Last Updated on November 18, 2019 by cwl

I find myself running three different web browsers, which is borderline ridiculous, I know. Here’s a quick summary of what and why…

Brave

The Brave team has launched its 1.0 version of the browser. I’m using it a lot, although I have not done anything with the Brave Rewards feature just yet.

Pros

  • Brave has an extremely aggressive approach to ad blocking and content filtering. This makes for fast page loads, and uncluttered content.
  • Easy access to Tor. Tor allows true anonymous web browsing by masking your real IP address. Why would you need that? Well, for surfing porn sites, but forget that. Using Tor and DuckDuckGo, you might want to learn something about Islam without resorting to pro-Zionist web sites and filtering. Or maybe you want to look for some unbiased information about vaccine efficacy and risks. These are highly volatile topics, and it’s nice to know you can’t be tracked while you are poking around the web looking for information.

Cons

  • Brave has an extremely aggressive approach to ad blocking and content filtering. It’s broken some of my financial sites, and online purchasing can be a problem. You can turn off filtering for individual web sites, but I never remember to do that until after something breaks.
  • It has a primitive speed dial feature. See Opera below.

Opera

Pros

  • Not a big target for hackers, with less than 2% of internet users actually using Opera (according to W3Schools).
  • I love the Speed Dial home page. Opera first created this feature, and other browsers have emulated it. It just looks cool to me.

Cons

  • Older web sites and some eCommerce web sites may choke on Opera. I dimly recall seeing this happen, but I can’t remember the details. YMMV.

Firefox

Pros

  • An “industry standard”. If your web site works correctly with Firefox, it’s probably in good shape.
  • Very good developer tools, or maybe that’s because I am most familiar with Firefox dev tools. Opera and Brave also have developer tools, but I haven’t used them yet.

Cons

  • Sped Dial is available as an add-on to Firefox, but lately I have been trying to avoid adding any add-ons or extensions to any browser. Browsers already have a big CPU/memory footprint, and I don’t want to add any more “bloat” if I can help it.

Chrome

I don’t use the Chrome browser. (I am deliberately not adding any links here.) In fact, I try to minimize my use of any Google products. They already know too much about me, they have a cozy relationship with the FedGov intelligence community, and now they are trying to pull in my medical history. You need to make yourself look like a hard target to this outfit.

Summary

  • I use Brave and DuckDuckGo for all of my web searching.
  • I use Opera Speed Dial for often-visited web sites that I know work with the browser.
  • When in doubt, I use Firefox. This is my “go to” browser for eCommerce and financial sites.