The only reason why Brave was cool to me was because of the speed it had. But after switching from Brave to Firefox, I don't think speed is a problem anymore.

I wouldn't say I'm brainwashed at all. I'd rather try a different browser than stick to Firefox, which (sadly) seems to be the token browser for the majority of FOSS enthusiasts. My primary reason for trying Brave was to avoid the invasive advertising and tracking in Firefox. From reading their extensive list of anti-fingerprinting measures, it seemed like well-placed hope.

I also find it hard to recommend a browser that enables Google Analytics, Adjust and Leanplum by default, without any sort of user confirmation. I did raise this on r/firefox, but my post got swamped with Firefox apologists.

Browsers definitely should not be creating new advertising subclasses, then enabling them by default. This is an issue with both Brave and Firefox. If the cryptography functions were not enabled by default, and caused no obstruction to my web browsing, I'd honestly be fine with it.

That being said, I've come to realise that my initial reason for using Brave doesn't seem to have stood the test of time. Thank you for your (mostly reasonable) reply.

You can turn it off in startup install which FF prompts

that’s interesting about the pushing sponsored links, never see this with ghacks userjs. one thing I did notice from running my dns through a kogger is that when you open a naked profile it goes beserk phoning home. for out of the box privacy, ungoogled chromiun is leagues ahead of firefox but I still use hardened firefox for competition reasons. if they crippled userjs I’d never use it.