It isn't a "practical" thing, it is a mental thing. "flossing my whole mouth feels overwhelming, so I'm not going to do any of it", vs "I just need to floss a single tooth, that is easy". Sure "just grow up and do it" sounds nice, but learning to build habits that generally feel unrewarding when starting out (e.g. working out, learning instrument), is extremely difficult for some people (e.g. me).
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.
We don't collect your browsing data, and it isn't proxied through Brave. I am unsure what preloading information you found. All of our configurations are open source, so if there is something particular you are looking for, it is visible. We are also comparing browser defaults here. However, our adblocking approach is built directly into the browser using a Rust library and can function faster than a Chrome extension.
What do you like about Safari that iOS Brave is missing? We are quite a bit faster than Safari, and our private mode is more aggressive against things like cookies and writing data to disk.
(iOS engineer at Brave here)
All iOS browsers are based on webkit. WKWebView, which is what we use, does have full access to content blockers. This is how we do ad-blocking, HTTPSE upgrades, and script blocking.
Apples rules are a huge pain. Exception handling gets extremely complex (block all urls matching regex R, on domain B and C but not on subdomain D.B). I have not seen anyone yet able to handle the full breathe of the EasyList format.
To get around the 50k limit added by Apple, you must use multiple lists, however domain exceptions must be included in the same subset as the parent rules, since rules do not combine once compiled.
Also, dynamically whitelisting a domain is annoying since you must remove all of the lists form the webview before loading the page. HTTPS-Everywhere is even worse to get operational using Apple's content blocking lists.