This Web Pioneer Is Taking on Google With a Privacy-First Browser
Brendan Eich’s Brave browser is designed to make browsing faster and more private — and though it blocks ads, it has a plan for paying publishers
By Mark Sullivan
A Georgetown Law professor recently told me that many of his students have switched to a security- and privacy-focused web browser called Brave. I decided to try it, and was pleasantly surprised. I was a bit late to the party I’ll admit — Brave has been around for four years — but I was far from alone: Brave users increased from 1 million to 5.5 million during 2018. That growth has come mainly through word of mouth.
What’s the draw? The point of Brave is to look, feel, and act much like Google’s market-leading Chrome browser while still aggressively protecting the security and privacy of the user’s personal data. The developers obviously went to a lot of trouble to remove as many friction points and trade-offs as possible for people coming over from Chrome, while keeping users safe from risky sites, ads, malware, and cookies that track you around the web. Brave is built on the same open source Chromium browser framework that is the foundation of Chrome.
