Power tips on Brave (Chrome) when moving from Safari

Cool Workflows
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I’ve been on a vision quest lately as to what browser to use… I’ve been on Safari for a long time, privacy is paramount for me, but I found myself yearning more and more for the power and diversity of the Chrome extension ecosystem – and with iOS 14 allowing to change the default browser, I have been doing some back and forth, trying to find the right fit.

I have landed on Brave. The dealbreakers of the other ones were for me:

  • Firefox – blazing fast on Mac, but no adblocking on iOS, and some sites were not working right.
  • Safari – sad extension ecosystem with a few critical ones missing for me (SingleFile), and slow as hell on my 2015 iMac since version 14. (I’m tired to open Firefox or Brave every time I need this)

Brave had one major dealbreaker that everybody complains about (there’s an ongoing issue on GitHub), inherited from Chromium: if you have too many tabs open, they pile up on one another until you can’t see them. This can be solved by activating the “scrollable tab bar” flag in brave://flags
Maybe that’s an old trick, but it works perfectly (although pinned tabs end up pinned at the end of the scroll bar, making them less useful, but I can live with it).

Second dealbreaker I found how to deal with: by default, Chrome / Brave does not allow you to bypass expired security certificates like Safari does (and that’s an issue for me because my NAS throws that error when I try to log in). How to bypass: click anywhere in the error page so as to make sure it’s activated, type thisisunsafe (talk about a cheat code!), reload the page, and you’re in.

I’ve been looking long and hard for those answers, so hopefully they can be useful to someone here :slight_smile:

I’ll be missing Apple Pay in the browser and some autofill niceties, but at least Brave runs faster on my machine… Safari faster browser on Earth? Sorry, I don’t think so…

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So you’re using Brave on Mac and iOS? I use brave on mac and safari on ios. I really like having multiple profiles on Mac and I need to revisit profile syncing across devices.

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I use Safari on iOS and this is why I purchased BookMacster to sync my bookmarks between Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

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Yes, the Brave team has recently introduced syncing to iOS as well, so I have everything eveywhere. Which was my intent. :slight_smile:

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+1 for Brave.
The Great Suspender extension is a great addition. It suspends pages that you have open but haven’t interacted with .
That was the big issue with Safari for me. Sites that I visited and had the tab open would chew up CPU cycles even when I’m not on that site.

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I used it too, but I just found out that this venerable extension may have been passed to a malicious owner… https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2021/01/ditch-the-great-suspender-before-it-becomes-a-security-risk/ :disappointed: