I’ve been using Brave for three years now, and over that time I have noticed an ongoing decline in the quality of Brave in a number of areas. Most notably in the memory efficiency on all platforms, platform integration on Linux, font rendering on Linux, UI clutter on all platforms, feature bloat on all platforms - particularly in regard to LLM integration.
In the meantime, there has been a slight but notable improvement in Firefox, particularly in platform integration with the KDE Plasma desktop on Linux.
The combination of improvement in Firefox and degradation in Brave and other Chromium browsers means that Firefox is now the least unpalatable option on Linux, swapping places with Brave.
Probably the most important issue for me has been platform integration, Brave used to win this hands down by supporting “global” app menus in Linux, Firefox has taken over a decade to add this support because it is primarily a Gnome browser, and Gnome only recently embraced the option of top menu bars. Comparing Firefox and Brave in KDE today, Firefox beats Brave (Chromium) on a number of levels.
On Linux, Firefox respects the font scaling choices of the user in its UI, while Brave, frankly, shits all over user preferences for font sizes. Firefox uses the correct symbols for the minimize, maximize and close window controls, while Brave continues (after many years) to use the incorrect “symbolic” images. Firefox uses menus, buttons and scrollbars which don’t clash with the native controls while Brave has it’s own unique and inconsistent styles for them.
Brave has unbelievably bad font rendering on Linux, and support has continued to deteriorate during the time I have been using it, developing problems with font kerning and subpixel rendering in the UI, and a bizarre “ransom note” rendering problem with many fonts having letters of different sizes and weights. These are on top of the extra fuzziness plaguing Chromium browsers from the beginning.
In addition to superior platform integration by default, it’s possible to customize Firefox using userChrome.css, further improving platform integration and healing “papercuts" in the UI, improving quality of life, sealing the deal for Firefox.
The most galling aspect has been seeing bugs stack up on Linux and almost never get fixed, it really hammers home how utterly unimportant Linux users are.
On all platforms, bloat has been a major problem, the amount of memory used by Brave has ballooned in recent years as LLM features nobody asked for have been crammed into Brave. In your haste to appease shareholders, you have made it clear that we users aren’t the real customers, but cattle being milked for the benefit of the actual customers. It’s obvious enshittification at it’s worst.
The bloat is not just in memory usage and useless features tho, an increasing number of buttons adorn the UI, enough to put the back of a wedding dress to shame. So many buttons that an extra horizontal toolbar needed to be added to accommodate all of them. Where the interface once had about 7 buttons now there are about 20 of them as well as a hamburger menu that has a scrollbar.
At what point do you admit defeat and just add a normal menu bar like any other application that bristles with options? It’s no longer about minimalism, it’s now become about being ludicrously dogmatic about refusing to use a standard user interface element that has stood the test of time from the dawn of commercial GUIs. It’s at least possible to restore a menu bar in Firefox, even if a sane UI is not the default.
I will continue to evaluate Brave versus Firefox in the future, but for now, it’s not even close. Perhaps if Brave starts to put customers ahead of shareholders again I’ll be able to consider using it as a daily driver rather than a backup.
Bye.
