0:00 One of the browsers that I recommend a lot is Brave browser. Not because it's the most private and secure browser out there, but because it's a noticeable improvement to Chrome and is very familiar to Chrome users while still offering really solid benefits. However, the biggest thing I hear from people and honestly one of my complaints as well is that it is bloated. So today I'm going to show you both on desktop and on mobile how to de-bloat Brave and make it as clean as possible. And I'm going to walk you through the different features and what tends to bloat the browser the most. This is being recorded on March 21st, so of course anything down the road there might be new features or new things, they might be in different places, but I hope the principles apply to anything. And I want to say that this video is not for or anti-Brave, it's just a common complaint that I receive for people who even like
0:47 Brave, including myself. It can be bloated. I think that's a real thing. So let's go ahead and dive into this fresh new installation that I just put in a VM here. This is up to you if you want Brave to be your default browser. Let's say you do. I do think that matching system theme is the way to go for most people. If you're more privacy respecting, definitely do not opt into that. And of course they let you know right here if you want to opt into any other telemetry. Now, I think this looks okay, but it is so much bloat. So let's start with the home screen before we dive into the settings. First, I don't like any of this. I don't use Brave rewards. So rather than doing these things one by one, go to customize right on the bottom right here. And this is like the settings for your dashboard, your home screen of the browser. So first, disable sponsored
1:34 images. That's probably one of the most obnoxious things. And they still will give you fun Brave backgrounds that are not sponsored or ads. You can also just disable background images altogether, and it'll just give you this generic gradient in the background. Though you can always upload your own as well, but I actually like Brave's background. I like this and there's enough of them to keep it unique. I like Brave stats, but you can disable Brave stats here and it won't show you the neat things, but I actually like them and a lot of people like them and I don't fully consider that bloat. I don't like my top sites being shown personally. So I typically disable this to have a cleaner dashboard because I never just open a new tab and click a top site. I normally go straight to my Omni bar, but that's an option. Brave news is not something a lot of people like. And the weird thing is that even though you don't turn it on, it's actually still on the bottom here.
2:23 So you can actually turn this off in the Brave news section. You have to click down here and say no thanks, even though you never turned it on. And then you'll see it disappears from your dashboard. You go to cards rather than disabling all of them. The thing is Brave has introduced new cards since I first started using it. So if you want something a little more foolproof, rather than disabling them individually and then one day they add a new one, just turn off cards here. Don't do it one by one. Do it there. And then of course there's search. You can disable the search, which is personally what I do. I think it's very clean. I go straight to the Omni bar anyway. So I don't need a two like search engines, but you can have that down there. Very personal preference. But as you can see, this is already a huge improvement. Now before again, we go into the settings. There's still some more clutter up here. So the biggest one is going to be their tokens.
3:10 What I recommend doing is just right click on that and click hide Brave rewards icon. And that's now gone. Now you can go to the sidebar as well. And this is another place I think is actually pretty good by default. So there is like the Brave talk. You have Brave wallet, bookmarks, reading lists. What I would recommend is everyone, this is extremely personal preference. So you're going to go through each thing in the sidebar and see if you need it. And you right click remove, remove, remove, remove, remove. And then you can add whatever you want in whatever order in your sidebar. But the sidebar isn't that cluttered. It's just a matter of what features you actually like. Now if you remove everything, you'll see the sidebar option is already gone from the top. But if you add something back, then the sidebar is back. But you can also just hide sidebar icon
3:57 altogether. And that way you can still bring up your sidebar with keyboard shortcuts or by auto hiding the sidebar. That's another way to do that. Brave wallet is another thing that's a crypto thing. So if you use it, then keep it there. Otherwise just right click and hide. Same thing with their VPN. Not many people use their VPN. I don't really recommend their VPN. So you just hide the VPN and same thing with their AI. You can just straight up right click and hide that as well. It's really up to you how much you want to customize the top. But if I open a new tab window here, you're going to see that this is extremely clean and you could even hide this if you wanted to. And also once you start adding bookmarks, that'll show up as well. And if you want to hide the bookmarks menu, you just right click on the menu, go to show bookmarks and you can say never or always. But right now it's only on on the new tab page. But you can set it to never. And I think this is
4:45 really clean and something I really enjoy. So this already gives you pretty quickly a really clean Brave experience that's extremely de-bloated. And if you start adding extensions, then they can start filling the space up here. But let's go into the settings because there's actually a lot more stuff. First, if you're using multiple Brave profiles to separate your traffic between multiple users, which can be yourself, it can be like personal work, etc. You can pick avatars. You can pick colors. So definitely go ahead and feel free to have fun with that, make it your own. I also disable the bookmarks button. So you're going to see that's over here in the top left next to the Omni bar. I keep it off because if you go to our website, techlore.tech, you can just do control D or command D. And that's a way to add a bookmark. So I use a keyboard shortcut for that. But if you
5:32 of course have the bookmarks button enabled, then you don't have to do the keyboard shortcut. And then you can just boom. You can also hide the buttons I already hid. You can do that here in the settings in appearance or you can do it the way I already showed you. Auto-complete suggestions, I think, can actually get very bloated very quickly. I don't like quick commands. I don't like the Leo AI Assistant in my Omni bar. I like just using maybe browsing history and bookmarks. And I even remove top sites personally. And sometimes on some browser instances, I just outright disabled this. So this is going to be if you start typing, "Hello, my name is." Typically, I just want brave search suggestions and maybe my browsing history. But that's about it. And I feel like the default can be a bit bloated depending on how or what you consider bloat to be. In terms of content, one thing I actually really enjoy about Brave but is extremely personal preference is
6:20 their speed reader functionality. So if I go to our blog, techlore.tech, and I go to our posts, we haven't posted here in a while, but let's go to this one. This automatically went into their speed reader function as you can see up here. And you can customize the fonts. You can customize if it's centered. You can customize the color. Like here's the dark mode. This matches system theme. So if your system was in dark mode, there would be a dark mode version of this. So if you're someone who really prefers extremely minimal experiences on the web and you have Brave's ad blocker on, and you're using speed reader, you're going to get a very clean minimal experience. I really like speed reader. And it's something I typically enable by default, but it's really personal preference. And even if you have it off, if I refresh the page, you're going to see this is what our page looks like. It's actually not that different from speed reader because we have a really
7:07 nice minimal blog, but you can always just click up here on the top right and you get the speed reader view as well. So you can always do it manually or you can do it automatically. So I personally really like aggressive tracker and ad blocking. This is up to you if you want to show the number of blocked items. This is by default, it's going to have this number up here. So it's kind of your call if you think that number is useful, but you can actually hide that and it's going to get rid of the number. One quick thing, if you have the number hidden, you can always hover over brave shields and you'll see that it shows you the number when you hover over it. So it's kind of a middle ground without you needing to click it. And of course there's the advanced controls, which I think are really nice, but I normally keep the advanced controls hidden, which I think is a more minimal experience. The next place to go in your shield settings is content filtering. And I think that it's really good to enable fanboy annoyances plus UBO annoyances.
7:54 That will just to make the web a little bit cleaner by getting rid of things like cookie popups and some other annoyances on the web that are already crowdsourced by these projects. In data collection, they do a daily usage ping. It is actually very privately done, but you can disable that if you want to also opt out of that and make your browser even cleaner. Now the web three tab is probably going to be a big one that is pretty polarizing. So honestly, even if you never touch this tab, unless you're using web three features, it should never actually pop up or do anything. But if you want just want to be sure, you can just set it to like no fallback, no fallback, keep these disabled. Now if you really don't like the web three domains and you just don't want to deal with it, you can just set it to disabled. Same thing with ENS and same thing
8:41 with SNS. Very personal preference. Some of you might use these features, but if you don't, you can just leave them off, but they probably won't get in the way if you don't use them anyway. So with Leo, again, you can kind of just disable everything if you want. And you can delete all the AI conversation data. You can add new models, but of course if you don't want it, then you can just turn everything completely off and it won't even show in the UI. Search engine, the only real thing here is to obviously pick a search engine you enjoy that you feel is less bloated. I find brave to actually be a very clean minimal search engine overall, but some people like DuckDuckGo, some people like StartPage, they make it very easy to pick different search engines. And search engine suggestions is very personal preference. I think they're useful. I use them, but of course, if you find those to be too much, you can just disable it. And then the rest of the stuff isn't
9:26 really exclusive to Brave, right? Like these are things from Chrome, like Autofill, payment methods. I actually disable all of this stuff. I don't normally like my browser to save my addresses, my credit cards, my, I don't use the password manager that's built in. So I just go into settings here, offer to save passwords and pass keys, and I just turn this all off. I think this is the best way to do it. And normally you use something like your password manager extension is instead to have your passwords, or you just have a dedicated program. And with that said, this is my minimal desktop version of Brave. Now, before I show you my mobile experience, and we're going to go over to the phone, I wanted to shout out our sponsor, redact.dev. redact.dev allows you to de-bloat essentially your digital identity online. Seriously, if you have an old Facebook account, an old Reddit account, Discord, it doesn't matter what it is, they support over 30 services,
10:15 and they allow you to on device, delete all those services. They never get your credentials. You get to do this locally on your system, and you can schedule deletions. So things from like posts older than a month get automatically deleted. And it does things by like keywords, you can do it by content type, like only delete photos. And you can also delete DMs. It pretty much does everything you need to do. My favorite personal feature that I've been using is I've been deleting posts older than a month on my personal master on page is it archives those as well. So it doesn't just delete them, but it can actually save them locally on your machine so that you have a copy of your data. If you're like me and you like these more minimal experiences, you'll definitely enjoy redact.dev. They pretty much clean up your online footprint by letting you delete
11:00 all of your posts by your rules. And we have a 10% coupon right now that you can check out down below. That is just TECHLORE10. And that gets you 10% off their plans. Check it out in the description. And now I'm going to show you how to debloat Brave on mobile very quickly. In front of me, I have a fresh new Brave installation on iOS. A lot of the features are similar on Android, not perfect, but it's just easier to record things on an iPhone. First thing to do is kind of like on desktop, scroll down to Brave news and click the X button. And then you won't be able to scroll down anymore for Brave news. I just got this random pop up. I don't know why it wasn't part of the setup process, but for me it was a pop up. So again, just opt out of this to make Brave better, if you want to, I suppose. But then if you go into your settings, we have a few things here. So they
11:46 have the my actions. I typically start there and I would definitely customize this first. Personally, I don't really use the actions. So I can just delete all of it. But I feel like that's not normal. Like most of you will probably have a use case to have like a create PDF or like a night mode or send to your device. This is kind of your call. Go through this and see what you're actually going to use and add that to your actions. But I actually like it to be very clear. Now, if we go into the settings menu, obnoxious, X that out. Definitely you can set this as your default browser. If you go into shields and privacy, it's going to be very similar to the desktop. So I like to set this to aggressive. And then there's also the auto shred, which is very similar to their forgetful browsing feature. So anytime a site tab is closed, it will shred the data. Or when you close the app, it'll shred all the data. So I think something like site tabs close
12:33 is a pretty good middle ground, but you can also just leave it off kind of like desktop as well. You can go into content filtering and I would enable the fanboy annoyances. And this is also where you can update your list to make sure they're up to date. If you go into privacy hub, there's the show shields data, which is the same thing we saw on desktop. If you turn that off, you're not going to get your stats on the front, which some of you might like. I would definitely turn off show VPN alerts, especially if you don't have the VPN, though it sounds like you won't get notified for it anyway. Similar thing, you can disable that little daily ping. Brave rewards is off by default, but the icon is still shown, but we'll cover soon how to get rid of that. Leo, you can disable in the address bar, which is definitely going to give you a more clean experience. There's nothing to do in the brave firewall VPN. We already took care of that brave playlist. I think is actually an extremely useful feature. It allows you to like save YouTube videos and other media offline and
13:23 play them in the background, all those good things. But if you don't use this, then you can get rid of the quick access button. You can get rid of the notification badge, which shows up when it senses media. So you can get rid of all that. I actually think this is like the biggest selling point of brave on iOS. So I will not be getting rid of it, but that is something that you can use to de-bloat. Brave translate is also here is off by default. As of right now, you can enable it if you want translations, but otherwise it's not really doing any harm. And then web three is the same thing as desktop. It shouldn't actually impact you if you're not trying to actively use these services. But if you really want to be safe, you can just disable all of them. Search engines is the same as desktop. You can change your search engine. You can change what's recommended to you. So you can like disable browser suggestions, but keep search suggestions or vice versa or both,
14:10 whatever you'd like to do. You can change your app icon. And I would argue that most of these are not less bloated than the default icon. But obviously this is very personal preference. And some of these are actually pretty cool. Now, funny enough, instead of putting it in the rewards section, they put it in display, which also kind of makes sense. But this is where you're going to hide a brave rewards icon. So that's gone. And then the new tab page is where you're going to go in and turn off sponsored images. So click default images instead. And then you can hide things like the privacy hub, which includes your stats, or you can hide your favorites. I hide favorites. I don't ever use that feature, but I do like the privacy hub. Now in the appearance menu for display, I always recommend using just automatic because whether you use light or dark, it'll follow. But there is a cool night mode that brave uses, which tries to force all websites to be essentially
14:56 dark mode. It isn't the best thing. Sometimes there are sites that break. So I leave it off for that reason because a lot of sites I access actually still follow system theme. So it doesn't matter. But that is something to play with. And some of you might find that a much cleaner experience, very personal preference, almost done with mobile. There is the top and bottom bar. I prefer bottom bars. It's more easily accessible, especially as phones are way too big nowadays. And then we have the tabs bar, which you can customize to your liking. And then I would recommend disabling the logins and passwords personally and using a dedicated password manager rather than this. And that wraps up Brave on mobile. And that's it. No need to make this video anymore bloated. If you enjoyed it and you like this peaceful looking brave browser, give this video a like, subscribe to our channel and definitely check out this video where I cover my top 10 privacy tools that I use
15:44 on a daily basis. Go check that out. Thank you all. And if you like what we do, support us in the description. And I want to thank our sponsor, Redact.dev, as well as our sponsor, Notesnook. See you next time on Techlore. [BLANK_AUDIO]
