Firefox is the superior browser, but if you must use Chromium I strongly suggest ungoogled-chromium over Brave.
Everything in tech is shady. I think advertising is super shady. So I use an ad-blocker and move on with my life.
The bottom line is that your choice today is between Firefox, and something that is Chromium-based. Mozilla is a wreck of an organization, and their browser has compatibility issues all over the place because it's just not large enough to be relevant anymore (I'm sorry, it's true).
So people choose Chromium-based. If you don't want to go with Google or Microsoft, then this means you can use "ungoogled-chromium" or Brave. Brave is available on all devices (Vivaldi doesn't support iOS), and syncs bookmarks and passwords across all your devices.
So yeah. It makes a ton of sense for a lot of people to gravitate toward Brave. Why do I care whether their business model is showing NFT ads to people who don't turn that off? Just turn it off.
It's also not faster, if that is what you read in my comment: Chrome/ium and Firefox keep improving. And depending on what month and what benchmark, one will outperform the other. Slightly.
It could be anecdotal? For any of both browsers, though. E.g. some plugins/addons will slow down the browser significant. Or usage specific? Maybe one handles having 2000 tabs open better than the other? Or page-specific?
By visiting sites I visit often/everyday in both Brave and Firefox and comparing DomContentLoaded/Load/Finish timings in Developer Tools. Brave (but also Chromium in the past when I used it) is consistently faster.
Not much, but I noticed even before I measured, I did it to check if my feeling is wrong, and it isn't.
But this is the definition of "anecdotal". I can see all sorts of biases luring in your methodology. And the body is way too small to have any statistic meaning.
Again: performance, measured or perceived, may be bad for you. But that is completely different from "Firefox is slower than Chrome".
You cannot make such a statement based on measurements on a few websites where Firefox appeared slow to you.
Firefox don't play MKV videos, I use some site that has embed MKVs.
Slack calls didn't work on it (they workaround it). But I had trouble with other sites that use WebRTC in Firefox.
This is things I recall at this moment, but I don't want to have to use backup browser when something like this happens, so I use Chromium based browser and get on with my life.
The MKV thing sounds like a Firefox or codec issue, but I couldn't say. I haven't had issues with MKV or WebM, which is effectively a MKV profile, in many years.
