@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.