Brave is a fork, not a Chromium reskin
I switched to Brave last year after 22 years of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.<p>This was purely for Chromium performance reasons (although it seems Firefox has made some major improvements recently).  I didn't like leaving behind a unique browser engine, which needs to remain a significant player.<p>I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave.  If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them.  I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one.  It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.<p>One year in, I've had no issues I can think of.  And now they have their own search engine, another net plus to the ecosystem.  Outside of things like Tor Browser, the privacy is about as good as you're going to get from a client.  In fact, you can open a new window using Tor directly in the browser.  I don't use their VPN but that's available also (Mullvad?).<p>I spend enough daily time in it that I would notice UI/UX/perf. problems ... I really haven't seen any.<p>YMMV