Description: "100M+ people use Brave every month. Is it the best browser for developers, or am I in a cult? Tell me your browser and defend it in the comments."
Docs. Stack Overflow. GitHub. A YouTube video I'll "watch later" (I won't). Three tutorials I opened to "quickly check something" two hours ago. And a localhost project that has been broken since Tuesday.
If my browser were a person, it would be asking for a raise, a vacation, and probably a therapist.
So today I want to ask the question every developer secretly has a very strong opinion about:
Browsers have been fighting since before some of you were born: The 90s: Netscape and Internet Explorer go to war. The web becomes a battlefield. 2004: Firefox shows up and reminds everyone that browsers can be good. 2008: Chrome launches, and "fast and simple" becomes the new standard. 2016: Brave appears, co-founded by Brendan Eich, the person who created JavaScript. Yes, the same person. The guy who gave us [] + {} also gave us a privacy-first browser. 😂 2020: Edge switches to Chromium, and suddenly "Microsoft's browser" is a serious option. Today: Most of the web runs on Chromium, with Firefox and Safari holding the line as the other engines.
Every browser on this list exists because someone looked at the existing options and said, "I can do this better." I love that. It's also why this discussion never ends.
🦁 I use Brave. Here's the honest case. The ad blocker is built in, and for me it's the best I've used
No extension to install. No extension to update. No extension asking permission to "read and change all your data on all websites" (which, let's be honest, should make us all a little nervous).
Brave Shields works from the first launch. It blocks ads and trackers, and it upgrades connections to HTTPS where it can. Pages load faster, the clutter disappears, and I stopped feeling like I was reading the internet through a casino window.
My honest take, not a lab benchmark: after Brave, going back to a browser full of ads feels like going back to dial-up. 😅
You can tune it per site. Click the lion icon in the address bar and you get a dashboard of what was blocked on that page. The first time you see the number on a news site, you will not be okay. 😳 It feels lighter on RAM
Every dev knows the moment: Open a few tabs. Hear the laptop fan start to sound like a jet engine. Check the task manager. Watch your browser casually eating gigabytes like it's a buffet.
On my machine, Brave with an unreasonable number of tabs feels noticeably smoother. Less junk loading (ads, trackers, auto-playing nonsense) means less junk running in the background. Your mileage may vary, so tell me if yours is different. I actually want to know. (More on that in a minute. 👀) The cult following is real 🔥
Brave now has over 100 million monthly active users. That's not a niche browser anymore. That's a movement.
And Brave people are loud about it. Ask one why they use Brave and you'll get a TED Talk. (Guilty. 🙋 I'm literally writing one right now.) It's Chromium under the hood, so my dev life barely changes
Chrome DevTools? Same familiar feel. Chrome Web Store extensions? They work. Switching didn't mean relearning my whole workflow. I got the privacy upgrade without the productivity downgrade. The extras you didn't know you wanted
Built into the browser, no setup: 🕵️ Private windows with Tor for extra anonymity when you need it 🔍 Brave Search, an independent search option 🤖 Leo, a built-in AI assistant 🧰 Fingerprinting protection and cookie controls
Not everyone will use all of it. But having it there is a very different feeling from hunting for five separate extensions.