A bit late to the party (had your post saved), but I’m of the opinion that no web browser has it all and that no browser is completely free of drama.

I can’t comment on the performance issues you’re having, but you’re free to switch to any search engine you like in the settings of Brave just as you would with any other browser.

Brave is open source. Unless there exists compelling evidence of malicious code being added (and no, the much exaggerated affiliate link drama doesn’t count imo), the argument that Brave is funded by an organisation that we don’t like means absolutely nothing.

That said, Brave offers:

• Built-in ad blocker aka Shields
  • Which will continue to work as it does now after the inevitable MV2 removal
  • Set to ‘aggressive’ to enable first-party filtering
• CNAME uncloaking
  • CNAME cloaking is a technique increasingly used to circumvent ad blocker extensions including uBlock Origin for Chromium
• Optimised for privacy out of the box
• Removes tracking parameters from URLs seamlessly as you browse the web
• Completely de-Googled
• Consistently outperforms Chrome in every online benchmark
  • Confirmed in my own testing with three passes each
• IPFS support
• WebTorrent support
• Crypto: Wallet, ENS, Tor, Rewards, etc
  • Personally disabled all of these
• Sites generally work as they do in Chrome
  • Brave sends the same UA header to sites as Chrome
• Vertical tabs (work in progress)

Small quality-of-life changes/features that I appreciate:

• Relevant tabs are opened next to the current tab
  • In Chrome, relevant tabs are opened after the last tab
• Mute per tab by clicking on the loudspeaker icon
  • Chrome only lets you mute an entire site from the context menu
• Force paste
  • You know those sites that don’t let you paste into input fields?