Honestly this has been my daily driver for the past 6 months or so.

I really like it. The aesthetics are really modern, while still maintaining all the things I like about firefox.

My friends who are less tech literate swear by brave. I think it’s the way they market their browser… Some of Brave’s core audience don’t want to install a third party extension for adblock (either they don’t like third party or they just don’t know they can do it in other browsers)

Also on opening a new tab, they show the stats of how much data they saved and how much ads it blocked. Some people like seeing the number grow.

All this is my speculation. There may be some other reason for it being this popular.