Why Brave is now my macOS default browser

But why Safari is still, mostly, the goto browser on mobile

I bought my first MacBook Pro in 2007, not long after the release of the Leopard OS. Although a long-time devotee of Windows (I’d been developing business software for the PC for 20 years by then), I was increasingly frustrated by the constant updates to the OS. At the time, I was working in Norway with slow wifi in the office and hotel, and I could quite easily spend two hours every day as Windows readied itself for me actually to use the laptop. I’d never seen myself as a Mac user, but I was pretty sure that anything would be an improvement. It was the best decision of my life, and over the years has proved to be the most expensive (three MBPs, two MBAs, three iMacs, a MacMini, five iPads, eight iPhones…the list goes on, but that’s another story)

Since that first purchase, right up until 2021, Safari was my browser of choice. I tried both Firefox and Chrome, but I couldn’t really get on with them, and Safari got pretty much everything right for me. It was fast. There were enough extensions for my needs. I liked the ability to sync bookmarks and passwords across devices, and I was comfortable with the user interface. It made sense, and it appealed to my need for good design in a product that I was going to spend an enormous amount of time using.

But when Safari 15 was released with Monterey, there were some big and more subtle changes that I really couldn’t deal with.

https://daringfireball.net/2021/10/the_tragedy_of_safari_15_quote_unquote_tabs

It’s true that many of the changes which caused me and others so much angst were eventually either reversed or made user tailorable, but by then, for me at least, the damage had been done. Whenever I opened Safari, I felt uncomfortable and slightly disoriented. It was time to change.

Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash

Fortuitously for me, I had already heard of Brave and tried it out. It was faster and more memory efficient than Chrome, on which it was based, but it still had the advantages of the Chrome ecosystem of extensions. Safari was becoming isolated from the browser extension industry because of the policies and charges that Apple was inflicting on developers, and many of my favourites were no longer being developed. Finally, Brave was already being hailed as one of the best browsers in terms of privacy.

Over the next few months, I gradually started using Brave as my default browser, hoping that perhaps, one day, I’d forgive the Safari UI designers, but these days, that’s increasingly less likely as Brave is now set as my default browser on all my Macs. Safari is still my choice on iOS devices, simply because Brave is still lagging on its mobile implementation, but things are improving, and I tend to use Brave on my new 12.9 iPad Pro. It isn’t, however, set to be my default browser on any mobile device.

Specific reasons why I’m now using Brave instead of Safari:

1. I prefer the user interface and user experience — I like having the option to theme my browser, but I tend to use the Brave standard theme and use one of their predefined colour palettes
2. My default new tab page is not available under Safari, and this is probably the key reason I’ve stayed with Brave. I use an extension called Qlearly 4.0 which is really just an alternative bookmark manager, but it works perfectly for me.
3. I love the implementation of Group tabs. I have four pinned sites set up alongside six tab groups, and both the appearance and interaction with group tabs are just so obvious — something I didn’t find with Safari. My tab groups are set up for:

• Social (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn),
• Medium (My profile, My stats, My notifications),
• KeepIt (sites to hang on to for a while),
• ReadIt (things to read when I’ve got time but don’t need to put in the reading list) and
• Invest (where I literally keep tabs on my investments)

But I would really like to find a way to refresh a group without refreshing all the other groups and tabs — if anyone has the answer, please do leave a note in the comments!

I make extensive use of the Bookmarks Bar, which is loosely aligned with the columns on my Qlearly page, although my whole bookmark collection really needs a proper spring clean as many of the bookmarks are never used anymore and aren’t likely to be in the future.

Other useful extensions I have set up are:

• Mate Translate which allows a full page translation of a page and supports dozens of languages — including, most importantly for me, Czech
• Reader View — strips out all the rubbish from a page so you can actually read it. I wish web page designers actually spent a lot more time thinking about how their pages look so that I didn’t have to do this. There is no need for large amount of white space between paragraphs on a page, and quite frankly there should be a maximum number of adverts allowed on a page — preferably zero! I have never used adverts on any of my sites and I never will

Very occasionally, I load up Safari on the Mac to see whether I might give it another chance. But without Qlearly for Safari, the chances of that happening anytime soon is increasingly remote. I just wish Brave Mobile better reflected the desktop browser.

Has anyone else given up on Safari? What are you using instead? Have you tried Brave? Was it a good or bad experience?

I am a semi-retired independent management consultant specialising in organisational change management and better Ways of Working. I’m from the UK but based in Prague in the Czech Republic. I mainly write about developing better ways of working, working in the Apple ecosystem, and my adopted home in Prague. I’m still fairly new to Medium (so please be gentle with me!), but if you’ve enjoyed this, please check out some of my other articles or even follow me if you’d like to be notified when I publish new material