Micro: Brave or Ungoogled Chromium

Recently I was thinking to myself, should I be recommending people Brave browser or Ungoogled Chromium. Myself, I use Firefox, however I acknowledge that most people probably want to stick with Chromium based browsers just because they are familiar, and if they are moving from Chrome, the experience should be more or less the same. That being said however, which Chromium based browser is the one to recommend. Personally, I have been and still recommend Brave just because it is a more complete out of the box experience. While I don’t (and probably never will) fully trust Brave, I can’t deny that their browser is leagues more private than Google’s Chrome. Brave also has out of the box support for extensions and widevine DRM, so you can effectively use Brave as a drop in replacement for Chrome. On the other hand there is Ungoogled Chromium. Ungoogled Chromium is literally the most private browser possible. It is Chromium with all the google forcefully removed, but because of this, it lacks many features like the webstore or widevine. While Brave lets you disable these features, they flat out come disabled on Ungoogled Chromium, and to enable them is a process. As well, the main killer for me to recommending Ungoogled Chromium is its lack of a search engine by default. I have no idea why they chose to make it “No Search” by default, but the majority of people will just load up a browser and expect it to be able to search out of the box. And how would they be able to search to figure out how to set the search engine? To be honest, Ungoogled Chromium is still probably the better browser in terms of privacy, but Brave is what I have to recommend because of its out of the box usability. Expect a blog post in the future about me grappling with being a Firefox user and explaining why Chromium is better in every way…