My laptop crashed and I am not happy with the way sync works. I lost my browser data

Credit where it is due: I am using brave happily for the past 6 months now and I have experienced receiving less targeted advertisements due to your tracker blocking features. Great work there.

Some background: I love the “accounts” feature that Chrome provides. It is a deal-breaker. There are mainly two reasons for this:

  • Ability to have multiple profiles inside a single browser installation. I have multiple profiles. viz., personal, office, mom, dad.
  • Ability to sync any of my profile individually to any new laptop that I get. It is so simple. With just a single login, I have everything from my passwords to my browsing history to my bookmarks available within 1 minutue on a brand new laptop.

Recent Incident: I was using Brave for my office laptop and it was great, until yesterday when my laptop died of malfunction. I now have a new laptop, but no way to sync my lost Brave instance with the new laptop.

The problem with current sync methods of brave: I understant that you have a different method of sync using some random phrase and saving that phrase somewhere to facilitate sync in some untowardly incident like the one I faced but please try to understand that this method is just confusing and users are less likely to store a random phrase in some notes making application than to simply rememeber a username and password. Also, this method of sync that you are currently using doesn’t allow you to have that feature of having multiple cloud-synced profile inside single browser instance. Please don’t try to re-invent things here. Don’t fix a user experience which is not broken at all. I request you to accept that Chrome has solved this problem in much better way and just replicate their solution. It is that simple! And, from whatever understanding I have with Brave’s concern of maintaining user data privacy, you already store user data in encrypted format on your cloud and you can continue to do so even if you have account based sync like Chrome.

I request you to please go through this feedback carefully and understand the problem a user like me faced. I am trying very hard to move away from Chrome and want to make Brave my primary browser. But, things like the incident above don’t allow me to make that leap. Imagine, so many people out there who are willing to go away from Chrome and you can capture all of them by implementing just one feature that I described above.

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Same experience for me except my laptop was stolen.