Brave Browser: what makes it different?
Brave is a free, online browser developed by Brave Software, a company co-founded by Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla. It launched in January 2016, and like other browsers, Brave lets users navigate websites, run web apps and display online content, it remembers site authentication information and can block online ads from appearing on sites.
Brave is built atop Chromium, the open-source project Google and others maintain and use to provide the source code for its Chrome browser. The back-end technologies that power Chrome also power Brave. On iOS, Brave instead relies on WebKit, the open-source foundation that also powers Apple's Safari browser.
The goals set for creating Brave are mainly two: privacy and speed.
By eliminating ads and trackers, Brave is three times faster than Google's Chrome, having to download less content from a website compared to any other browser without an ad-blocking extension. The speed bump comes largely because it’s blocking ads and trackers automatically. This means fewer downloads are necessary when you’re on the web. It also uses up to 66 percent less memory and 35 percent less battery.
Eliminating trackers also means that Brave effectively blocks all efforts from advertisers to identify and follow users. Eich wrote, in his inaugural post in 2016 “We keep user data out of our cloud Brave Vault by default. It’s better for you and us that we don’t store any of your data without your permission.”, so the company does not, and doesn't have the intention to store any user data on its servers.
According to Brave, the browser had more than 50 million monthly active users (MAU) as of Gen. 6, 2022. The company stressed that it had more than doubled its MAU in the prior 12 months.
Brave has a really aggressive anti-ad attitude. Actually, what Brave does is strip all ads from a web page and subsequentially swap it with its own advertisements from its own network.
The difference between the two is that Brave's advertisements are not individually targeted but instead aimed at an anonymous aggregate of the browser's user base so that trackers are not used in any way. It also rewards its users for watching their advertisements, through Rewards.
Brave also eliminates all ad trackers (used by the ad network to show products similar to ones you purchased or just considered) so advertisers can't identify users nor watch what sites they visit or will visit, through their Shields extension.
Shields are one of the most important features in the Brave browser. With Shields, the website fights malware and prevents tracking, keeping your information safe. Brave Shields include ad-blocking, cookie control, block scripts, and many more. Brave doesn’t collect your personal information for added security, nor is any of your data kept on the company’s servers.
You can always see the blocked content from Shields when you're on a website, you just need to click on the shied at the top right of the browser. It also shows the number of trackers and ads are present. The Shields also blocks all things that could harm your security and privacy. You can however adjust the default shield settings if you think they are too restrictive.
In 2018, Brave integrated Tor, a project by a non-profit organization that conducts research and development into online privacy and anonymity. Brave Private Window with Tor helps protect Brave users from ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and visited sites that may be watching their Internet connection or even tracking and collecting IP addresses, a device’s Internet identifier.
Private Tabs with Tor default to DuckDuckGo as the search engine. It does not ever collect or share users’ personal information and welcomes anonymous users without impacting their search experience — unlike Google which asks anonymous users to prove they are human and makes their search less seamless.
As previously stated, one of Brave’s most important goals is to eliminate ads and trackers. With Brave Rewards, as you view privacy-respective ads, you can pay it forward to support content creators you already love.
As Brave explains:
“Brave Rewards locally picks which private ads to show you based on your browsing activity. Then, Brave uses an anonymous accounting process to confirm ad event activity, keep personal details private, and ensure people earn rewards for their attention.”
Each month, you earn Basic Attention Tokens or BAT. When viewing Brave Ads, you receive 70 percent of the ad revenue, which Brave hopes you pass along to your favorite web content creators. You can also tip creators directly as a reward for making great video content.
Brave is a package altready included in the Challenger Operating System, which you can download here
Brave can be also downloaded from this page of Brave Software's site. The page should automatically recognize the device's operating system and offer the appropriate version. Mobile versions of the Brave browser (for iOS and Android) are available in the Apple Store and in Google Play, respectively.
