I just installed Brave to try it out. I’ve been searching for like an hour to find where the apparently hidden settings are for the search bar. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/pull/9063 tells me to go to about:preferences#search, which produces an error: “The webpage at chrome://preferences/#search might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.” These settings don’t appear to exist at chrome://settings/. Eventually I found https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/9rby08/implementing_searchaddress_bar_autocomplete/ which is the first indication I’ve seen that Brave has changed architectures and old information no longer applies. https://brave.com/brave-upgrades/ promises a seamless migration, I believe this post should serve as a counterexample. After creating an account here I was very frustrated to find that I was blocked from creating a new topic in the Help Center and Resources forum, which has in its description “Start here if you’re new to Brave or Community”. Apparently it’s not where I should start.
This whole experience has been confusing and frustrating. I would suggest putting a placeholder page at about:preferences that explains why the page has moved / no longer exists. I would suggest showing a note on installation explaining that Brave has changed architectures and old help articles no longer apply. I would suggest instead of having a “blocked” icon while hovering over new topic creation that there be some sort of link to a page explaining permissions for new users and how to ask a question. If it took me, a developer, this long to figure this out, there are many other users who never will.