I just updated the browser and am very pissed off at the result.
The entire reason why I started using Brave was because other browsers kept inflating the whitespace in menus and in the bookmarks toolbar. Lo and behold, this latest update is ridiculous on that front. And there are no options to roll it back! There are no options to specify this size!
I don’t know the term for this, but I’m talking about changing the margins between items in the menus, vertically, and also the kerning between icons in the bookmarks bar. The latter doesn’t seem to have changed except you added a stupid “create tab group” that I have no need for, and no ability to remove!!
How do you all (by all I mean all web browser devs) not understand this problem? How is it not an option?! Why is it OK to just keep inflating these margins and not provide an option for us to specify the number of pixels?
If I have a long series of bookmarks.. I get used to scrolling down so far to find certain often-used ones. Within bookmark folders, I know where certain bookmarks are via the distance. You f’ with that “muscle memory” when this stuff is updated. And it doesn’t look better! It never improves the situation for me personally. It always messes me up. It does not increase readability. It makes it harder to find stuff, every single time.
Like I said, the original reason why I went to Brave was because you were behind chrome and firefox on this inflation. If I could find a browser that just gave me control over this, I would switch.
What I want is for it to display like other apps, not have its own margin settings. What I want is for it to be consistent, not constantly increase every half year or so. If you insist on changing it with updates, then expose that variable as a setting!!! Allow us to keep it the same instead of forcing us to just adapt to a worse GUI every time the devs have this whim to increase it, for inexplicable reasons.
Right-click on the bookmarks toolbar and click Show tab groups:
For the spacing issue, can you share a screenshot of what you’re seeing? As far as I can tell, the spacing between bookmarks – both on the bookmarks toolbar and in the dropdown – looks the same as it always has.
Right on. I got rid of that new “create tab group” icon. Thanks for the tip.
The bookmarks.. how am I supposed to show you this when it’s all bigger now? I have no ability to show a before/after. It can’t be because of a windows update as I’m on win 10 and there haven’t been updates in a while and there won’t be ever again. 
Upon relaunching Brave, the changes were in effect. I’ll paste in what I have now and you’ll have to take my word for it.
It’s certainly bigger. It’s noticeably displaying less items on the screen now. It increased by at least a pixel though I don’t know by how many.
Note that I only updated the browser because some movie streaming sites started refusing to work without doing so. I don’t know how long it’s been since I last updated. It may not have been terribly recent. But this has definitely happened to me before since I initially installed Brave.
Just wanted to make sure that the spacing wasn’t different that what me or any other user is seeing. What you’re showing appears to be accurate to what I’m seeing on my end.
Not entirely sure what to tell you here. The change may have come from simply updating the UI font/typeface or may have been inherited from something changed in the underlying Chromium engine – hard to tell and looking through the release notes for the last few updates, I don’t see anything explicitly mentioning a change in spacing of these elements.
You’re welcome to open an issue for this on our Github or submit a feature request for it here on Community but I feel confident that it won’t be prioritized particularly highly. Additionally, implementing an entire browser setting for a particularly niche functionality like this is highly unlikely and disproportionate to the amount of work it would take.
OK. It may be inherited from chromium.
I mean I have other software that either never does this or it maybe happens twice a decade. They don’t feel the need to change how the menus appear every year or so. They generally use some kind of OS-specific default. But for some reason, web browsers seem to think this is necessary to do often. It feels like make-work to me.
I understand that it’s unlikely to change, but like I said, if I ever find a browser that puts a premium on not f’ing with the GUI constantly, I will switch to it. I’m not a fan of GUI changes just for the sake of change. I’m a fan of consistency in GUIs.
Thanks for your help.
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I also want to say that I find it kind of silly, the notion that it’s too much work to expose this as an option. Maybe if chromium isn’t doing it, that makes it harder, but I’m a dev. Adding options is not hard to do, especially when you have a jillion other options. That’s part of why this is maddening to me. It’s a count of pixels or something that goes into the formatting. You all would just have to expose that number field instead of making it a constant. That being said, the last time I tried to figure this out was with chrome, with its plethora of hidden options, none of which was for this.
