Improve 'top sites' section on home screen

Brave Feature Requests
#1

Representing the most frequent sites you use, combined with large, friendly icons, the ‘top sites’ interface on the home screen is really handy. However, I think it could be greatly improved with the following 3 adjustments:

  1. Allow users to add/remove their own top sites (manually)
  2. Allow for more than 6.
  3. Allow users to drag & drop sort/re-order

And to a lesser degree:

  1. Allow users to create ‘groups’ of icons (and add labels), to categorize top sites.

I realize this is encroaching on just being a bookmarks manager, but I personally see them as something very different (bookmarks being more inclusive/exhaustive).

#2

I gave up on that happening. People have wanted most of those items for over 2 years now and nothing has changed. I resorted to use yet another extension to ad functionality to Brave Speed Dial 2 New tab or Speed Dial [FVD] - New Tab Page, 3D

2 Likes
#3

They should add special bookmarks folder called top sites and bookmarks in this folder would be displayed on the new tab page as top sites. They should also add option to hide suggested sites (due to privacy).

They should add shortcuts to settings, bookmarks, history, downloads, passwords etc. to the left or right top corner of the new tab page too because they are very useful.

1 Like
#4

They should do a lot of things.

They have only recently fixed Sync V2 which was necessitated because Syncv1 was so broken it was causing issues in Brave. Sync v2 in beta and dev versions now apparently shows Open Tabs on other devices now. Before it was only showing the last 4 manually entered URLS. This was something I spotted when I was testing the beta back in Jul/Aug 2020 but could not get any response here on the community why I was seeing this. Only after posting a bug report on GitHub did I find out that was a known issue but was how Sync v2 was going to function. Now 4 months later

This end user, has no interest in BAT or crypto, but wants a browser to function properly for the 18 hrs a day that it is being used. I often wonder how many of Brave’s reported active users are only using Brave simply for earning BAT and the money that it earns which has fallen drastically.

I also wonder whether the browser functionality and support are spread thin due to also having to look after BAT payout / missing BAT etc. Due to these issues, I frankly waffle a lot between using Brave and MS Edge Chromium as my default browser. I have no strong allegiance to any particular browser and support is something that I need to have when I find issues.

1 Like
#5

These are good suggestions and match what’s possible in Firefox. As it currently functions, it’s practically unusable since you can’t count on a site to even be continually displayed. The sites should be able to be added, pinned, moved, edited, and significantly increased in number, just as they have been for a long time in Firefox. I’m looking forward to the new functionality.

2 Likes
#6

Yup I gave up on Brave doing this on their own and installed yet another extension this one to fix NewTab page.

#7

Yeah, I’ve almost given up on brave as a whole. I keep seeing what the users want and then brave implementing something else, then asking their users to give them feedback. What is the point of that feedback if the issues and/or feature requests are barely getting any attention?

1 Like
#8

I kept telling them there were issues with Syncing since they redid sync and for a year re cookie deletion not work. Was told that Sync was working and it was a known limitation and the cookie deletion was an issue with my computer.

It is not. Both issues are bugs and it has taken this long for someone to admit it and only because I bypassed the community and posted the issue on their GitHub. This experience has taught me to give up reporting new issues with Brave or providing suggestions. BAT is taking too much of a scarce resource away putting out fires.

1 Like
#9

Yeah, this lack of flexibility with Top Sites is sending me back to FireFox. It’s kind of like limiting your MacOS or Windows desktop to six icons that you can’t control. People would pull their hair out and move to a better OS. And yet, here we are … still.

Thankfully, I’ve not bookmarked much new stuff since trying Brave so I don’t have to move a bunch of stuff back over.

1 Like
#10

Hello!
Just wanted to drop in and let anyone who may interested know that this feature just landed in Nightly and is targeted for a v1.23.x release on Stable. Those of you with Nightly builds installed can go ahead and play with the new feature now. We also have the following guide for the new feature:

4 Likes
Custom number of speed dial/top sites on new page (up to 18 tiles with 3 rows?)
Manually Adding Top-Sites
#11

Amazing!! The only gripe I have now is the UI on the android version. I want to be able to choose my favorite sites there as well without having to use a widget because I want to see the sites at the same time I see my stats, like on IOS and earlier Android

#12

Yea this feature is sooo much needed especially for customizability and convenient. Hope they add it been waiting for so long for this.

#13

Sad to say this is something I had requested back in 2018 and was told it was on its way. Three years later and it is finally being implemented. I have been battling two other issues with Brave over the last year its inability to delete specified cookies on exit plus its wacky behaviour regarding Open Tab syncing. Both of these issues have been confirmed by others and have been filed on Brave’s GitHub as bugs. With the Open Tab syncing, I was told that it was a behaviour that has been inherited from Chromium yet MS Edge has neither of these two issues. As I can not wait for 3 years for these problems, which I consider more important and not fixable via yet another extension, to be fixed I am using MS Edge as my default browser on all my systems here.