Even if I agreed with the “block ads and then show our own” business model, which I don’t, I will never install a web browser, or any other application, that includes a cryptocurrency wallet.
Sadly, this also includes Signal at the moment, but I won’t be moved.
"Yes it comes with awful stuff but you don't have to use it" is not an argument. There are plenty of alternatives without that awful stuff in the first place.
It's awful, in your opinion. Clearly plenty of people enjoy it, and it provides a simple means of monetization that's far more on the up-and-up than the typical alternative of - 'spy on users, profile them endlessly, secretly monetize them.'
I also am unaware of any reasonable alternatives with similar functionality and compatibility. Single click access/tweaking of a native ad blocker, auto-https, script blocker/toggler, anti finger-printing, and much more is just awesome. And for better or for worse the Web is built to target Chrome and so Chromium based remains desirable, even if it is clearly becoming more onerous to decrappify it over time. It may eventually prove unsustainable, but we're not especially close to that point yet and at that point a fork would probably still be more desirable than a new root.
I'd amend this list to place anything that can run UBO (the real version, not kneecapped lite version that now runs on chrome) at the top. AFAIK that still only includes Firefox and derivatives.
Purchase referral code swap thing? As far as I know, nothing like that has existed. There's a ton of FUD "reporting" about Brave out there intended to drive users away.
There was a function that'd suggest a campaign partner while typing things in the address bar (eg. "binan" for binance.com, it'd show an ad for binance as one of the dropdown suggestions). For one day, it had a bug that if you wrote a complete url (eg. binance.com) in it and that matched a campaign partner, it'd give the ad as a suggestion. The bug was fixed within one day of being reported and the whole ad suggestion thing turned off by default.
As far as I know, they've never done anything to referral codes within websites. The current browser does have a function where if you right-click a link, it gives you an option to copy a clean link by stripping tracking nonsense out of it. Eg. X links just become plain links to tweets and so on.
Wasn't their entire original premise the Basic Attention Token? It was some kind of crypto that you'd buy and then the browser would block ads for you and instead pay a small amount to the website owners. Problem was if the website owner wasn't part of the program they'd just keep the tokens for themselves, something like that.
OK that does ring a bell. The whole project always seemed a little on the scammy side and I wasn't sure what the browser actually brought to the table that Firefox didn't, so why even check it out?
Much better performance on less powerful hardware (I don't care about synthetic benchmarks, do your own testing and you will notice the difference).
Vertical tabs. Built-in tor support, built-in efficient adblocker that supports ublock origin rules, but is complied into native code.
More anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting measures (in total, and only counting those enabled out of the box). Configurable shortcuts for absolutely everything. Probably something else I'm forgetting.
Plus a bunch of crypto bullshit, but it's disabled unless you make an effort to enable it.
https://privacytests.org/
I would say
#1 LibreWolf
#2 Brave