Running Mint 18.2 (a bit old, I know) Connecting a Dell i7 P66 laptop to a public WiFi network, I get increasingly balky connection behavior. Like Mint is trying to morph into Vista...... (Yikes!!!)

I had been having WiFi issues, like the bar graph indicating zero signal strength while the pop-up list of available connections gives 80% - to - 100% signal, while the connection may or may not be just fine(?!?)

Sometimes a restart seemed to fix the problem, other times it had no effect.

Lately, it has become impossible to connect with Brave browser; I tried clearing the browsing history,thinking some cookie, or the sheer congestion might be responsible, that made no difference.

I also tried connecting to different networks available at a mall, all attempts got the same result: Brave would not connect, and I'd get a white screen, with "connecting" in the lower left corner - as if the process was stuck half-way through.

I used the "ROUTE" command via the Terminal, and entered into the address/search bar what GENMASK listed: some variation on " 255.255.0.0 " or "255.255.255.0"

So finally,I tried Firefox,and it connected on the first try. I know this one try is not enough to prove anything.

I have tried to update Brave, but I can't get it to do anything. In the past, this was not a problem.

Any/all ideas, info welcome!

browser does not connect to the net. It is made by the OS.
From the other hand you may configure different browsers using different proxies (or something similar). But anyway, wifi issues cannot be related to the browser.

OK, thanks.

I was just trying everything I could think of before posting the issue to a forum.

Now I know not to bother with the browser.