I told friends to use Brave for almost three years.
When someone asked me what browser they should switch to from Chrome, “Brave” was my one-word answer. It blocked ads and trackers by default, the engine was fast and familiar, the privacy story was tight, and crucially — and this still matters — it didn’t require teaching anyone anything new. Install it, sign in to your Google account, your bookmarks come over, your passwords come over, your extensions come over, your aunt who is sixty-eight years old and still doesn’t fully understand that “the internet” and “Chrome” are different things can switch to it without crying.
I’m not telling people to use Brave anymore.
I want to be specific about why, because Brave is a real product made by people who have done meaningful work for the privacy ecosystem (Brendan Eich invented JavaScript and helped found Mozilla; the team has shipped serious privacy engineering for years), and the criticism isn’t that the browser stopped being technically good. It’s still technically good. The browser engine still blocks trackers well. Brave Search is, on its merits, a defensible alternative to Google. The Tor integration in private windows is genuinely useful. None of that has degraded.
What changed is that Brave has spent the last few years adding features that aren’t quite about privacy. They’re about a particular vision of what a browser company should do, and that vision turns out to be different from “be a privacy browser.”
The first signal was BAT. Brave’s cryptocurrency, the Basic Attention Token, was introduced in 2017 and was supposed to enable a new kind of advertising economy where users got paid (in BAT) to view ads, and content creators got paid (in BAT) when their work was viewed. As a thought experiment, this is interesting. As a product, it required adding cryptocurrency wallet functionality to the browser, then exchange functionality, then prompts encouraging users to opt into ads in exchange for BAT, then notifications about BAT balance, then features for tipping creators with BAT. None of these are bad things in themselves. But each of them is a feature added to the browser that has nothing to do with reading the web.
The privacy story used to be: “Brave blocks ads and trackers, the end.” It became: “Brave blocks ads and trackers, and also serves you its own ads in exchange for crypto, and also has a built-in wallet for the crypto, and also integrates with Web3 protocols, and also now has its own Search and its own LLM and its own VPN and its own video calls and…” The list keeps growing and the original promise — that this is a privacy browser — keeps getting diluted.
I started noticing this when I’d open a fresh install of Brave to recommend to someone and the new-tab page would show me crypto-adjacent content I’d opted out of multiple times, or a notification would suggest I “earn rewards” for viewing ads. I’d have to remember which settings to toggle off before handing the browser to someone less familiar with all of it. The bar for “easy to recommend to a non-technical user” had moved.
The second signal was a series of smaller decisions that, individually, were defensible, but cumulatively pointed in a direction. The brief 2020 controversy where Brave’s address bar autocompleted certain URLs (like binance.com) by appending an affiliate referral code without the user’s knowledge — a mistake that Brave acknowledged and reverted, but a mistake that signaled the product priorities of the company. The shift in marketing emphasis from “privacy” to “rewards.” The integration of Web3 protocols (IPFS, ENS) that arrived enabled-by-default and required configuration to disable. The repeated announcements of new features that felt like they were chasing the cryptocurrency cycle rather than addressing user-reported privacy issues.
None of these are deal-breakers in isolation. Together, they tell me what the company is becoming, which is an ad-tech company with a privacy browser as a delivery vehicle. That’s a different thing from a privacy browser.
The other shift, less about Brave and more about the ecosystem, is that there are now genuinely better options for the use case I was using Brave to fill.
Mullvad Browser launched in 2023, a collaboration between Mullvad and the Tor Project. It’s essentially the Tor Browser without Tor — same hardened Firefox base, same fingerprinting resistance, same privacy-first defaults — but configured to be your daily driver instead of your anonymous-research browser. It does not have crypto. It does not have ads. It does not have a built-in search engine pushing you toward a particular search product. It does not have a wallet. It does not have a built-in VPN trying to upsell you. It is a browser, full stop. It is, in 2026, the best answer to “I want a browser that takes privacy seriously and stays out of my way.”
LibreWolf is similar in spirit — a Firefox fork with hardened privacy defaults, no telemetry, and no commercial entity adding features that aren’t about reading the web. It’s not as polished as Mullvad Browser but it’s been around longer and the community is stable.
Firefox itself, with the right settings, is also defensible. Mozilla as an organization has taken its share of criticism over the years (the Pocket integration, various ill-conceived experiments), but the underlying browser is open-source, the engine is independent of Google’s Blink monoculture, and you can configure it to be substantially private. The friction is the configuration: out of the box, Firefox needs a half-hour of settings adjustments and an about:config excursion to be where you want it. But after that, it’s genuinely good.
The browser I use day-to-day, as of this month, is Firefox with Arkenfox user.js applied, plus uBlock Origin and a handful of other extensions. For people who want less configuration, I now recommend Mullvad Browser. For people who want easy recommendation to non-technical users — which is the slot I used to fill with Brave — I currently recommend Firefox with the privacy settings cranked, with a clear walkthrough of the settings to change. That’s more work than handing them Brave used to be. I think the work is worth it.
One thing I want to be careful about. I’m not saying Brave is bad. The browser engine is fine. The privacy defaults remain meaningfully better than Chrome. If you’re already using Brave and you’re happy with it, you’re not wrong to keep using it — most of the issues I described above are configurable away. What changed for me is the calculation of which browser to recommend by default to a privacy-curious friend. That calculation now points elsewhere.
The other thing I want to acknowledge: the privacy browser market needs commercial actors. Mozilla survives on Google search-deal revenue, which is its own complicated story. Brave is one of the few companies that has tried to build a sustainable, advertising-adjacent business model that doesn’t require selling user data to the same companies it’s blocking. That attempt is genuinely valuable even if I don’t like the product direction. I want there to be more attempts like it. I just don’t want to recommend the result, in its current form, to my aunt.
If you’re reading this trying to decide what to use:
- Easy recommend, non-technical user: Firefox + the Arkenfox basics walkthrough (intimidating-looking but skip to the “Privacy Quick-Start”) + uBlock Origin
- Privacy-first, low-config: Mullvad Browser
- Maximum control, willing to tinker: Firefox with full Arkenfox
user.js, or LibreWolf - Built-in Tor, occasional anonymous browsing: Tor Browser (still the right tool for this; not a daily driver)
- You like Brave and don’t mind the crypto stuff: Brave is fine, just know what you’re choosing
We’ll have full reviews of each of these in the coming weeks. If you’ve been using Brave and you’re considering a switch, this is the article I would have wanted to read three years ago.
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Mullvad Browser direct · LibreWolf · Firefox
None of the above are affiliate links. Mullvad doesn’t do affiliate marketing; LibreWolf and Firefox are non-commercial projects. We earn nothing from your downloads — included because they’re the right answer.