I’ve been bouncing back between a bunch of browsers lately, and functionality & security wise, I like Brave the best so far, but some first impressions UI feedback after setup…
Android
- The “Tab Selection” page could use some features & polish. The bottom menu contains ONLY the new tab button, and the Normal/Private selector is a tiny pair of “tabs” way at the top that’s hard to reach even on a small phone. In addition, despite looking like tabs, you can’t even swipe left/right in an open area to flip between them. It would just make sense to move the normal/private selection to the bottom bar with the new tab button, as well as allow swiping between them, like Vivaldi. Maybe even add options to open bookmarks and recent tabs from other devices here.
- Long shot, but as a user with very few mobile tabs, i really loved Opera’s (i think?, been a while) full-size tab selection UI that mirror’s the android app switching UI, with swipe up to close, left/right between tabs, and seamlessly right swipe into private tabs. Was great for peeking at another tab quickly without actually opening it.
- It would be nice if disabling some Brave features (news, vpn, rewards, wallet, etc) hid them from the main menu. The menu has so many items in needs a scroll bar as it is.
- Homepage/New Tab Page, might have missed it, but you cant even have it show bookmarks, or even pin certain sites? Are you really just at the whims of the “Top Sites”? After opening all my fav sites, It still only shows a single link, and that link has a useless title that I can’t even rename?
Windows Desktop
- Homepage/New Tab Page, like desktop seems very limited. The main part I use is the pinned links, but in Brave they are tiny in the top corner, not front and centered, and they only use the pixellated favicon, whereas other browsers will use a screenshot or try and pull a full sized logo from the page
- The sidebar needs some more features, there’s just not enough there to want to keep it active. You can add websites but they are just links, I would LOVE it if you could could make them open as floating or pop-out sidebar tabs similar to Vivaldi (as janky as they are there). It’s amazing for chat, email, calendar, notes, etc.
Overall I love the functionality, the android version’s privacy and ad blocking works better out of the box than my Opera and Vivaldi ones did after hours of meddling and adding custom personal blocking rules. The irksome bit on both is that I feel the need to use a 3rd party home/start page on both android and windows, or roll my own, just to show a decent looking list of bookmarks.