Not sure I understand your priorities. Surely giving users what they want is fairly high?

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Like many or most I got to Brave because I care about privacy. No I’m not obsessed by privacy, but I’m very happy to see someone develop a browser that puts MY interests before those of rank monetising. I’m happy for Youtube to know who I am for example, but am NOT happy to be considered marketing fodder just by dint of using the internet. What I search for, who I email is NOBODY’s BUSINESS but mine - purely as a point of principle.

That said, and allowing for the fact that under my Linux distro I’m running a beta version of Brave (0.65.114) I still find it rather odd yet incredibly annoying that there’s been so little apparent interest in improving user customisation. Some examples (that others have commented on):

WHY ON EARTH is it so darned difficult to give us MORE THAN SIX TABS on the new tab page?? Really? This was brought up years ago, and turns out to be (surprise to myself) a REALLY USEFUL thing! REALLY useful… as in it becomes such a complete pain in the a** to keep having to manually enter favourite websites, that I consider uninstalling Brave and simply sticking with Vivaldi.

I came here from Vivaldi because while (for me) they have absolutely nailed it with regard to allowing user customisation (themes/colours, tab styling, personalisation, home pages, frequently used etc. etc.) they’ve clearly had some deep issues with the underlying code because 40 second page load times ARE NOT what I want from a browser.

So yeah, just chatting on here really… I do appreciate that ALL this stuff we get to use is FREE and is not paid software - sure, I get that. But this seems to be how the world currently works i.e. you give people free tools, which they download and use, but realise “oh, it hasn’t got ‘x’ feature” or “bother, I can’t do this with it”. And that stuff actually matters. I switched media players after years of what ended up feeling like displaced loyalty because I’d kept saying to myself yep, they’ll get to that feature/bug fix/issue soon enough… but imagine I then find out they simply announce “we’re not going to do that” - cue internet raises its voice to ask why… answer comes “because we don’t feel we want to support it”. So, I went through the pain of spending days installing and testing players. Ended up sticking with one which is funnily enough NOT under active development, meaning that nobody is likely to come and mess up the way it looks/works in the name of “improving” it!!!

I’m happy to accept that if I change to new software I have to adapt. It may lack familiar features, or it may require me to rethink how I do certain things but that said I feel it’s a very fine but important balance - between respecting the developers, understanding that “it’s only a small thing” for us might in fact be very complex or might undermine some basic design principle while at the same time if users keep being told “that’s not going to be included (yet)” or “we made a decision to NOT implement such and such” then users will just go off and find something else.

After all - the purpose of developing what has now become such a core utility (a web browser) - is to ultimately satisfy who? The end users or the developers?

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I’m not a programmer, coder, etc., but over the years I’ve learned that if the programmers know what they are doing, they will create the program in such a way that it’s very easy to add on new features.

They have to create modules and use OO coding (I think it’s called.)

Anyone who doesn’t do that doesn’t know what they are doing & that’s why they use the excuse that they don’t want to add XYZ, because they have to go back & reinvent EVERYTHING they already did because they created a mess.

So I’m sure I’m not 100% correct, but this is what I’ve heard over the years talking to programmers who do know what they are doing.

Yes it takes longer to design & code in the beginning, but then after the initial structure is in place, not only does it work properly, adding new features is then easy.

Wow, they don’t allow for unlimited tabs?

I know I have WAY too many tabs open in Chrome, but seriously, that’s my choice.

Well so far my list of questions in my thread have been ignored, so I won’t be moving over to Brave b/c I HATE being ignored.

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I think the thing you’re writing about is part of Dynamic Programming.
So, the main answer “why it’s not implemented?” is the time, the time which unfairly been not enough when the author(s) analyzed similar projects before created they own.
The time, which is needed for adding new features in conditionals when your project is an attempt to create something, that will be better than analogues, something that is driven by yours inspiration and not by work or money.
The reason to a problem is that world(society, e.g world of people, money system,etc) makes us to work, not by giving ability or inspiration, but giving needs, the true needs and the fake needs.
The angry, disappointment and expectations is slowing us down in solving this problem.
This problem is caused not by some stupid or fantastic things but because every human is different, and to make all of the people stay connected together, we need to have similar problems, it’s the only key to understanding, but, in this case, understanding is not enough, i think.
The key, in my opinion, is cooperation with everyone, so you could be sure, that you won’t slow down yourself or any other one with some kind of bad emotions :slight_smile:

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@BrowserMad,
We hear you and appreciate your feedback. I’d like to respond, if I may, to a few points you raised:

You’re not the only person to bring this up. In fact, it’s fairly frequent and when I respond to users who lodge this complaint, they’re generally understanding and amenable to the situation (thank you for everyone to whom this may apply!). Further, the next major browser improvement is the new tab page refactor.

If you visit our Github, you can see the project board containing collated issues and features we’re working on implementing. Note that this board was updated an hour ago (at the time of writing this).

I’m not certain whether or not you have software dev experience – if you do then this will serve as a reminder and if you don’t, maybe it’ll help you understand our position better.

It is a difficult balance to strike for any software company – especially ones with as few years “in the market” as we have – between the things that need to be done and the things that would be great to do. Unfortunately, at this time, both of these lists are fairly long (and detailed) and will take time to work through. Time, which is rarely on our side, is one part of the equation – the other is resources.

I’ve mentioned this to users before, not as an excuse or cop-out, but because it’s the truth: our team is small. Everything you see right now with respect to Brave –

  • the browser itself and the speed in which the browser operates
  • “the ungoogling” of the engine on the back end to ensure your data remains private
  • Shields/ad blocking/protections against online threats/malicious content
  • proprietary cryptocurrency (BAT) on the blockchain, as well it’s direct integration within the browser – Brave Rewards
  • Brave Sync which keeps your data synced across Brave installations on all your devices,
  • Brave Ads feature which pays you for engaging with privacy respecting ads
  • built in Tor connectivity

And a host of other features and fine-tunings that I’m leaving out were all done just a few years and by a team with less than 100 people. Google, Mozilla, Microsoft – even Vivaldi, have teams of hundreds - thousands of employees to work on/develop a litany of projects at any given time. So while we’d love to take a few devs and have them work on nothing but the NTP or “tab management”, we just can’t.

It’s not because we don’t care to or because we don’t hear or see the demand for it – we just can’t. It’s not that we will never do it, it’s not that we don’t want to give you these things, it’s just going to take some time. And, as mentioned above, we’ve achieved a lot in the short amount of time we’ve been around. Remember – we’re not even at Brave 1.0 yet.

I don’t mean to trivialize your frustration – it’s absolutely understandable and warranted from the context of a user looking in. But Brave is growing very quickly – that is, our user base is growing very quickly. Almost too fast. Subsequently, so do the requests for features, additions, bugs and fixes. One thing that is not scaling in this same way is the size of our team. Yes, we’re hiring people and our team is growing, but not fast enough to meet/match the trajectory of requests and things that “would be good to do”.

Please allow us time to stabilize ourselves and gain proper footing – I can assure you that we want a dope new tab page, scrolling tabs/tab pages, UI customization, and all the other “cool” features that have been requested (or, at times, demanded) just as much as you. And if it were possible to wave a magic wand and “make it so”, then it would be so – but until someone finds that wand, it’ll have to get done the ol’ fashion way – grueling, hard work by a group of dedicated developers and team members, doing the best they can to build the best browser we can.

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That’s awesome!

Thank you so much for taking the time and care for a detailed and fulsome reply. It is this kind of thing which builds user loyalty - no doubt I’m singing to the choir on this point.

Very pleased to hear of the next features being implemented - can’t wait for that to ship :slight_smile:

I’d happily volunteer to help out but I’m not an experienced coder of any sort - just a home ‘hobby’ enthusiast. I’ve worked in computer games but that’s not really the same thing at all. Wishing you and the team much success. I’ll stick around and see how Brave develops - despite my frustrations I was very impressed with the design and implementation… I love the fact that privacy is sufficient WITHOUT my having to install extensions, and done in such a way that it doesn’t break websites (Facebook doesn’t seem terribly happy of course… but who cares? haha).

Other positives are that the browser is solid (no crashes at all) and fast enough. I can use Chrome extensions but the code is being decoupled from Google such that we aren’t forced down their path. Love that! It can only get better from here :slight_smile:

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@BrowserMad,
No problem at all – always a pleasure to speak to users such as yourself. Additionally, while you may not feel you have the experience, remember that we are open source and you may at any time download our code and build the browser from source and attempt to edit/fix anything as you see fit. If you’re having trouble doing so – please let us know! Our devs would be happy to point you in the right direction or assist with the build process.

Everything you need to get started can be found on our Github:

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I can’t figure out how to quote you.

And yes I know how you feel. I’m an anarcho-communist (although I’m still studying the communism part), & this is EXACTLY WHY we need to move from capitalism because they force us to work so we can’t actually create anything that matters in life.

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@Mattches - can you explain to me why you are ignoring me?

You guys have ignored my thread & even here I mentioned that I was ignored & you ignored that too.

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@OurFreeSociety,
Can you be more specific with respect to where you’re being ignored and also expressing that you’re being ignored?

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So this is my thread from almost a week ago…

And I mentioned in this thread above in my last sentence that I was being ignored.