I Ditched Google Chrome For Brave Browser

2025-09-20

A few days ago my wife walked into my office and saw me using the DuckDuckGo search engine.

"What on Earth is that?" she asked.

"That" is the result of getting fed up with how terrible Google Chrome and Google Search have become.

A few months ago, Chrome stopped supporting the adblocker I used. That forced me to experience just how frustrating browsing the web is for like 90% of the sites I visited.

I also kept having to scroll past or collapse an AI overview in Google Searches. Even after getting beyond the AI garbage I would have to then scroll by four or five sponsored results to finally find what I was looking for.

Like most people, I've always just used Chrome and not thought much of it. Chrome has always just worked. Google Search has been the default search engine for as long as I can remember. Basically everyone uses it.¹

The adblock support and the AI overviews were enough for me to call it quits on Chrome and Google Search. The enshittification became too much for me.

I started looking around for alternatives.

I briefly thought about just defaulting to Safari since I'm using all Apple products, but liked the appeal of a Chromium browser since that's all I've worked on for years. Safari for whatever reason just never felt right to me. Maybe I never gave it enough time, I don't know.

Brave Browser had a lot of solid reviews, so I gave it a try and liked it enough to make it my new daily driver.

I've been using it for a few months now on my laptop and phone and It's been rock solid so far.

I turned off whatever crypto integration they offer you, explored a few of the search engine options and ultimately settled on DuckDuckGo. Of the default search engine options DuckDuckGo seemed to give me the best results with the least cluttered page, but I am open to alternatives here if you guys have them.

Just browsing the web and watching YouTube is a night-and-day experience compared to Chrome.

It's hard to imagine going back.

#productivity