I suspect that you were wise to dump Chrome. I know nothing about Brave. What operating system are you using? I have never {with my last few operating systems - Win 7, 8 & 10} used any other browser than FireFox and have never had any trouble with images. I wonder if some other browser that you used with your operating system put some malicious malware on your computer to thwart FireFox... a bit above my pay grade.
Windows 7. I had 10 for a while and I hated it beyond measure. For some reason images got very difficult with FFox.
“***I had a hard time seeing images with Firefox - not all the time, but enough of the time I had to open Chrome up to see images***”
Does Firefox have a “safe search” mode? It’s been years since I used it (Opera now and it has one).
If you have Safe Search and it’s on high, it will limit what pictures you can see.
Have never had a malware problem with Vipre for more than 10 years. Don’t know what the FF problem is. Let me search FF.