I’ve been using Brave Search supplemented by Startpage for the past 2+ years. When I search for something, I want to get results for credible webpages, not a summary of unknown quality. I liked the previous AI inclusion because it was instant, didn’t take up much space, and I could quickly navigate to the websites referenced in it, but with the new feature it takes up more space, is slower, and not really what I want out of a search engine.
As soon as the feature was rolled out I disabled it in settings, but the AI button stays visible, I get autocomplete specifically for Answer with AI and I get frequent notifications to try out the new AI feature. An opt-out toggle should not mean that I still am pestered to use the feature I opted out of.
This is really annoying, and I’m probably going to end up switching to Startpage or SearXNG or something.
Some images (opted out of AI features):
Brave buys into hypes a lot. They built blockchsin stuff into their browser, even set up their own cryptocurrency, and now that nobody really cares about that anymore I’m far from surprised they’re trying to go all in on AI.
Like with the blockchain stuff, it’s a decent browser if you disable all of the weird stuff it comes with. I find Brave to be a good browser despite, not because of, the focus of the company behind it. One checkbox usually isn’t enough, there are multiple checkboxes in different places to really get rid of their investor attracting features.
I don’t know about any notifications, though. The moment the browser sends me a notification about Brave search, I remove that crap from my devices.
At the risk of seeming to throw shade; why use Brave at all if you’re going to switch off all its unique features?
Yeah, at that point I feel like using vanilla chromium would give you a better experience.
I mostly use it because there are still websites out there that don’t work on Firefox.
Out of all the Chrome forks I’ve tried, Brave is still the best in terms of privacy protection and regular security updates. I disable the weird crypto stuff and ads but the rest of the browser is still pretty good.