Hey, I just wanted to follow up on your comment. Since this discussion I looked into the following:
Ungoogled Chromium: Lousy installation / update experience. Lacks Widevine support and syncing across devices. Will maintain Manifest V2 as long as feasible, but no guarantees. No Widevine is a non-starter for me.
Helium: Lousy installation experience again, also no Widevine or sync. They’re maintaining Manifest V2 support for now but it’s unknown what will happen if/when it’s completely removed upstream. I’ll keep my eye on this as it looks promising, but it’s not ready yet.
Vanadium: Irrelevant to my desktop use case
Vivaldi: Has Widevine and cross-device sync. Has built-in adblocker but it’s based on ABP and worse than Brave’s. I use 1Password and I had to manually create a file in /etc/1password as root to get the browser extension to communicate with the desktop app. I also had to specifically install Vivaldi as a system package to enable 1P integration; no Flatpak or Snap (as if). Non-technical users would struggle with this. It will also maintain Manifest V2 for as long as possible, again no guarantees. Otherwise, Vivaldi did really impress me with how customizable and featureful it is. Vivaldi comes with a free-tier Proton VPN. While I wouldn’t trust it with sensitive information, it’s good enough to foil certain kinds of statewide bans.
Firefox: Every time I try to use Firefox I end up back with a Blink-based browser because sites just tend to break more in Firefox. Otherwise it’s a great choice for uBlock Origin alone. Personally, I have lower tolerance for website breakage than I do for the occasional ad slipping through.
Orion: This one really impressed me with its features and customization. It has cross-device sync for sure. My Mac is a work computer, so my Widevine test was to try playing some Pluralsight content, and that worked. It supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions, which is kind of nifty. There isn’t a Linux version available yet, but it’s planned for this year. On my work Mac, I use Brave Shields’ built-in userscripts support to bypass some nag screens, but the same scripts do not work in Orion with ViolentMonkey, and while they claim to be the fastest browser, the PR review view in GitHub lags noticably when adding comments to a diff. I want to switch, but I don’t feel Orion is ready yet.
Brave: Good installation experience, has Widevine and cross-device sync. 1Password extension works out of the box. Some crypto shit appears in two places in the UI but are easily hidden just by right-clicking on them. They’re maintaining Manifest V2 support as long as they can like other Chromium-based browsers but still no guarantees. Of the browsers I surveyed, Brave Shields is the best built-in ad-blocker. It’s not uBlock Origin, but I almost never see any ads, and it’ll live on even if Manifest V2 gets sunsetted. No free VPN, but instead integrates with Tor, which is slower but probably more trustworthy for sensitive stuff while being free.
So, bottom line: it’s not just “good marketing”; Brave legit offers the smoothest experience by my criteria with top-tier website compatibility while also offering a permanent ad-blocking solution which is not quite up to uBO standards, but close enough that I don’t mind.
Hey, I just wanted to follow up on your comment. Since this discussion I looked into the following:
So, bottom line: it’s not just “good marketing”; Brave legit offers the smoothest experience by my criteria with top-tier website compatibility while also offering a permanent ad-blocking solution which is not quite up to uBO standards, but close enough that I don’t mind.