God I wish chrome didn't remove manifest v2 
Here is the list of things that piss me off about firefox:
- It is dogshit slow
- It eats up a ludicrous amounts of RAM, which I wasn't expecting since it's one of the main things people make fun of chrome for
- It crashes constantly
- It tries to push it's "AI" bullshit on me despite me turning it off on multiple occasions
- It puts ads on my home page
- It needs to be relaunched regularly because at some point it becomes too laggy to use. It even stops loading pages altogether
- "Restore previous session" feature doesn't work half the time so restarting the browser is absolutely terrifying
- Profile management is a mess
Are there any alternatives? Is Brave any good?
Your entire post sounds like something one of my developers would type out after spending a half hour trying to figure out how to install a new piece of technology. As I tell them, your issues are probably due to a misconfiguration issue.
I use Firefox personally day to day and have very little issues with it. I'm going to point by point rebuttal:
Slow, don't know what you mean, I use it every day. Do you perhaps have other add-ons or something running in it that's causing it to slow down or maybe sites that don't work appropriately?
Firefox uses less RAM on average than Chrome, but a lot of your any of the Blink browsers. It is true that it uses less RAM, but there are other builds that are even leaner. I use it to maximize the amount of RAM I have access to on my system so I can run virtual machines in my professional career.
What AI bullshit are they pushing on you? I didn't even know Firefox had AI features. That's how little it bothers me and how little it actually comes up.
If it's crashing constantly, there seems to be a problem with your setup and not necessarily the technology itself.
Yes, their ad model is annoying, and the fact that they have ads to support themselves suck, but they have to make money somehow, and nobody else is paying for it
I don't relaunch my Firefox and use it to the tune of 50 plus tabs for 30 plus days straight with little issue. The new integrated sidebar tabs make this really nice.
I've literally never had the restore previous feature never not work for me, but you could also just install a session manager extension of which there are many if that's not good enough.
I will fully admit, profile management is a total wreck on this browser, so I won't actually complain about that point.
I'm not sure you should use any alternatives. I'm not entirely sure you can handle a browser correctly. However, I think Vivaldi would probably fit many of your pain points along the company embracing anti-AI.
Careful though, I think they have ads somewhere on their site too to support their browser.
Link to blog:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/
Vivaldi wouldn't be my first chromium-based browser choice. Still too many privacy issues vs other browsers:
https://privacytests.org/
That's fair. I consider the privacy issues, but I really, really hate the user interface of Google Chrome itself and Brave is basically a copy and paste of their UI.
I like Vivaldi for all of the additional features it offers users. I only use it for work-based stuff, so the privacy stuff doesn't really bother me since my company's already monitoring all of that or when I need a Google-based browser for whatever reason.
If privacy's a major concern, then I would probably just go to like, librewolf which is developed by the community to be as privacy forward as possible.
You can also just add a few add-ons to make it more privacy-focused like no script and no cookies and ublock light.
Yeah you seem like you know what the deal is. I basically posted that for anyone reading along in the thread. Quite a few people on this site have no clue about privacy and its kind of my hobby horse.
You know, it's kind of a bit sad that people don't understand the privacy aspect of the internet. I wish people did.
I understand, though, that people are busy and that privacy is just one of the many, many things we all have to worry about.