I don’t trust Brave one bit. Its whole approach reeks of a bait-and-switch (think “we won’t share or sell your data” pre-9/11 Google). Its founder is a massive homophobe and crypto-bro, and I have a massive learned distrust of homophobes and crypto-bros.

Moreover, I see no reason to use it when we already have far superior options (Firefox).

I agree with this distrust. Something about the browser just feels off to me.

I stick with Firefox for browsing, Ecosia for searching, and Mozilla VPN

Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees! I actually forgot about this one. I’ve been planning to try it.

I use it sometimes and works fine. Not great, but it’s fine for not super specific stuff

I just tried it, and my one concern is that it appears to tailor its results based on locational data, which is a feature I try to avoid. Like you said, I might use it sometimes, but I’m sticking with Startpage and SearXNG instances as my primary search engines for now. I’m adding it to my list though, so I can test it out a bit more. Maybe there’s a setting I haven’t found yet.

Gonna give SearXNG a spin then, since even though “I don’t have anything to hide talk”, privacy is a right we’re better off upholding and I want to use services that respect it.