How to Make Brave the Default Web Browser on Mac
As the Brave web browser gains popularity, Brave users and privacy-centric Mac users may wish to adjust the default web browser in macOS to Brave. That’s super easy to do on the Mac, so let’s check out how it works.
If you’re unfamiliar, Brave is another cross-platform web browser option, but what makes Brave unique is a focus on privacy, with a variety of privacy-first features. This includes things like built-in tracker blocking and ad blocking, which not only can help protect your privacy on the web, but also can really speed up the web browsing experience since a bunch of extraneous stuff doesn’t get loaded. The Brave browser is based on Chromium, which is the open source version of Chrome, but it has been modified enough to make it a unique browser, and to remove the tracking components and ads that are allowed within Chrome.
You’ll obviously need to get Brave browser from https://brave.com before you can use it as a default web browser on a Mac, so do that first if you haven’t already and this topic interests you.
Making Brave the Default Web Browser in macOS via System Preferences
You can set Brave as the default browser directly through System Preferences:
- Pull down the Apple menu and go to “System Preferences”
- Select “General”
- Look for “Default Web Browser” and click the selection menu, choosing “Brave” as the web browser to become the default on the Mac
Now any links opened from other apps on the Mac will launch into Brave automatically, rather than Safari (or whatever your default browser was set to, if you previously changed it.)
Setting Brave as the Default Web Browser in macOS via Brave
You can also set Brave ast he default browser directly from the Brave browser itself. Upon first launch of the app it will give you the option, otherwise do the following:
- Pull down the “Brave” menu from within Brave and go to “Preferences”
- Under ‘Getting Started’ tab, choose “Make Default”
All links on the Mac will now redirect to the Brave browser.
If at any time you want to switch and change back to the Mac default browser, Safari, you can easily do that through System Preferences > General > Default Web Browser > Safari.
Brave is also available to set as the default browser on iPhone and iPad if you’d like to be consistent across platforms. Brave is also available for Windows too, if you have or use a PC as well.
Do you use Brave as your default web browser for the Mac? What do you think of it?
Love Brave, Hate Chrome
I used brave for several months while finishing my degree. I found it was a reasonably fast and dependable browser with the ability to maintain privacy. Also I earn a small sum in brave browser crypto for ads.
Then I got a job and soon found the limitations that Brave had vs Chrome
Most of these existed in being able to log into third party systems and VPN access. As a result I had to dump brave as my main browser and switch back to Chrome. It was nice but until they are fully functional I cannot use the Brave browser.
The one thing i dislike about this browser is no prompt when closing the browser.
I wish you had talked about why we should use Brave versus Mozilla Firefox.
I have switched to Brave because several websites I use do not work well with Safari.. Google=The New Microsoft..
However Brave does lack a few nice Safari features like a reader view so there are trade-offs but that is of course true for everything.