Brave Launches Paid, Bloat-Free "Brave Origin"

I can’t see how Brave Origin makes any sense. Brave has not substantially innovated in the browser space. Their most innovative feature, which made it appealing at the time it was released, was Brave Rewards. They attempted to invert the ad revenue model, in which you would get paid for your ad attention. And this is where their meaningful innovation ends. This leaves them with a Chromium wrapper with many Brave-esque features, none of which are unique to Brave but also conveniently installed out-of-the-box, which might be appealing to a particular crowd. Brave was further popularized as a browser with privacy-first defaults, and this popular notion still holds: that Brave’s whole appeal is that it’s a private out-of-the-box experience, as evidenced by several posts in this thread. I give that to Brave, because Firefox doesn’t have private defaults. The irony is that Brave now seems to present Brave Origin as a premium experience. What is interesting about this is that their idea of a premium browser is to make their browser less like Brave and more like a generic chromium wrapper. See: > Brave Origin users will continue to benefit from our industry-leading privacy, adblock, and speed (via Brave Shields), as well as regular software updates, Chromium patches, and security and privacy improvements. Beyond this core, Brave Origin will affect the following features: > > > Leo > News > Playlist (iOS and desktop Nightly and Beta) > Rewards (which also disables browser-based Brave Ads) > Speedreader > Stats like the daily usage ping, crash logs, and privacy-preserving product analytics (P3A) > Talk > Tor > VPN > Wallet (which also disables Web3 domains) > Wayback Machine > Web Discovery Project > What, then, is left of Brave? At this point, what is the difference between Brave and another one of the thousands of chromium wrappers? Further, if you consider the debloated version a more “premium experience”, I would argue that there is no reason for you to enjoy Brave as a browser, or even the company as a web browser vendor. Because if your idea of an ideal experience is Brave without Brave, why even use Brave? If you want an out-of-the-box private browser, and still want a comparable level of privacy, is $60 really worth paying over downloading LibreWolf for free? For the record, I neither hate nor dislike Brave. But I can’t see Brave Origin making any sense.