undefined | Better HN

0 pointsatombender6y ago0 comments

Honestly, I've not found any speed difference.

Things I don't like:

* Autocompletion is much worse than Safari. See screenshot comparison [1]. The results are dinky and hard to read, and rarely include history or bookmarks. For example, in the screenshot, if I type "p", it matches bookmarks and history, but the suggestions disappear if I type anything more, despite the fact that "photothera" is a substring.

* Brave's tabs (though the tab overview is nice). Mobile is just too small to show tabs.

* The fact that the location bar is filled with widgets that give only about 30% of the space to the URL.

* Syncing of bookmarks, history, etc. seems to randomly stop working. It's never really worked for me. Syncing should just work seamlessly with iCloud, and not require the manual step that it currently does.

* "Find in page" doesn't work for PDFs.

Plus, the privacy bugs (see my previous comment) that never get solved. Being aggressive about cookies is one thing; breaking non-abusive sites without any workaround isn't acceptable.

I don't really use private mode, so that's not relevant for me. I also don't use Brave Rewards, so the big icon in the address bar is annoying.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/nygTJ9f

0 comments

csharp6y ago

Thanks for the verbose feedback. We seriously appreciate it. Wanted to respond to your items:

1. You are Comparing DuckDuckGo and Google suggestions (search engine), not Safari and Brave (browser). Change your Brave search engine to DDG, and results will be the same.

2. You can turn off the tab bar thing in settings. Safari offers this, just defaults to off.

3. We do have a lot of icons, you can hide the BAT icon if you don't use rewards (see settings).

4/5. Yes, those are bad bugs, we are currently rebuilding our syncing system.

I will raise this ticket and see if we can get some movement on it.

atombenderOP6y ago

Thanks, didn't realize there were settings for those things.

Not sure what you mean by DuckDuckGo. I don't use DDG in Safari, and changing to use DDG in Brave doesn't fix the issue.

I'm not sure if you looked carefully at my screenshots. When I type something in Safari, I get suggestions from searches, web sites, bookmarks, history, etc., all presented in neat rows. If I've visited a page with the title "Hacker News", then I can start typing "h", "ha", "hac", etc., and Safari will most likely suggest it.

With Brave, you provide those really dinky search suggestions, which are comparable to Safari's larger completions. I'm not happy about the presentation (small for thumbs, jumbled instead of neat rows), but at least they're there.

But the other suggestions generally don't come up. There seems to be some bug. I just tried it out. If I type "h", "ha", etc., I don't get anything at all. Not even "hacker news". On the other hand, if I type "kurt", I get the Kurt Vonnegut Museum page I just opened from HN. So who knows what's wrong there. It seems really flaky.

Edit: Ha, I went back and tried typing "h" again and now Hacker News does show up (which it didn't, previously; must be some async indexing going on here?). But not on "ha", "hac", etc. Just "h".

Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/qFJoo6g

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse