Brave finally admits its bloat problem—but it could cost you $60 to fix it

When Brave first appeared on the scene, it built its reputation on being a fast, lightweight, and privacy-focused alternative to Chrome, without any of the bloat. Sadly, over the years, Brave has become bloated itself, adding features such as AI, crypto wallets, rewards, and news feeds that users never asked for. Brave Origin is a new stripped-down version of Brave that removes the bloat, but there's a pretty significant catch.

Brave Origin removes a ton of features

Say goodbye to a lot of the bloat

Brave Origin removes many of the most controversial features of Brave, such as the crypto wallet and proprietary AI. These are features that have been added over time and that many Brave users would prefer to do without.

Brave Origin still includes built-in ad blocking , but many of the most notorious features have been stripped out. Features that have been removed from Brave Origin include:

• Leo AI

• Wallet

• News

• Rewards

• Speedreader

• Private Windows with Tor

• VPN

• Wayback Machine

• Web Discovery Project

• Brave Email Alias

• Playlist

• Talk

• Daily usage ping, crash logs, and privacy-preserving product analytics

This makes Brave Origin much more like the original vision for Brave . It still offers privacy and ad blocking by default, but it's no longer bloated with features that many people simply never wanted or used.

There are two ways to access Brave Origin

You get standalone and upgrade options

If you want to use Brave Origin, there are two ways to do so, which feels a little strange. You can download and install the new standalone Brave Origin app. This app has all of the features listed above completely removed; they're not just disabled; they're compiled out of the build. Any new features added to Brave outside the core Brave Shields functionality will not be added to the standalone Brave Origin app.

The other option is to upgrade your existing Brave app. This adds a new settings panel to Brave in which all of the features listed above are turned off by default. You can enable any of these features through the settings if you still want to use them, and any new non-core features added in the future will appear in the list, also disabled by default.

This means that if you upgrade Brave, all of the code for the removed features will still be included. You get access to both options, so you're not tied down to using one or the other. The standalone version is only available on macOS, Windows, and Linux, while the upgrade version is also available on Android and iOS.

Whether to pay is the $59.99 question

You can already do a lot for free

Here's the real catch. If you want to use Brave Origin, most people are going to have to pay for the privilege. Brave Origin is available for a one-time purchase of $59.99 on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. However, there's some good news if you use Linux: Brave Origin is available for free.

The weird part is that although you have to pay for the upgrade to Brave that disables the most annoying features, you can disable many of them for free , and there are even instructions for doing so on Brave's own website. You can manually hide Wallet, Leo AI, Rewards , News, Tor, VPN, and Talk, and even disable some of them using command-line flags or policies.

Hiding the features still leaves the underlying code. If you want the smallest version of Brave, then the Brave Origin standalone app is the better option.

Brave Origin makes sense for some people

It's a no-brainer on Linux

If you're a Linux user, currently using Brave, and are sick of the feature bloat , then Brave Origin really is a simple choice. The standalone app removes all of the unnecessary features from the build, giving you the lightweight and private browser that Brave should be, completely for free.

If you're on macOS or Windows, then paying to remove features that you can disable yourself is a tougher sell. The upside is that if Brave adds even more revenue-generating features, they won't get added to your build on the standalone app or enabled if you've upgraded. You won't have to keep playing a constant game of whack-a-mole where you have to disable more features as they're added.

You might also want to pay if you just want the most minimal version of Brave available, without having a ton of redundant code for all your disabled features sitting doing nothing in the background. Alternatively, you may simply want to support the development of your favorite browser. It's a one-time payment, so you only need to suffer once.

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Brave Origin is what Brave was meant to be

Escaping one browser that's bloated with unwanted features only to have the browser you moved to do exactly the same thing isn't great. With Brave Origin, Brave is at least admitting that there's a problem. The solution of getting people to pay to remove features is a choice, but if you're a Linux user, it's definitely good news.