube videos now start instantly!) and ad blocking capabilities (still one of the best) as well as its privacy features but it’s crazy how some simple functionalities are still missing or not working properly after so much time.
So, in no particular order, here’s a quick list of things that I think must be improved to make Brave a no brainer choice when it comes to choose a web browser on desktop. Most of these have probably been reported or asked already tho, that’s why I’m posting this as feedback.
1 - Brave uses a TON of memory. I’m one of those guys that opens tabs and keeps them there to get back to later, which means I have a lot more than 100 tabs open. But I also have the memory saver option set to maximum, which I would expect it to put most of the tabs to sleep as soon as I launch Brave and not long after I have visited one specific tab. This apparently isn’t happening. There are times that games crash at launch with a low memory error popup when I have Brave open (I have 16Gb of RAM, but this never happened with Vivaldi and the same number of tabs).
2 - Open new tabs after the active tab. I use vertical tabs and this is a must for me because it allows me to keep the most recent tabs at the top portion of the tabs bar and not have to scroll all the way down there to access a recent tab. Sometimes it works (when opening a link in a new tab from the active tab) and other times it doesn’t (pressing the middle mouse button on a bookmark - or anywhere else for that matter - places the new tab down there at the very end). This is extremely annoying.
3 - The tabs bar scrollbar is apparently broken when using collapsible vertical tabs. The scrollbar background covers half of the tabs icons. It’s good that we have an option to hide this scrollbar, but that makes it hard to know if I’m looking at the top, middle or bottom of the tabs bar. A thin scrollbar should solve the problem.
4 - Websites pinned to the sidebar are just simple links. These links should open in a sidebar panel, just like all other buttons in there (LEO, Bookmarks, Reading List and so on). Currently they behave just like bookmarks and we already have a bookmarks bar for those.
5 - An option to prevent pinned tabs from being closed. I use pinned tabs for the websites I visit the most (duh) and since I also use mouse gestures, sometimes it detects the “open new tab” gesture as “close tab” and there goes the pinned tab. This option would disable all close tab shortcuts, the middle mouse button and only allow users to close a pinned tab through the context menu “Close” button.
5.1 - This one’s a feature suggestion for pinned tabs: an option to block pinned tabs to their current site. This prevents a pinned tab from loading up a different site, so when enabled, if you click a link and it tries to redirect you to a different website within this pinned tab, it’ll open it on a new tab instead of the pinned tab you’re in.
6 - Customizing toolbars is a real pain. Dragging buttons/icons around rarely works properly and messes everything up. I just end up giving up completely and leave the default layout, even though I’d like to change some things arounds.
7 - Translate selected text. Most of the times, I don’t need to translate a whole page, just a paragraph or a phrase that is written on a different language.
8 - Search with different search providers. We have the “search Brave for…” button in the context menu, but could we please have a “search with…” collapsible menu where you could select a different search provider? For example, highlight an address then select “search with” → “google maps”.
9 - Search for image button in the context menu of an image. This allows quick and easy access to Google’s image search service. I know people want to “degooglefy” everything nowadays, I get it, me too, but like it or not, there still are no decent alternatives to some of their services. This is one of them. You could have a checkbox in the settings for this so people could enable/disable it.
10 - Mouse gestures, where are they!? 2026 and still no native mouse gestures support. This feature has been asked for a decade… literally. Once you get used to it, you can’t go back. I know there are some extensions for this, I’m using one, but they don’t work with Brave internal pages (settings, new tab, extensions store, flags and so on). And by using an extension I’m probably making the browser even more memory heavy.
I really, really want to love Brave, but these things do get in the way a lot more times than I’d want. Anyway, thanks for your work, new features are cool and all but please, can you also focus on improving the user experience?