user.js VS brave-core

I don't know about Chrome based browsers but if you are using Firefox you can try user.js from arkenfox [link] or from pyllyukko [link] (I personally recommend the first one because they have a great wiki), you just put the script to your Firefox profile directory and it will spoof your screen resolution, link referrer, user agent, etc. (Remember to manually edit the file to suit your preferences, otherwise it may delete your history and cookies!). Also you can try User-Agent Switcher and Manager [Chrome] [Firefox] it is open source and lets you change your user agent to whatever you want. You can view your browser information on this website: https://deviceinfo.me, IMO this is a great website for identifying your browser's privacy issues.

I don't know how this one compares to Arkenfox, but from my limited understanding, it seems it's more/less of an out-of-the-box Arkenfox experience.

I recommend pyllyukko's hardened user.js https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/

I've been using the user.js script based on https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/tree/relaxed for a few years now, but today I noticed that it hasn't been updated for quite a while.

If you're that worried about privacy you should probably change your Firefox to one of these templates.

Already tried it. Pretty nice but I prefer hardening Firefox on my own (which just means copying and pasting this user.js accordingly and applying some extensions )

Unrelated but about Brave and interesting to me: I recently found myself having a large upstream project that I need to maintain some custom patches for, and there's a need for deeper customizations and I worry that my rudimentary system of applying .patch files will turn into an unmaintainable nightmare of merge conflicts after every rebase. I was thinking about possible solutions, and it occurred to me that Brave being Chromium-based must have this same challenge but an order of magnitude more difficult, so I looked for their code to see how they solved this issue.

It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].

Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one.

[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/13737

(Incidentally, that PR number is not quite elite. :)

I disagree that it's lip service Brave has a ton of engine level privacy patches https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

To my understanding you can't match it with just js extensions.

Only firefox on the highest security mode comes close I think?

Or ungoogled chromium? (brave has most of their patches IIRC)

Are there other options that have this number of patches?

Chromium is not 100% Google's forever and always, though they do currently lead the way, and with the most used/backed fork.

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/19476

They have much more changes than just compile flags. Here's the repo where they maintain their patch set: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

Brave Private Ads toggle controls just Push Notification ads at this time. So, if you are still seeing Push Notification ads, that would be incorrect. However, it's normal to still see New Tab Page image ads, and/or other ad formats. We are introducing a new UI that helps you better toggle on/off specific ad units, and removing the "Brave Private Ads" toggle that can be confusing: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/18938

Yes, being fixed. Github at https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/18922