I’m especially concerned about it being somehow broken, unwieldy, insecure or privacy-invasive.
Case in point; at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser. Out of the available options I gravitate towards Brave as it seems like the least bad out of the bunch.
Unfortunately, their RPM-package leaves a lot to be desired and has multiple times just been awful to deal with. So much so that I have been using another Chromium-based browser instead that’s available directly from my distro’s repos. But…, I would still switch to Brave in an instant if Brave was found in my distro’s repos. A quick search on repology.org reveals that an up-to-date Brave is packaged in the AUR (unsurprisingly), Manjaro and Homebrew. I don’t feel like changing distros for the sake of a single program, but adding Homebrew to my arsenal of universal package managers doesn’t sound that bad. But, not all universal package managers are created equal, therefore I was interested to know how Homebrew fares compared to the others and if it handles the packaging of the browser without blemishing the capabilities of the browser’s sandbox.
P.S. I expect people to recommend me Distrobox instead. Don’t worry, I have been a staunch user of Distrobox for quite a while now. I have also run Brave through an Arch-distrobox in the past. But due to some concerns I’ve had, I chose to discontinue this. Btw, its Flatpak package ain’t bad either. But unfortunately it’s not official, so I choose to not make use of it for that reason.
At least in the privacy community, Brave isn’t super popular. It feels more geared towards the “hyped crypto early adopters”. Brave inclusion in privacy guides has always been controversial.
Brave is ultimately an advertising company, they base their business model in ads. And everyone knows how bad that can turn.
Ungoogled Chromium on the other hand takes patches from brave and other Chromium based browsers, removing every bit of telemetry and giving you the cleanest experience you can get on Chromium, without relying on a shady company.
Seems more like FUD, but sure.
In the past it was simply dismissed due to reasons mentioned here. I don’t have any qualms against Ungoogled Chromium, so I’m not opposed to using it if the stated reasons have been cleared since. But I’ve never got any confirmation on that.