Brave — A Better Web, A Better Browser | Review
Introduction
Brave is a free and open-source web browser that is developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. It emphasizes security and privacy while not sacrificing features or performance. The browser also blocks ads and website trackers.
About
The Brave Browser is privacy-focused and open-sourced, and it is engineered by great developers that seek to make the web a better place and make the adoption for cryptocurrency mainstream through the integration of the BAT Token. In fact, it is the latest unique browser to join the ever-expanding market.
Brave comes with an inbuilt BAT wallet. This wallet enables users to support their favorite websites. Users can load the wallet and allocate a specified amount of BAT to their preferred sites. However, the wallet can be funded through Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and BAT Token.
What Is BAT Token?
Brave has its own cryptocurrency, which is known as ‘Basic Attention Token’ (BAT). It is an Ethereum (ETH) based token, where the browser rewards its users with BAT Token when they use the Brave browser. It can also be used to tip content creators registered with Brave. BAT is also known as “Brave rewards”, which is one of the most interesting features of the browser.
With BAT Token, you can also set up automatic donations to websites that you visit, specify how many ads you want to see per hour, and customize how much page time counts as a visit.
History
Brave is developed by Brave Software, which was founded on May 28, 2015, by the Co-founders Brendan Eich, and Brian Bondy. On January 20, 2016, Brave Software launched the first version of Brave with an ad-blocking feature and announced plans for a privacy ad feature and a revenue sharing program.
However, Brendan Eich is the creator of the Javascript programming language. He is also the co-founder of Mozilla, the organization behind the open-source web browser Firefox.
In June 2018, Brave released a pay-to-surf test version of the browser. This version of Brave is preloaded with approximately 250 ads and sends a detailed log of the user’s browsing activity to Brave for the short-term purpose of testing this functionality.
The browser announced that it added support for Tor in its desktop browser’s private browsing mode.
In June 2019, Brave started testing the new ad-blocking rule that matches an algorithm implemented in Rust.
However, a Brave claim is on average 69 times faster than the previous implementation in C++. The new algorithm is inspired by the uBlock Origin and Ghostery algorithms.
Brave launched its stable release version 1.0 on November 13, 2019, while having 8.7 million monthly active users overall.
At the time, it also had approximately 3 million active users on a daily basis. It is important to note that Brave 1.0 was made available for Android, iOS, Windows 10, macOS, and Linux, and integrated “almost all of Brave’s marquee features across all platforms.”
The Team
- Brendan Eich — Co-Founder and CEO
- Brian Bondy — Co-Founder and CTO
- Yan Zhu — Chief Information Security Officer
- Ben Livshits — Chief Scientist
- David Temkin — Chief Product Officer
- Brian Brown — Chief Business Officer
- Brad Richter — Head of Design
- Catherine Corre — Head of Communications
- Holli Bohren — CFO
- Johnny Ryan — Chief Policy and Industry Relations Officer
- Brian Johnson — Principal Engineer
- Brian Clifton — Director of Engineering
- Anthony Tseng — Sr. Software Engineer
- Sriram Venkataram — QA and Customer Support
- Marshall Rose — Principal Engineer
- Jon Sampson — Sr. Developer Relations
- Sergey Zhukovsky — Sr. Software Engineer
- Ryan Watson — Director of IT and Infrastructure
- Cezar Augusto — Sr. Software Engineer
- Luke Mulks — Director, Business Development
- Alex Wykoff — Product Manager, Brave Rewards
- James Mudgett — Principal Product Designer, Mobile
- Nejc Zdovc — Sr. Software Engineer
- Joel Reis — Sr. Software Engineer
- Lauren Wagner — Software QA
- Kamil Jozwiak — QA & Release Manager
- Jenn Rhim — Director of UX Design
- Peter Snyder — Privacy Researcher
- Tom Lowenthal — Privacy & Security Product Manager
- Chris Nguyen — Technical Operations Coordinator
- Jocelyn Liu — Sr. Software Engineer
- Jimmy Secretan — VP of Services & Operations
- Artem Samoilenko — Sr. Software Engineer
- Alexey Barabash — Sr. Software Engineer
- Geeta Sarvadnya — QA & Support
- Asad Syed — IT Support Engineer
- Matt Bacchi — Sr. DevOps Engineer
- Jennie — BAT Community Manager
- AmirSaber Sharifi — Sr. Software Engineer
- Michael McLaughlin — Sr. Software Engineer
- Nick von Pentz — Sr. Software Engineer
- Michał Buczek — Sr. iOS Engineer
- Taylor Campbell — Tor Engineer
- Aubrey Keus — Sr. Software Engineer
- Emerick Rogul — Sr. Software Engineer
- Bartlomiej Lechowski — QA Engineer
- eV Quirk — Principal Engineer
- Jan Piotrowski — Business Development
- Pranjal Jumde — Sr. Security Engineer
- Pete Miller — Sr. Software Engineer
- Dimitrios Athanasakis — Machine Learning Researcher
- Matt Evangelista — User Support Engineer
- Ryan Lanese — Sr. Software Engineer
- Mandar Shinde — BAT Ecosystem Product Lead
- Rafael Ebron — Product Manager
- Hamed Haddadi — Visiting Professor
- Max Karolinskiy — Sr. Software Engineer
- Dan Lipeles — Software Engineer
- Karen Liu — Sr. Product Designer
- Scott Locklin — Blockchain / Machine Learning
- Des Martin — Business Development & Community
- Panagiotis Papadopoulos — Security Researcher
- Mark Pilgrim — Sr. Software Engineer
- Terry Mancey — Senior Developer
- Andrius Aucinas — Performance Researcher
- Mihai Plesa — DevOps
- Adrian Legardy — IT Support Engineer
- Cory McDonald — Software Engineer
- Ben Kero — Senior DevOps Engineer
- George Dregalo — Senior Software Engineer
- François Marier — Senior Security Engineer
- Matteo Varvello — Performance Researcher
- Jan Seidl — Senior Infrastructure Security Engineer
- Clayton Hartford — Brave Ads, Rewards & Creator Partnerships
- Dan Murphy — Brave Ads Support Specialist
- Steven Hollon — User Support Engineer
- Donny Dvorin — Head of Sales
Strengths & Weaknesses
Strengths:
- Fast
- Packed with features
- Can use most Chrome extensions
- Good security & privacy features
Weaknesses:
- Low update frequency
- Can only sync bookmarks between devices
Understanding The Brave Browser Model
Brave is a more-or-less standard browser that lets users browse, run web apps and display online content. It is free to download and use. Furthermore, they remember site authentication information. With their default ad blocking, they caused a buzz in the market. Likewise, it was viewed by many as a threat to content creators. But, the fact is that some of the users can support the content creators even more this way.
Actually, Brave offers a clean and crisp interface that is intuitive to use. It has all the elements you would expect in your browser. However, its individual tabs support icons for quick identification, and hovering the cursor over a tab offers details on the page in that tab without having to click on the tab and activate it.
Brave also displays statistics about the content it has blocked. These statistics are very useful. It displays photos, the current time and shortcuts to your favorite sites. Like other websites, one would expect these features to have an effect on speed. It is very easy to use, with a streamlined design and the useful option to preview the content of tabs.
Features
The Mobile and desktop versions of Brave include a built-in ad blocker, which saves you the trouble of installing a third-party extension. You can also set up a “sync chain” between your devices so that they share your bookmarks with one another.
So, instead of forcing you to create an account like most browsers, Brave accomplishes that via one-time verification codes, which are available in text and QR form. Unfortunately, the “sync chain” is limited to bookmarks.
Performance
Brave is a fast browser. On a desktop, it reaches higher speeds than Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. On the other hand, on mobile, Brave is as fast as any of its competition, running only a tiny bit slower than Firefox on iOS.
The browser accomplishes those speeds with far lower RAM consumption than most browsers, which is impressive because Chromium-based browsers are infamous for being resource-hungry.
How Brave Protects You?
Brave protects you from trackers and blocks third-party cookies and fingerprinting by default, and the handy “shields” menu makes it easy to turn those protections on and off and monitor how much they are doing.
However, the company says that Brave never collects your data, with the exception of safe browsing and prediction services, which can be disabled. Even the ad personalization through the “Brave Rewards” program is done locally on your device without sending the results of the analysis to Brave or the advertiser.
How Does Brave Make Money?
Brave is funded by its “Brave Rewards” program, which rewards users who have opted in to view ads with the BAT Token. When those users view ads, Brave is paid by advertisers. Then, it transfers 70 percent of the revenue to users and the remaining 30 percent makes up its revenue.
Reasons To Use The Brave Browser
- Brave cares about your privacy
- It is fast and elegant
- It pays you for viewing ads if you decide to opt-in
- It promotes decentralization and crypto adaptation
- It is also a unique way to support your favorite Content Creators
Brave is actually gaining popularity. It has been viewed as the next Google Chrome. It appears to be the solution to challenges that come with regular browsers.
News On Brave
On November 13, 2019, it has been reported that makers of the Browser combine privacy with a blockchain-based digital advertising platform, announced the official launch of Brave 1.0.
Brendan Eich, the Co-founder, and CEO of Brave stated:
“Today’s Internet is broken, and users suffer the most. They are being tracked, tagged, and exploited; this not only violates privacy, but slows down page loads, drains batteries, and makes for a miserable experience. Meanwhile, publishers are losing revenue at a record pace due to a few gigantic super-companies and too many ad tech intermediaries. Advertisers are wasting time and money on an industry filled with fraud. Everyone with a legitimate stake in the open Web loses in this environment.”
Brendan Eich
He added:
“Surveillance capitalism has plagued the Web for far too long and we’ve reached a critical inflection point where privacy-by-default is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have. Users, advertisers, and publishers have finally had enough, and Brave is the answer. Brave 1.0 is the browser reimagined, transforming the Web to put users first with a private, browser-based ads and payment platform. With Brave, the Web can be a rewarding experience for all, without users paying with their privacy.”
Brendan Eich
The Use of Brave In Chrome Extensions
Brave is set up on the Chromium platform, as Chromium is an open-source system that also powers popular browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Based on the Chromium capability, you can almost use all Chrome extensions on Brave. The extensions on Chrome can be added to Brave through the Chrome Web Store.
You should make sure that you read messages accompanying extensions carefully. It is up to you to make responsible decisions when installing 3rd party extensions with respect to your data. You can also enable, disable, remove and view additional details/options for your installed extensions in the extensions window.
The Brave Users
Since 2018, Brave users have increased so far. Elsewhere, BAT’s active users have grown from 1 million per month in January 2018 to a total of 5.5 million active users in January 2019. Likewise, in March 2019, Brave reached over 20 million downloads on the Google Play Store for Android devices.
Conclusion
Brave is a web browser that aims to change how advertising works on the internet while providing users with great security and privacy without sacrificing performance or features.
Thus, Brave is a browser that allows you to support creators without the fear of demonetization.
For more details, you can visit the official site here: https://brave.com/
Source: brave.com | medium.com | cloudwards.net | en.wikipedia.org | miningchamber.com | zerocrypted.com
