Serious Discussion I intercepted Brave's network traffic for 48 hours

[Miravi]

You're perfectly right.100% is impossible. One thing is to take a holistic approach. Brave has some powerful tools and features to prevent tracking, but paradoxically, the more settings you have, the higher the pobability of making a mistake that gives you a "shape" and somehow give more details about you, than you wanna hide.

Brave has also a few scandals about their browser and the use of user data.

In the end, you need to combine experience, knowledge and the need to learn new things and method, so that you can make the best of what you have. And in this case, it concerns tracking, adblocking and privacy.

What scandals are there about Brave's use of user data? These are the three major controversies I'm aware of: early plans for ad replacement (2016), the crypto referral code (2020), and a Tor DNS leak (summarily fixed and apologized for).

Brave hasn't had a privacy scandal based on substance as far as I know. Brave Search is even independently audited for privacy every year.

 

[Miravi]

Brave doesn't promptly close issues and leans toward keeping many open as part of a community-oriented approach. A lot of feature requests, suggestions, enhancements, etc. stay open. For example, I just pulled up an open issue where someone complained about the icon not being stylish enough, and it kept them away all this time.

It can happen that someone reports a crash in a particular setup or similar experience without properly tagging it, but when I search for open issues without the type:bug or labels:bug, crash, regression, perf (performance issue), or perf-regression (performance regression)—it accounts for 8,418 of 10,350 open issues that don't immediately sound buggy according to type and labels. Some reported issues are niche or otherwise can be difficult to reproduce.

There's always a lot of work to do with a browser, especially when you serve so many platforms.

For further perspective, Chromium's open issues are so numerous that the tracker doesn't even give a number of pages. They're also more likely to merge duplicates and tidy the entries in other ways. It fluctuates, but you can guess that Chromium has as many as 50,000–80,000+ open issues at any given time: Chromium open issues

Brave's Chromium fork is the most heavily divergent one in the market. Whereas it's estimated that Vivaldi (closed-source) adds 1–2M lines of custom code to a largely vanilla Chromium base, Brave applies over 5.7M lines of custom code and surgical alterations to Chromium.

 

[oldschool]

For further perspective, Chromium's open issues are so numerous that the tracker doesn't even give a number of pages. They're also more likely to merge duplicates and tidy the entries in other ways. It fluctuates, but you can guess that Chromium has as many as 40,000–70,000+ open issues at any given time: Chromium open issues

But is that true for stable versions? And since Chromium is the development platform for Chrome one would expect lots of issues, especially with all the different platforms. Just my hunch due to my lack of technical background.

 

[Miravi]

But is that true for stable versions? And since Chromium is the development platform for Chrome one would expect lots of issues, especially with all the different platforms. Just my hunch, and I lack the technical background.

Absolutely. Browsers are massive pieces of software with a lot of code. They're also full of bugs, whether severe or minor. Triage is vital to working on them in the order that makes the most sense. The magnitude of Chromium's ecosystem with downstream vendors and forks adds to the drama of contributing many issues.

Issue trackers are also used for tracking things like feature requests and development underway.

The point is, don't let these browsers' issue trackers scare you. A whole lot of people successfully use Brave and obviously Chromium.

 

[lokamoka820]

I was recently testing Brave browser to see if I could use it as my new daily browser because it's a 'private browser', but the unreliability of sync (I read about many issues with its sync mechanism) made it unsuitable for me (I have a lot of bookmarks and resources that I want to sync continuously). However, after reading this discussion, I started thinking about using it as a browser for my personal accounts because it's a 'secure browser', so I don't need to sync in this case since these are basically my email sites, and its biggest advantage is that I won't need any extensions because it has a built-in ad blocker. I was considering continuing to use Microsoft Edge for this purpose, but I noticed that Brave receives updates faster, which makes it more secure, I believe.

 

[Miravi]

I was recently testing Brave browser to see if I could use it as my new daily browser because it's a 'private browser', but the unreliability of sync (I read about many issues with its sync mechanism) made it unsuitable for me (I have a lot of bookmarks and resources that I want to sync continuously). However, after reading this discussion, I started thinking about using it as a browser for my personal accounts because it's a 'secure browser', so I don't need to sync in this case since these are basically my email sites, and its biggest advantage is that I won't need any extensions because it has a built-in ad blocker. I was considering continuing to use Microsoft Edge for this purpose, but I noticed that Brave receives updates faster, which makes it more secure, I believe.

Brave is the only widely used browser with true P2P sync, which I've heard people say is okay but not great. It's obviously meant to help support the focus on privacy, but it's likely not as responsive as centralized sync servers.

Hopefully that improves. My personal experience with Brave is quite good after allowing the product to mature over the years.

The adblocker is powerful. It's similar to DNS blocking and offers even much more right in the browser. It really shines on Android—everything is optimized for real efficiency while the adblocker works like magic to save battery and cut network usage.

 

[lokamoka820]

Sorry if this isn't the right place for this question, but how can I remove the white space on the page after Brave's ad blocker blocks the content? Is there a built-in filter to do this?

 

[Miravi]

Sorry if this isn't the right place for this question, but how can I remove the white space on the page after Brave's ad blocker blocks the content? Is there a built-in filter to do this?

Brave's default filters include cosmetic filtering and try to handle this automatically, especially post-2024 procedural cosmetic filtering updates. I understand this can improve when you set "trackers & ads blocking" to aggressive. I have it set to aggressive myself.

If even aggressive mode doesn't handle it, a custom rule adapted to the site in question may be necessary. Something like this would hide the element containing the whitespace: example.com##.ad-container

A stubborn gap might require a more rigorous rule for collapsing it.

 

[oldschool]

how can I remove the white space on the page

Just FYI, these are called placeholders.

Like @Miravi, I always used Aggressive when I used Brave and no issues.

 

[lokamoka820]

Brave's default filters include cosmetic filtering and try to handle this automatically, especially post-2024 procedural cosmetic filtering updates. I understand this can improve when you set "tracker & ads blocking" to aggressive. I have it set to aggressive for myself.

If even aggressive mode doesn't handle it, a custom rule adapted to the site in question may be necessary. Something like this would hide the element containing the whitespace: example.com##.ad-container

A stubborn gap might require a more rigorous rule for collapsing it.

I set "tracker & ads blocking" to aggressive, and overall, the placeholders disappeared. They only appear on one site, but it's not a big problem.

 

[lokamoka820]

Brave is the only widely used browser with true P2P sync, which I've heard people say is okay but not great. It's obviously meant to help support the focus on privacy, but it's likely not as responsive as centralized sync servers.

I was reading the Sync FAQ and found some interesting information stating that Brave now uses servers to synchronize data, which in my opinion is better than P2P synchronization:

How long will my Sync data be available on the server?

Your Sync data on the Sync server will be available as long as one of your devices is actively using it. Server data which has not been accessed in 12 months will be permanently deleted. Local copies of the data in your browser will not be affected by this automatic expiration of the server data.

 

[Miravi]

I was reading the Sync FAQ and found some interesting information stating that Brave now uses servers to synchronize data, which in my opinion is better than P2P synchronization:

Thank you for sharing. When I've read overviews on Brave, the P2P sync was always prominent. I'm not an expert but do some reading here and there. Doing a search can still bring up mentions of the old WebRTC-based P2P implementation.

When I looked into the specs of Sync v2, I discovered that it's encrypted end-to-end using AES128-CTR-HMAC via scrypt-stretched BIP39 passphrase from your sync code. The no-account, encrypted, and private nature of the feature still has people oversimplifying it as P2P.

Sync v3 has been in development since late 2025. You can catch a glimpse of progress on the Github issue tracker. Here's an example: [Sync V3] - "Sync everything" functionality detail · Issue #50262 · brave/brave-browser

 

[Miravi]

@Jonny Quest might be happy to know that Brave has been working on a coveted Containers feature like Firefox's over the last nine months:
Containers · Issue #46349 · brave/brave-browser

It's not at all an easy feature to incorporate into Chromium forks, but they're moving heaven and earth to satisfy community requests. Containers is already technically present in Brave Nightly as an experimental flag, but full isolation and sync aren't complete yet.

 

[Jonny Quest]

@Jonny Quest might be happy to know that Brave has been working on a coveted Containers feature like Firefox's over the last nine months:
Containers · Issue #46349 · brave/brave-browser

It's not at all an easy feature to incorporate into Chromium forks, but they're moving heaven and earth to satisfy community requests. Containers is already technically present in Brave Nightly as an experimental flag, but full isolation and sync aren't complete yet.

Thank you for that update, it's the main feature (as well as customizations) that I loved about FF, but with the slight glitch on this forum, continue to use Brave with satisfaction (being logged out of Google).

My "Containers" are in using Chrome's Profiles, which I have one used only for Banking (with F-Secure Banking Protection extension) logged out of my Google account, and another Profile logged into my Google account for checking email, my YouTube account, and using Gemini Plus (which isn't allowed to access my Gmail account or GDrive). It would be nice to eventually use Brave to do that

 

[lokamoka820]

@Jonny Quest might be happy to know that Brave has been working on a coveted Containers feature like Firefox's over the last nine months:
Containers · Issue #46349 · brave/brave-browser

It's not at all an easy feature to incorporate into Chromium forks, but they're moving heaven and earth to satisfy community requests. Containers is already technically present in Brave Nightly as an experimental flag, but full isolation and sync aren't complete yet.

Thank you for sharing this information. I just started using Firefox containers the day before yesterday, and I installed Zen Browser yesterday for testing because its workspaces make better use of Firefox containers. I'm happy to hear that Brave Browser will incorporate this feature.