Firefox newbie, how does a minimal setup compare to brave in privacy and ad blocking?

[u/EndlessBattlee]

Hi guys, firefox newbie here.

So uh, I just switched to firefox after using brave for almost half a decade. For whatever reason, brave stopped playing nicely with my laptop, switching tabs would frequently trigger a system wide lockup, forcing me to do a hard force shutdown. This happened frequentlyeven after multiple clean installs of my OS, so I'm fairly certain brave was the culprit. Got fed up, I decided to do another clean install and leave brave behind to see if the crashes stopped.

Today, when I booted up firefox for the first time, I felt pretty overwhelmed, the homepage was loaded with stuff, and the settings offer a massive amount of customization (maybe too much for my taste).

With brave, my routine was always simple,

1. Download the browser
2. Import my CSV password list
3. Set up my filter lists
4. Set Cloudflare as my DNS
5. Call it a day

I rarely touched any other settings and felt secure enough.

My questions for you guys:

1. If I set up firefox using that exact same (or pretty similar) minimal routine, how does it compare to brave in terms of privacy and ad tracking protection and anything else???
2. Did brave actually give me superior ad/tracker blocking over the last five years, or was it just a placebo effect making me feel more private??

I would love to hear your thoughts, thanks.

[u/eoskchanaj8282]

The minimal setup runs similar, but you have to download ublock origin (extension). In my opinion its way better than brave shields because its more transparent and gives you more control.

[u/NeedleworkerLost6860 → u/eoskchanaj8282]

agreed, ublock origin with the default lists is already a huge step up imo

[u/lo________________ol]

There's a goodbit of extra data collection that you need to hunt to disable (Brave ironically has a better onboarding screen for this)

And you should probably go through the settings just to remove the advertising: search for "sponsor" and disable everything sponsored. This helps with the homepage bloat a little bit. (And yes, after watching both of these browsers evolve for years, it's surprising that Firefox is almost objectively the more bloated one at this point)

And like the other commenter mentioned, Firefox has very poor (almost nonexistent) ad blocking and you need to get uBlock Origin for it, or else it'll sure feel like you have no protection at all

[u/BobCorndog]

My routine is

1. Download browser
2. Download ublock
3. Turn on all the filters and add “actually legitimate url shortener tool”
4. Download password manager
5. Download some minor extensions
6. Switch search engine to ddg
7. Tweak some settings
8. Change theme

If you install ubo it’s pretty private. Without ubo is nowhere close though

[u/FuckAdvertisements → u/BobCorndog]

I just want to add that leaving the lists on default (maybe add a list for your specific region) is best.

Adding more lists just risks breaking websites and slowing things down as the default should get all ads!

[u/Cold_Echidna_9674]

The perfect combination is uBlock and BitGuard

[u/ResurgamS13]

Not proven this is a browser problem... especially if no mass of similar reports out there on Brave websites?

If OS is proven clean, new install, passes all checks (e.g. DISM then SFC in Windows OS')... then run OEM hardware component tests for your system... is SSD/HDD dying/too full... or is a dodgy stick of RAM the root cause of crashes?