Found a 'native' way to debloat Brave

VPN
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TLDR: Brave Leo, Wallet, Rewards (incl. RSS feed ads) can be hidden by a Group Policy. When set correctly, Brave will hide these entries entirely.

Long answer: Brave has a built in Group Policy support inherited from Chromium. Interestingly there are also some entries just for Brave, such as enforcing availability of Brave Wallet, Rewards and VPN, listed here:

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039248271-Group-Policy

I realised these can be used to hide unwanted features entirely from my sight. This is another small step towards truly making Brave putting me first.

Tested on Windows by editing the registry, it yields the following results. However YMMV and do at your own risk.

Brave Wallet/VPN/Rewards no longer shown in Settings/TopBar/Menu

Brave News no longer shows ads

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Hi folks,

Eventually, we will have all the Brave specific options added to the policy_templates.zip (in windows\examples\brave.reg) that we link to on our group policy page.

In the meantime, here’s a link to a post which has a .reg file format with all of the options toggled.

You can basically make a new text file, paste the contents in, rename as brave-policy.reg (or similar - as long as it ends in .reg) and then double click it to run. Just edit the ones you don’t want (by default, example should have all items disabled). You can basically set shields up/down for sites and show/hide all of the major features like VPN, wallet, Leo (AI), etc.

As /u/Temporary_Classic645 mentions in comments here, there is not a way to remove the Managed by your organization. This is something that will show up whenever you have group policy set. You can view all your active group policies on brave://policy

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Is there a way to remove the managed by organization thing that appears when i do this?

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Can’t find any entries for brave rewards, wallet and vpn. Can you tell me where to look?

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We need an Unbraved Brave spin /s

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Incredible that Brave has reached a point where you need to debloat it - I always thought it was supposed to be a debloated, private browser.

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Would you be willing to share your policy if you’ve written it? I think your wants in a browser sound pretty similar to my own, and it’d be nice to have something to compare to / learn from, as this isn’t something I’ve dabbled in before.

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Is it possible to debloat the Android version?

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i did too install firefox

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I just hide all this stuff in settings.

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I wanted a way to make Google the default search engine, via regedit, but I can’t :frowning:

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So you disable everything non chrome? Why are you using brave then? Just use chrome right away.

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Glad to see an official response here.

For macOS unfortunately, the policies cannot be enforced (only “recommended”) when using the “default write” command.

Currently they can enforced by installing a custom profile (I asked ChatGPT to generate one) but I hope to see that policies set to “recommended” can expose the functionality of hiding certain features.

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I commend you all at Brave for the work that has been put in to documenting this, but I’m curious what is the cause of the slow progress on this?

Since at least 2022, this has been something you all have had an intention to get around to better documenting brave specific settings and group policy templates, but apart from the few settings documented here and sporadic discussions in #26502 I am not seeing a lot of progress.

What would need to happen for there to be progress on this? Is it just a matter of priorities and limited time, or are there blockers of some sort holding this back?

Thanks for the good work you do.

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Is there a way to apply group policy on iOS ?

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Not that I am aware of, I’m afraid.

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Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\BraveSoftware\Brave]
"BraveRewardsDisabled"=dword:00000001
"BraveWalletDisabled"=dword:00000001
"BraveVPNDisabled"=dword:00000001

Paste to Notepad, save as .reg file and run.

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Has been one called Bold browser, just no one maintain it anymore.

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Brave is a commercial product and needs to make money. It blocks ads everywhere but on their own platform.

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I always thought it was supposed to be a (1) debloated, (2) private browser.

  1. [Debloated]: Nope, far from it. Brave since its inception has added a bunch of stuff not present in upstream Chromium. I think they may remove some stuff also, but on balance, Brave has added more non-essential features and non-features (ads), than they’ve removed.

  2. [Private]: Yeah, it is supposed to be (and for the most part is) a privacy focused browser.