Brave CEO calls on Apple & Mozilla to add Brave Search to the default engine picker following addition in Chrome

On Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari, you cannot natively select Brave Search as an option. The CEO of Brave wants that to change, since he supports giving users a choice instead of locking them into platforms.

Through a post on X, Brendan Eich (the CEO of Brave) praised Google for adding Brave Search as an option in the default search engine list. In the same post, he elaborated that Firefox and Safari offer insufficient options for a default search engine, and that they don’t support user choice/freedom. You can view the post below.

On Safari, if you go into the “Search” menu from Settings, you’ll find these options: Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia. Apple doesn’t allow you to natively select Brave Search as an option.

Similarly on Firefox, going into Search settings gives you Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Perplexity, and Wikipedia as the default options you can select. Brave Search isn’t present among the default options.

However, it’s not really a major problem on Firefox. The browser lets you add custom search engines from Search Settings, so you can just enter (https://search.brave.com/search?q=%s) in the field, and it’ll work. No such option exists on Safari to add a custom engine, so you’re stuck with what Apple gives.

Sure, it would be good if Firefox just lets you pick Brave directly, but someone who is interested in using it would easily be able to figure out how to add it on Firefox. 

On Google Chrome, you get Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Brave as the available options. We covered that here.

This post from the CEO (talking about default search engine choices) also served as a quote post, which talks about Brave hitting 51M daily active users, successfully avoiding the “summer slump,” which leads to a loss in users. We detailed that here.

In other Brave news, the v1.93 update on Android finally adds a search bar to the Settings page. More on that here.

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.