I used to use Firefox in the past but I used it passively. Then I discovered Brave and I loved it, at that time.
Now I got back to Firefox and this is my list of killing features of Firefox that makes other browsers meaningless to me.
You can make screenshot of full pages
The screenshot feature of Firefox is really powerful to get things available offline and on phone.
Just by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + S makes you able to select, grab elements, make a screenshot of the view, or making a screenshot of a entire page.
This is so usefull!
You can customize the top bar
I love the fact that I can almost entierly customize the top bar.
I personally prefer to get as much space on the webpage and as small space on the rest of the screen, also because my computer’s screen is really tiny.
So you can get it compact change the place of everything, add new cool elements, I love it.
The reader mode
I discovered the reader mode at the perfect time, when I needed to read a very long page. I clicked on this icon I never saw, and this was exactly what I needed!
I don’t like reading on most websites, the background is white, the font is not adapted, the position is widescreen, there are a lot of sidebars, ads, etc.
With the reader mode I was surprised about the customization of the pages that is very useful and easy to use at the same time.
Then finally, what I use all the time now, the TTS function. The voice is weird, but when you find the correct speed and read it at the same time. It just makes the reading process much easier than ever. You can hear it and read it at the same time. This is incredible to me.
Firefox is so lightweight compared to Chromium based softwares
This was the original reason why I switched, Firefox use a such tiny part of CPU compared to other browsers!
The web devlopper options looks so nice!
The devlopper options have cool animations, powerful usage, snippets, almost a real editor in the browser.
Brave’s problems
The Brave company have done some bad things to the users in their back, the thing that first frustrated me was the sponsored background when you open a new tab. I didn’t activated the Tokens and I stil got ads. This go against their vision of ‘You are not product’.
Also they auto-completed the urls when you wanted to go on affliated links automatically.
Without counting that the Brave adblocker is meaningless compared to Ublock Origin. Not enough options according to me.
And I think customization is something that is missing on Brave in general.
What I miss from Brave
I don’t miss a lot of things, but if I needed to list a few that would be:
- The speed that was really incredible, I try to reproduce it using Ublock Origin
- The torrent client in Brave is really useful, you don’t need any other apps and no need to go out the browser’s comfort zone.
Vivaldi is Chromium based and has build-in screen shot options. https://help.vivaldi.com/guide/key-features/take-a-screenshot/
I used Vivaldi and it is a good browser. I just don’t use it because it is not FOSS.