Brave vs. Firefox vs. Safari?

Just checked my stats. Pretty impressive.

Nothing can be quite as frictionless as Reading List, but Instapaper and Pocket are both great. To me, they’re actual read-it-later services though, not “hold this for a sec” type things like Reading List.

The most direct replacement is probably a shelf app like Gladys, which I should really try to make better use of in this context, come to think of it…

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I park stuff in Reading List all the time and forget to go through it, resulting in months of stuff I have to delete :upside_down_face:

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Three options:

  • Just use Bookmarks. Save it to a folder called “Reading List” if you don’t want to mix that in with your regular bookmarks.
  • Use the One Tab extension. Funny thing, I’ve had that extension installed on Chrome/Brave for literally years but never made much use of it. I only started using it more heavily in the past week and holy crap it is fantastic.
  • I’ve been using Diigo as a read-it-later service. Diigo is like pinboard.in with highlighting and annotation.

None of these will help you with offline reading, if you need that.

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Thanks for the suggestions.
I ran across the cryptically named Reading List extension, and it works very well. Lives in the address bar, shows up in the right-click menu for links, etc.

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Does it let you view saved pages on the iPhone or iPad?

Dreams dashed. It looks like no.
Probably best to use a Reading List bookmark group as you suggested, and wait for ios <-> macos sync. At least for things I want to be cross-device. Reading List would still work for local items.

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OK I’ll bite, what are the extensions that you use (the plural you as in everyone in this thread) that keep you from using Safari?

I only have 2 extensions active in Safari, clip to DEVONThink and 1Password.

In Firefox all I ever use is the old SQLite Manager and I stay on an old rev of Firefox too because of that.

Never use Chrome except when I was trying ti as a desktop version of LambTracker but since that is now deprecated I’ve been really tempted to remove the app from my machines entirely.

Then again, seems like a lot of you use reader view or reader list. What for? I’ve always hated that if I mistype sometimes things end up in that stupid reader list in the Safari Sidebar and I lose them. For me either I have time to read the web page or I need it as reference. I don’t save web stuff to read for later unless I feel its worthy of saving as a reference document.

So what am I missing?

Just Read. Does the same thing on Brave/Chrome that Reader view does on Safari. I read a lot of news articles. Formatting on newspaper and magazine websites are famously awful. Also, they’re bloated with javascript and other adware. Just Read cuts down on the clutter.

1Password. Doesn’t seem to work with Brave but I have it anyway.

Buffer, for scheduling to social media.

OneTab. Saves and closes open tabs. Because of my habit of reading news and magazine websites, if I have more than about 10 pages open, my entire MacBook Pro slows to a crawl. (I have no objection to ads in principle – they’re how my paycheck is funded – but the entire existing ad ecosystem needs to be burned to the ground and the soil sown with salt.)

Two extensions for BookmarkOS, for saving and viewing bookmarks. Because Brave does not sync bookmarks to iOS, BookmarkOS is how I keep bookmarks. And I may stick with it even after Brave gets iOS support for syncing; I just like it.

Diigo. My current read-it-later service.

And the Evernote Web Clipper.

I’m too lazy to provide links. I assume you know how to use teh googlez if you see something you like on my list.

And now I’m reviewing the list here and wondering if I can go back to Safari.

I’m a safari guy. It just works better in MacOS. the integration with Messages for two-factor authentication is amazing, it’s prettier, it’s more energy-efficient, and I find that it’s just nicer to be in.

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Safari is a nice browser. Firefox is more secure and Brave is more secure and also faster. I am currently playing with Brave and I hope that the iOS sync will get out of beta soon. In case Brave will be able to keep Google out of its security features, it will be soon a clear winner for me.

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I detailed some of the several dozen extensions I use on Chrome/Brave here:

I’m Using the 1PW extension for Brave without issues. (macOS)

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2FA via text, and auto filled by Safari isn’t really 2FA, just more steps in the process.

Scenario: if you walk away from your laptop, someone could open Safari, then whatever website by using your dog’s name password and your 2FA via SMS because the code is coming to the same device.

If you use an app such as Duo mobile to generate codes or receive push notifications, then you would presumably have the phone or watch with you, and the person wouldn’t be able to access the site. With the phone, you can just tap the code which is copied to the clipboard, then paste it in on macOS.

Perhaps there are situations that I’m not aware of, like requiring SMS?

Yes, it works fine for me too.

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I get it, but it’s really nice and convenient. :joy:

I used to do some front end development, and had to use Chrome for that. Now I work in a back-end team, and I’m 99% Safari; really the only thing I need Chrome for is the in-house extension with all the links to the damned timekeeping systems, Confluence pages with weird names and stuff like that which could be converted to a web page full of links, but won’t be because someone actually spent time developing the extension, so now we have to use it…

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FYI, for reasons unknown, under Safari 12.1 Apple has disabled the ability to disable hyperlink auditing, AKA click-tracking. Although Apple implements protection against cross-site tracking, this is a mystifying development that does permit sites to track what you click on.

Chrome also disabled that functionality, but Brave and Firefox still have the protection on by default.

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Hi! I just switched to Brave as well and would find this super useful. Just joined the forum and am trying to figure out how to message you. Thank you!

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If you click on Extension Options in the plugin you’ll get a pop-up which lets you customize the CSS. It also show a link to this Github page which has user-created custom stylesheets. I use a slightly modified version of the dark-gray-theme.css that’s there (IIRC I basically changed the font and font size and maybe also the paragraph widths, I don’t remember).