The last -laptop version, 0.23 was much nicer than the current 0.57 product. The settings menu was much more usable before, tabs below the address bar was much nicer, and the delete can and remove X on downloads.
At this point, I’m getting a vibe of starting with Chrome and tweaking from there, and I am totally against that. Chrome is a BAD product.
At any rate, there are many, many things which need to be replaced in the current build which were awesome in the -laptop build. I’m tempted to go back to the -laptop last version for my own convenience, but will try to stay in the current beta to be helpful. I am very much on board with the goals of this project, and want to see it succeed. I do provide useful (I hope) information on problems I experience in GitHub, but felt that this was the place for this rant.
Hopefully this is all just a memory soon. I hope that significant effort goes into laptop-parity stuff, but with priority 5, I’m not too optimistic.
I found the newest version of Brave to be full of features I had been waiting for, like:
Support to the whole Chrome library of extensions.
The ability to add new themes
Brave Rewards
A better more modern look
I do agree with your argument though, Brave as a Chrome product makes me feel less secure. In fact, earlier today, I did make a topic regarding this issue, I was affirmed that Brave would still be just as secure as before and that the creators of it had no intention of partnering with Google. Also, another way I agree with you is I’ve never liked the tabs over the URL input menu (btw, if anyone has a fix for that, I would love to hear it) .
OK, point taken; there have been other improvements I hadn’t noticed or which don’t affect me but are still improvements. Still I think this is a huge step in the wrong direction from a UI and usability standpoint, not to mention that the person who commented that now it looks like “just another Chrome clone,” which makes it harder for a normal user to see its uniqueness and explore its benefits, is not incorrect.
I am also involved on the GitHub (developer) side of things, and can confirm that I’m not the only one who wants the real Brave back, and that some issues have been logged other than by me to that effect, but they are low-priority. This is unfortunate. It means that I’m going to have to tolerate a product I like much less for potentially a long time, and people who aren’t as committed as I am will take their betrayed feelings and go back to whatever they were using previously.
Well I prefer the Chromium based Brave over the old Moun build . Then again I loved the old Moun as I believed that Brave ( the idea ) is the future. I use linux and support open source. Chrome is proprietary version of ‘open source’ Chromium and many of the other browsers are built on it . So here is some food for thought:
I encourage everyone to to use what they like , and to read the mission statement to their browser of choice. I have read Brave’s and believe in what they are doing. Did I mention trust.
I understand all that has been said here, and I don’t dispute that Brave as it sits at 0.57 is better than Chrome, or that the project’s goals are worthy. My loyalty to the project is based on the love of those goals. I am simply saying that in starting with “pure Chromium” a lot of what made the Muon builds feel polished and special is gone, and correcting this needs to be P3 at the lowest, as perception is everything with the non-technical, and that is the vast majority of potential users. Two steps forward has taken a huge step back, and unfortunately the one step is in areas where it is immediately obvious, and the two in areas less so.
I think I would have delayed releasing the non-Muon other than in the dev channel until it had achieved significantly better laptop-parity and felt like the Brave we all love, only better. Now, the cat is out of the bag, and many more people than just myself are clamoring for beloved features that got overlooked because “pure Chromium” doesn’t have them, they haven’t been reintroduced, and the features were fabulous.
In my opinion, a significant team needs to move from so-called core features that supposedly moving to “pure Chromium” freed them to develop, and focus on immediately recreating the user experience features that the Muon builds offered: friendly, usable configuration pages; private tabs; the download delete can and X; the tabs below the address bar; and a host of other details which are seemingly small, but defined for many users what Brave was.
Brave was never just a privacy-enforcing browser with a built-in ad-blocker, but now, that’s all it is. In the process of getting a new body, it lost its soul. Create the soul team to recapture the Spirit of Bravery in this new body you’ve chosen.
I think you are just jumping to conclusions about using a purely Chromium code base. Things were done differently on Muon because it was a custom fork of Electron but came at the cost of having to maintain a code base which led to a lot of regressions. Keeping up with Chromium version was an overhead since a majority was custom code and upgrade meant breaking things and fixing them.
Most features that were there in Muon is still part of brave-core. And please remember this is still not the final product. Of course certain things that were part of Muon would not make it into brave-core but would have a better implementation of it. Please read through the roadmap that we have which explains what all is being done to close the parity. Also have a look at the list of issues that we have already created to bring down the parity. So its not like what was there on Muon is abandoned
I fully understand why the change was made, and also that the current product is not the final. I am hanging on, testing and reporting, because I know that this is not the final product. I understand what you mean by “majority of features are already present,” but unfortunately, many of them are so because they’re present in every browser. I still contend that about half of the features that made Brave special are still missing. Never lose sight of the fact that little details in the user experience which are not part of any lofty goals can nonetheless become a huge part of the identity of a product, and should be preserved during a code transition.
For now, I’m going to just hang back and see what happens. I still believe in the goals, and the character of the development team. I simply wanted to impress on them the urgency of achieving parity quickly to avoid disillusioning people who aren’t going to investigate things deeply, and understand this fully.
Rest assured by the time we get to the final product it would have all feature parity fixed. For example Tor/Webtorrent are features that are specific to Brave which are already implemented. Similarly we will incorporate what makes the browser Brave. Some features may not look and feel exactly the same as Muon but will definitely be included.
We welcome any kind of testing and issues that you can report so that we can fix them up. Community contribution in terms of testing is a big plus to making the app better.
Certain things would get priority over other so it might get in late but it will eventually make it.
I use the same username on GitHub and we’ve spoken there, too. Thanks for the assurances.
Also, I am now running the two concurrently, since some features I need are broken in the current build. I can therefore compare the two readily, perhaps more than you’d like at this stage. I am using the current beta as my primary, but it feels a little like a rat rod right now—fast and uncomfortable. I look forward to the finished product.
It would be good to see an acknowledgement that the switch is ‘swings and roundabouts’ - plenty of good things have been lost (e.g. tab sets making it possible to navigate between hundreds of open tabs) in the current version and a commitment to bring them back.
@SilverPuppy I’d like to understand more re: your comment on “half of the features that made Brave special are still missing”. If you can list them out or if you have github issues you want us to take a look at would love to check them out. Can only promise that we evaluate the features and feature set, can’t promise what gets implemented. Lots of people want things to work one way and another set want it the complete opposite.
Thank you for that. All the obvious things I’ve listed, and many more besides, are already in GitHub. That pretty much everything in the laptop-parity category is marked P5 (lowest priority) is deeply concerning to me, as I believe that giving obvious feature regressions the lowest priority is irresponsible, for reasons I elaborated here: Please reinstate some of the features that were used in Brave Muon
I am a non-techie, and SilverPuppy has expressed my impression of the new platform. For the time being, I am running the old Brave, and seriously thinking about abandoning it altogether. I researched and found Brave when I got fed up with IE and did not trust Edge’s and Chrome’s invasion of privacy. I tried Mozilla, until they decided to engage in the cultural war and punish people who do not share their political values. Brave has always seemed like a “beta” operation for me, and had its quirks that I was willing to put up with because I supported the goals - and, eventually, the techies would figure out the quirks. But it was easy to learn. The new one seems inordinately more difficult, not easier.
My specific complaints? There is no default to turn JavaScript on, and EVERYBODY requires it - even this forum. So instead of adding one site at a time, I wish I could turn on a default. Another feature I liked on the Moen version was the ability to have a default browser for the InPrivate browsing. I grew to like duckduck, but it was pretty limited in giving results so I used other search engines on other settings. Why can’t I enjoy the privacy of one search engine in Tor or InPrivate, and a different default engine for general research? Finally, there are a few select sites that just do not seem to want to place well with others on Brave - a big blue home center site used to be a bit wonky, but now it is totally unusable.
aethetics aside, I see that cookies are installed and are not automatically deleted when the browser is closed with the new version. I thought that the old one (muon) deleted cookies when session ended. Am I mistaken? If not, could you please incorporate that feature? It was one of the features I really liked about Brave. Thanks.
I recently wrote a brief explanation of how Shields work in Brave here:
We’re working on this already, issue captured here:
If you’d like, you can post a topic about the sites you’re having issues with in the Web Compatibility category and we can do are best to diagnose the issue.
Thanks for the assurances.
I am using the current beta as my primary, but it feels a little like a rat rod right now—fast and uncomfortable. I look forward to the finished product.
This is the default setting. When you first install the new build, your Global Shields settings should be set like so:
