I’ve been using Brave Search supplemented by Startpage for the past 2+ years. When I search for something, I want to get results for credible webpages, not a summary of unknown quality. I liked the previous AI inclusion because it was instant, didn’t take up much space, and I could quickly navigate to the websites referenced in it, but with the new feature it takes up more space, is slower, and not really what I want out of a search engine.
As soon as the feature was rolled out I disabled it in settings, but the AI button stays visible, I get autocomplete specifically for Answer with AI and I get frequent notifications to try out the new AI feature. An opt-out toggle should not mean that I still am pestered to use the feature I opted out of.
This is really annoying, and I’m probably going to end up switching to Startpage or SearXNG or something.
Some images (opted out of AI features):
I mostly use it because there are still websites out there that don’t work on Firefox.
Out of all the Chrome forks I’ve tried, Brave is still the best in terms of privacy protection and regular security updates. I disable the weird crypto stuff and ads but the rest of the browser is still pretty good.