Recommend Forgetful browsing option in Brave

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We should recommend to use this option in Brave that has now been widely rolled out.

It is so easy now to keep cookies for only the websites you want the browser to.

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For whatever reason, a lot of people have been dismissive of this feature (I think a combination of not understanding how it works and anti-Brave sentiment). I haven’t tried forgetful browsing with Brave, but for years I used Firefox + CookieAutodelete to accomplish the same functionality.

It won’t be the right fit for everyone, but its a really optimal configuration for some people (it falls somewhere in between ‘clear history when the browser is closed’ and ‘always use private browsing mode’–more private than the former and more convenient and flexible than the latter).

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It’s only been recently rolled out to most users. So that isn’t really strange.

It is imo the best balance between convinience and privacy.

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For me as well–particularly for users that don’t restart their browsers often.

If you are the type that open a browser to do a specific task, then close until you need it for the next specific task, I think the advantages are pretty limited, compared to ‘clear history/cookies’ on browser exit’

But if you are like most people and keep your Browser open for many hours or days, forgetful browsing + a small whitelist, is pretty optimal.

I think that with Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection and dFPI, approaches like ‘forgetful browsing’ became much less needed, at least for Firefox, but I still like the approach.

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I played around with the Forgetful Browsing (FB) feature for a bit.

While I appreciate that Brave added this feature, a downside of FB is that, as far as I can tell, there isn’t a list of the sites for which you created exceptions. You could navigate to Settings -> Privacy and security -> Cookies and other site data -> See all site data and permissions for something resembling such a list. However, it is not the most intuitive and also includes extension data, which could confuse the user.

I acknowledge that these exceptions should be made sparingly—with staying logged in to a regularly used site being the main use case— and therefore arguably do not necessitate a list to track them. However, I still think the current guidance on the Privacy Guides site (i.e., Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows and adding per-site exceptions in the same settings page) is more user-friendly and, for what it’s worth, allows you to create an exception without having to navigate to the site first.

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Is this missing on Android?

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I see it by navigating to the three dots menu in the top right → Settings -> Brave Shields & privacy -> Brave shields global defaults → the last entry of the section, between ‘Content Filtering’ and the “Clear browsing data” orange subheading.

(Release v1.60.110 installed from Obtainium)

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