Boy howdy do I have good news for you.
Firefox released a new bar design in October. It’s currently enabled by default in Nightly, but if you can find the “Secret Settings” menu on Stable, you may want to give the “Composable Toolbar” option a spin :)
Can you elaborate more on what you don’t like about Firefox? All phone browsers feel very similar to me so I’m not sure what specific about it you don’t like. If the issue is muscle memory from using Brave, that will change once you use it for a few weeks.
The only browsers I would consider using on Android are Cromite, Firefox, IronFox, or DuckDuckGo. Tor if you’re paranoid. All the rest are just messy and crammed full of AI slop.
Browser:
Search:
If your budget allows, I would set them up as family members in Kagi and make it their default search engine in all browsers they could come in contact with. If you have family members susceptible to going down disinformation rabbit holes, when you set them up you may want to consider downranking sites for them that spread that kind of content. They publish their most blocked/down ranked sites for easy reference - if logged in you can adjust your settings right from the stats page.
If you’d prefer a free option: DDG, with AI/Ads/feature suggestions disabled. DDG results have been getting better (no longer just a Bing clone) but still suffers from pretty heavy AI slop when searching niche subjects.
A note on the password manager: install and get them in the habit of using it on all of their devices (and potentially even generating random passwords for sites). Burn the notebook they have everything written down on. Delete the note from their phone’s built-in notes app. Disable password saving in their browser and help them import those passwords before removing them. If they NEED to write down the master password, sobeit, but keep it somewhere safe and without context (e.g., don’t write “BITWARDEN” next to it in big red letters). If its a family member, talk to them about the possibility of adding you as an emergency contact or similar for their system. This could save you significant headache in the future.
A note on FF Forks: I know there are forks that do come stripped of AI/telemetry automatically, but from a maintainability perspective FF is a lot more stable, more likely to be running long-term, more recognizable, and available for all devices to encourage familiarity.
I’ve never had a update change my default browser. Feels pretty low risk, especially if you get them used to clicking the specific FF icon and hide all Edge shortcuts. They’ll forget it exists quickly.
Absolute safest is a wipe but just powering off the phone means they won’t be able to access anything without a PIN (protected by the 5th amendment). There’s no laws against turning your phone off.
Generally speaking, Microsoft and Google don’t have encryption in the Privacy sense, only in the security sense. They hold the keys, and are therefore happy to have anything over that’s requested. No need to break any encryption.