I’m not big on “alternative” web browsers. Back when I was the administrator of Marquette’s eLearning platform I actually had a student call in to support to complain that the application didn’t work correctly with his IceWeasel browser. Seriously. I sometimes use Chrome, but for the most part I use Safari simply because it is the browser built to work the best on my Mac. And by that I mean mostly that it isn’t a resource hog and won’t run down my battery.
If I decided that I would rather go with a more compatible, standards-based browser like Chrome, I run into another problem. I don’t trust Google all that much. Not to put too fine a point on it, I trust them a little more than Facebook and a whole lot less than Apple. Is there no better compromise than to use Apple’s pretty privacy oriented and just OK standards compatibility?
Maybe there is. I read something about a browser called Brave yesterday so I decided to try it. I was immediately impressed. It cleanly blocked ads and had some pretty aggressive privacy settings. Things went south, however, when I discovered that I could not use Google web apps like Gmail and Google Calendar. I fooled around with it for a bit, but couldn’t get it to work.
Until this morning. I toggled some settings and emptied the cache and voila. Brave is an open source browser based on Chromium (like almost everything is these days) which means it’s a highly standards compatible browser indeed. And the performance is fantastic so far. It’s amazing how much your browsing can be improved just by blocking a few ads. I have run into a few things that didn’t work, but I was able to put “shields down” for those sites and then everything works, even while maintaining an aggressive security/privacy regime.
I don’t know if I’ll stick with it or not, but after using it all day today I’m not sick of it. If you’re not happy with where Edge is yet, or you’re looking for a non-Chrome browser that’s more compatible than Safari, try Brave.