It Might Be Time to Switch Your Browser
It Is a Brave New World. Pun Intended
Browsers are one of the most important subjects of all time. I thought of writing this to share my thoughts about what I believe will or should be in the computers of most people if not everyone. I am talking about the Brave browser. Brave has been my daily driver browser after switching away from Chrome for a while now. So far, the best choice I have made browser wise. In this article, I will be sharing what you need to know about it, what is great about it, what still needs work, and why I think you should switch.
First of all, get this out of the way. I am not writing this article because of the hate I have for the other options or anything like that. My main goal is to share my experience with it and leave the switching decision to you. Currently ( 2020 ), Brave is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was just one year ago, and it remains my go-to daily browser. Now, this is not to say that I do not use the other browsers. My computer has like six browsers, which I use for testing the performance of web apps in different browsers.
For those of you who are wondering, Brave is a privacy-first Ad blocking web browser built on the open-source framework that underpins Google Chrome, meaning you get the ubiquitous UI UX from Chrome without all of the tracking and spyware in the back-end. With that being said, many people ask me why I chose Brave over something like Firefox with extensions for Ad blocking and tracker blocking. My reasons are not in any particular order. I am going to go over 4 major reasons why you should be using, or at least try Brave.
Cryptocurrency Integration
This is the number one thing that makes Brave so unique from other browsers beyond its extremely efficient Ad blocking engine. Basic attention token ( BAT ) is used to pay users like me for viewing anonymously matched Ads inside the browser. The tokens you earn can be subsequently used to pay content creators for premium content. They can also be converted to other cryptocurrencies, which can be redeemed for gift cards in the future. Now, much of 2018 and 2019 was building towards the release of this critical feature on brave across mobile and desktop platforms. You can now choose to view advertisements on the platform to earn money in the form of basic attention tokens.
Still keeping privacy in mind, Ads are served to you locally without collecting your personal information to match you with ads on a server somewhere. Brave sends ad packages to your browser locally on your computer or your mobile device, then matches Ads anonymously to you all within your environment rather than on Brave servers. This means that there will be no more user accounts with your personal information stored on servers somewhere and no more personal information shipped away to advertisers. This is one of the most compelling reasons to use Brave, in my personal opinion.
When you use Google search and Google Chrome, your personal information is up for sale to the highest bidder, and you lose control of it the moment it leaves your computer. Google can sell your information and attention as if it is theirs, and you get nothing in return. Many people do not care about this because they get a lot of things for free. Brave is giving you the same thing but turning the model on its head. How? Out of the total revenue that they earn from Ads that they serve to you, you get 70% of the proceeds for giving your attention, and Brave keeps 30% for the services that they are providing in giving you this browser.
Many rationalize Google’s practices by saying they provide so much free service to us, but nothing is truly free. The impact of your personal information being shared so extensively is heavily underestimated. In my opinion, you are much better off protecting your information as much as you can and healthily seeing Ads while earning a little bit of revenue as a result.
Best Ad Blocking Engine
Even if you do not use an ad blocker, there are a few that come close to the one native to Brave. You can find those as Chrome extensions. One of those is that uBlock Origin. Early on in Braves history, Adblocking was a bit laggy, and page compatibility was all over the place, but now, everything is faster. Load times are lightning-fast compared to Chrome or Firefox Adblocker extensions. This shows the commitment that the team behind brave has when it comes to improving their product. They converted their whole ad blocking engine over to Rust, which is a highly efficient programming language. This Rust implementation, at its core, resulted in a massive improvement in performance for this engine.
These features, of course, work well on both desktop and on mobile, which quite frankly makes brave a top choice for mobile users as well. I have even heard people like brave mobile, even more than they like the desktop version from here. I would expect brave to improve their ad-block engine and their tracker blocking features. On top of all that, Brave’s Firewall + VPN, powered by Guardian, offers enhanced security and privacy by encrypting and protecting anything users do while connected to the Internet. There is no reason to not give this browser a try.
Focus on Privacy
Nowadays, I feel like people are so used to seeing Ads, giving their personal information to anyone who asks and even some people who do not ask, and that it is now just not a factor to many people, that their privacy is not respected online. The issue here is that there are broader implications to personal information being so readily available. Poor security and privacy online can have a lot of consequences like identity theft, fraud, online impersonation, you name them. A rule of thumb should be that websites collect as little if any, data as possible. They should also be as clear as possible about it when they do it transparently.
Brave is building their browser to put you back in control of your data and your privacy with key features like local anonymous advertising and cross-device syncing of bookmarks without a user account over encrypted sync. They have also built a browser that has top of the line lightening fast Ad, tracker, and script blocking features built-in natively with no extra extensions to download, and then gives you more control over how each website is dealt with in terms of these features. Brave lets you decide whether you want to use all of these features or none of them for each page that you visit. Beyond that, they have a built-in Tor browsing feature that uses the DuckDuckGo search engine by default to give you a far more effective alternative to the nonsensical incognito mode in browsers that just routes you through Google all over again.
Braves team is clearly very much involved in helping develop and refine privacy standards and Ad blocking lists in the internet community, and their browser is a reflection of that. Now, if you do not care that much about privacy, that is fine. Brave has other performance benefits over other browsers way outside of the realm of privacy. Brave consistently uses less Ram, and pages load much faster without all the ads sucking up bandwidth and running scripts behind the scenes on each page. For that reason alone, brave is an improvement over most browsers, especially Chrome, considering it has some of the best features of Chrome without all the bad ones.
Transparency and Commitment
Brave CEO, business development team, their developers, and their marketing team are active on social media, and they listen to people. This kind of responsiveness to their users is what makes Brave my number one browser. They are transparent about their exact process, including how they collect data. They post all the results from their tests so that you can make your determination about what they are saying. They are not just marketing to you and telling you to trust them.
I know the reasons above may make you think that brave is the best of the best, but no. Of course, there are things that I d not like about brave or that I think need to be improved. For example, I find that brave is severely lacking in customization features. I love customizing my browser to my liking. It is a bummer not to be able to move controls around to where I want them or to customize the new tab page as much as I can in other browsers. I am aware that they are trying to make this possible, so it is just a matter of time. Another thing that I dislike about brave is that withdrawal of basic attention tokens to external wallets requires integration with Uphold. There is a lot to come. Brave is getting better and better.
I hope this article has given you some clarity if you were stuck on choosing your daily browser. Keep in mind I am not suggesting that you ditch your current browser. Give brave a try, see if you like it, then switch! It is a brave new world. Pun intended.
