Amerika

As an unabashed fan of Brendan Eich, and someone appalled by his dismissal from Mozilla Corp. for political reasons, I had high hopes for the newish Brave browser. In fact, I spent several months holding out for the updates to it, hoping that they would fix the many problems that plague this browser.

It would be nice to have an alternative to Mozilla, after all. While Firefox is a great browser, the Leftist convergence within that organization makes it unsupportable both politically and economically, since organizations that “go political” are usually the ones that have also lost focus and are casting around for a new pseudo-purpose to attract customers. It is kind of like how when rock bands are really out of ideas, they make a political album because you can convince people to buy it because of “the message” or the idea that they “should” buy it.

At first, Brave seemed promising. The adblocker works better than most browser add-ons, the logo is great, and the installation process was easy. But then, problems emerged. For the first time in fifteen years, browser crashes became a daily part of life. Certain pages just exploded Brave. And then, it became clear that there was a pattern of glitching: every five seconds or so, the browser seized up as if caught in a loop, and about three times a day, it began consuming so much memory and processor that it had to be restarted. The problem is that these glitches happen every day.

So, cue the updates. At first, there was the hope that these problems would be fixed. Other people reported the same thing, both on Windows 10 and Linux, but it seemed that nothing could be done, because the next five updates did not fix any of these problems either. Loading up the bookmarks menu took thirty seconds at times, with another fifteen seconds to make changes. Routinely the browser froze, and crashed if typing continued.

This is the worst browser I have used since the early days of Mosaic. It seems competent, but then it crashes or freezes, or worse, just glitches so that certain controls on a page (but not all) are non-functional. The ad-blocking is great, but that can be done in Firefox or Chrome with a plug-in, so the utility of this browser seems dubious.

It is unfortunate to report that this is a good product with certain glitches that are so profound that they make it a total failure. Many of us wanted this to succeed, want Brendan Eich to succeed, and wish for more alternatives in the browser market. Those are all legitimate, but the fact is that the browser must also work as a browser; ideology alone is not enough.

Tags: brave, brave browser, brendan eich, mozilla