Brave works well on windows 7 pro. I use it so.
“My wife and I use Opera as the default browser. Any idea whose side Opera’s creators are on?”
I like Opera, but it is based on Chrome, and I think is now owned by China.
My browser of choice would be Brave, since it was created deliberately by Brendan Eich (after he was fired from Mozilla, which he also helped create, for donating to an anti-same-sex marriage referendum) to preserve privacy.