v2.2.0 - Fluent Windows GUI

A rewritten Windows interface.

All 78 policy keys and all 6 presets are byte-identical to v2.1.0 — verified key by key, not asserted. What this tool writes to your registry has not changed. What changed is how you drive it. Linux and macOS are untouched, so there is nothing here for those users to update to.

Closes #20.

The interface

• Every policy explains itself — a plain-English description under each title, with a chevron that expands the full text where it is longer than the row.
• Search reads the descriptions, not just the names, and matches policy keys and category names too.
• A sidebar of seven categories — or skip it: All Options lists all 78 in one scroll.
• Presets are cards showing what each does and how many policies it sets. Loading one only fills in the controls; nothing reaches the registry until you press Apply.
• Clicking a label does nothing. Only toggles and dropdowns respond, each inside its own bounds. This tool writes machine-wide policy; a stray click should not flip one.
• It scales with the display. Every layout coordinate goes through one DPI factor. Above 100% scaling the old window clipped its nav rail, outgrew its search box and ran the button row off the form; it no longer does. This also puts the action bar on screen on a 1366x768 laptop, where it previously sat under the taskbar.

Two behaviour changes worth knowing

• The repair for leaked Shields exceptions now covers every account on the machine, not just the one running the script. Brave writes managed *ForUrls content settings through into each profile's Preferences, and removing the policy does not roll them back. The policy is machine-wide, so the cleanup now follows it.
• Reset no longer deletes list policies it does not own. An ExtensionInstallBlocklist set by group policy or another tool is left in place and reported, matching what Apply already did.

Known limits

Stated plainly, because they are real:

• Not verified on a real high-DPI display. The scaling work was tested with an offscreen render harness on a 96 DPI machine. If something looks wrong at 125% or above, please open an issue.
• No keyboard path. The interface is drawn rather than built from standard controls, so only the two text boxes can take keyboard focus. Keyboard-only and screen-reader users cannot operate this version. The previous GUI could. This is a regression and it will be addressed.
• A display-scaling change after the app starts is not picked up; restart it.

Prefer the previous layout?

v2.1.0 is the last release with the three-column window. It keeps working; it just will not receive newer fixes. The README shows both install methods pinned to that tag.

Verifying this release

c7a6e33b375e030e3e89deb226004a62dcb39cf2e6704876255534d0bd817f95  SlimBrave.ps1
1df7cf80edd7a1a1a167bec857c4b3d181ab835136a7477be6a16d563799cc42  slimbrave-linux.py
62912867a1ea22d2dc09cf15f32f4e4a619b267f05ac5257546709e6cc4723b9  slimbrave-mac.py

Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 .\SlimBrave.ps1

sha256sum slimbrave-linux.py     # Linux
shasum -a 256 slimbrave-mac.py   # macOS

These sums are of the bytes GitHub actually serves, checked against the raw URL before publishing. Sums published for v1.9.5 through v2.1.0 were generated from a CRLF checkout and do not match what those tags serve — that procedure is corrected in SECURITY.md as of this release.

Tags are not signed — there is no maintainer signing key published yet, so do not read an unsigned tag as a sign of tampering. See SECURITY.md.