I had to adjust a ton of settings to stop it from downloading in the background every file I just wanted to view or print,

Well, you can’t view or print a file without downloading it.

Despite turning off settings to open new tabs, every website I open browsing on mobile opens a new tab

That shouldn’t happen, I’ve just set Homepage > Opening screen to last tab and when I open firefox it defaults to the last tab that I was on before exiting the browser

I had to adjust a ton of settings to stop it from downloading in the background every file I just wanted to view or print

Iirc its just setting browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline to true at about:config

Give Vivaldi a try, it’s a chromium fork but with a strong focus on privacy.

Honestly, after this latest stunt by Google and Brave’s growing list of issues, I recently switched to Firefox myself. It was actually surprisingly less painful than it was switching from Chrome to Brave.

Fair enough, you have an opinion, that firefox is wrong in everything it does, it’s not valid, but you need to learn the defaults. Be well.