@nellaiseemai, excellent question! I will address this directly, but I’m going to broaden the scope of your question a bit as I think others would benefit from knowing these things.
This is both a very exciting time for Brave users (and staff!). The transition to the new build/1.0, a Beta release, Developer release, and live “stable” build (Muon) may be confusing to users who may not have been exposed to the concepts of an open source project or the software development process. So I’ll take a moment here to (hopefully) clear up any confusion surrounding the multiple Brave builds, requesting support, and giving feedback:
So many builds - which one should I use?
If you were to look in our GitHub repository, you’ll notice that we have a repo for Browser-laptop
and one for Brave-browser
. These are the repositories for the Muon build of Brave (v0.24.0) and for Brave 1.0/Beta (v0.55.11 as of writing this) respectively. Within these repositories, you can view the release channels for each build of the browser. Each channel is, essentially, its own install of Brave and can be run in parallel with any other Brave build you have on your machine. We technically have more than 4 total channels in which builds are released on but I’m going to stick to the ones relevant to this discussion:
-
Developer Channel - Dev channel builds are (for the purposes of this discussion) the first build some new feature or design implementation will hit. Features seen here are usually experimental/unstable. These are features that are being implemented that aren’t yet ready for daily use. Once they are, they’ll be added to the Beta build.
-
Beta Channel - Builds on the Beta Channel have the new recently implemented changes that seem stable and are ready for further testing with a broader audience. More use cases means more tests for whatever changes were made allowing us to further refine them before they’re pushed to the release channel.
-
Release Channel - Builds pushed through the Release Channel are live, stable, operational builds of Brave - the “Main” channel. If you go to the official download page, this is the build you’ll be downloading. This is where our previous Muon build lives used to live.
In a couple weeks, the Release Channel switch from Muon to Brave Beta and subsequently be the “official” The Muon build has since been depreciated and bumped down from the Release Channel in favor of our Brave Core build download link. Soon there after, when Brave-core is ready, it will be moved into the release channel and the current Dev/Beta channels will become Brave-core Beta and Brave-core Developer.
Should I still be reporting/giving feedback for the previous Brave build?
Sure! Brave will continue to provide support for the Muon build for those who want to continue using it all the way up until Brave-core goes live. However, Dev/Beta build support and feedback are currently our priority and we are frequently pushing users to move over to Brave Beta. Given how close we are to releasing Brave-core, it would be inefficient for us to continue logging new issues and providing the same level of support for the Muon build - especially since Beta build addresses many of the known problems present in it.
Community will undergo a redesign of its own right around launch time in an effort to keep support and feedback better organized and clearer for users to navigate. It’ll also look real slick!
Hopefully this clears some things up. If you have additional questions don’t hesitate to ask.