The Verge – Vlad Savov: “Readers of this august website may recall that a year ago, I lauded Firefox and its progress toward becoming a genuine alternative to Google’s dominant Chrome browser. As much as I liked where Firefox was going, however, I couldn’t stick with it over the long term. It wasn’t compatible with everything the way Chrome was, its extensions were different, and, for my way of using a browser, it was slower and less responsive. So I returned to Chrome after a few weeks of Firefox, but the urge to decouple my browsing habits from Google remained.

This year, I’m pretty sure I’ve found the ideal Chrome alternative in the Brave browser. If your reasons for sticking with Chrome have been (a) extensions, (b) compatibility, (c) syncing across devices, or (d, unlikely) speed, Brave checks all of those boxes. What’s more, it’s just one of a growing number of really good options that aren’t made by Google.. a word on why I’m trying to escape Google’s browser…I’m growing less and less comfortable with having Google know more and more about me. As an Android phone user, I’m already informing Google about my location (even with location history off, Google periodically pings my device’s location), my mobile gaming and app usage, my YouTube-watching habits, and my chronic failure to get off Twitter. Given that I do a large proportion of my job in a browser, Chrome fills in the rest of my daily activities for Google in a manner so comprehensive as to be disturbing. If I wouldn’t want a single person to know what I do every day down to the finest detail, I shouldn’t want a single corporation to have that information, either…”