Brave, the hip new privacy browser that plans to pay users and publishers
TL;DR
Brave promises to be better, faster, take care of your privacy and even pay users and publishers for better ad experiences.
Founding team
Brave was founded by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy.
This is why it matters: Brendan is only the creator of JavaScript, co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and served as the Mozilla Corporation’s chief technical officer and briefly its chief executive officer. Brian worked for my beloved Firefox for a number of years, for Khan Academy and is now lead developer at Brave. So, yes, this sounds like a very potent combination.
Micropayments
Now this is interesting: Brave plans to offer micropayments to readers and publishers using Bitcoin to offer a better alternative to third-party ads, which it blocks by default (you can disable it). Very curious how this one will play out.
Privacy respecting browser
Our goal is to block everything on the web that can cramp your style and compromise your privacy. Annoying ads are yesterday’s news, and cookies stay in your jar where they belong.
I’m pretty concerned with my privacy, with a number of counter-measures in place, like do not track, the Disconnect plugin, HTTPS Everywhere, DuckDuckGo for search, and clearing all browsing data on quit (yes, this means logging out of everything).
Brave has HTTPS Everywhere built-in, and many security and privacy features to block tracking pixels and tracking cookies, phishing attempts, a built-in third-party app blocker and can even offer fingerprinting protection.
Speed
This affects speed in a big way, and you can really feel it.
Up to a whopping 60% of page load time is caused by the underlying ad technology that loads into various places each time you hit a page on your favorite news site.
And 20% of this is time spent on loading things that are trying to learn more about you.
Multiple sessions
Different tabs support different sessions, so you can have three twitter accounts or multiple Google accounts active simultaneously.
No Flash support
Flash is rapidly dying, with Chrome also announcing to actively block Flash from next month on (September 2016). Good riddance.
The only issue I have, is that one of my most visited websites, southparkstudios.com, doesn’t offer an HTML5-alternative yet.
Comedy Central, y u do dis.
No Plugins (yet)
This could be because it’s still in early stage, and/or a clear choice, to try and offer everything you need without needing a plugin ecosystem.
My guess is they will offer Chrome plugin support.
Which is good, I need my mouse gestures for fast browsing, dangit.
Technical
Brave is built in Electron, which basically makes it an HTML5-web application, and easy to port to various platforms, and uses Chromium for rendering (they explain why here).
Remember, Brave is still in a very early stage, Beta, is already a pretty impressive browser, and will be optimized and improved upon, I‘m guessing frequently.
Good job on snagging that domain name and those accounts, that’ll probably have cost them a nice buck.
