I decided to transition to using Firefox as my primary browser on desktop. However, I still want a Chromium-based browser since certain things run better on Chromium browser than on Firefox. Not least of these things is the WordPress editor for The New Leaf Journal. I had been using Ungoogled-Chromium as my primary browser, but UG-Chromium is a bit troublesome for a secondary browser. I thus decided to install the next best Chromium-based browser, Brave, as my secondary browser. Brave is solid out of the box, but it has a number of annoying features that I wanted to disable.
For those of you who are not interested in Brave’s crypto “features” – you can turn them off in the “Wallet” tab in Brave’s Settings menu. In Privacy, you can disable Brave’s telemetry if you are so inclined. I personally opted to disable hangouts, Tor in private windows (I’ll just use the Tor browser if I want to use Tor), and Torrents (I have a client for that). I also turned off autofill in the search bar and set Brave to delete my history and cookies on close (I make site-by-site exceptions). Finally, I set Brave’s adblocking and Fingerprinting protection to Strict, added three filters to its adblock, and installed uBlock Origin with my rules (ported from Firefox) to use as a Script blocker.
Finally – Brave’s homepage is also configurable. Look for the “Customize” button on the bottom right of the homepage.