56 PCWorld DECEMBER 2019REVIEWS BRAVE 1.0
up in the Tor sites I visited made me quickly
wonder what the hell I was doing. I’d probably
put Brave inside Windows Sandbox (go.pcworld.
com/wsnd) before I wandered in again.
There are some additional perks hidden
beneath Brave’s surface, too. WebTorrent is
natively supported, meaning that you can
download torrents right in the browser, or
watch BitTorrent-distributed videos that use
WebRTC as a transmission method. Hangouts
are supported. Brave can also manage your
cryptocurrency wallets: Ledge, Trezor, or
another crypto wallet right from your browser.
Even casting to a Chromecast is supported,
although not on by default.BRAVE’S BAT: A WILD CARD
THAT MIGHT PAY OFF
But if a browser like Brave seals off all sorts of
advertising and ad tracking, how then does a
site like (cough) PCWorld make money?
Brave’s answer to that is the Basic (why not
“Brave”?) Attention Token, or BAT. Set at
about 4.38 BAT to the dollar, Brave allows you
to make money via ads, as well as ship BAT off
to sites or other users. Brave calls this Brave
Rewards, in much the same way that
Microsoft also allows you to slowly build up
stored points though Microsoft Rewards (go.
pcworld.com/msrw).
On paper, BAT sounds attractive. If an
advertiser pays Brave a
dollar, you get 70 cents
of it, or whatever that is
in BAT. Oh, wait—did
you think that you’d
have an ad-free
experience?
Well, yes, you can,
but Brave would like you
to see some ads, just not
the ones generated by
websites themselves, so
it will pay you to do so.
These ads slide in as
system notifications—
text ads, yes, but they’ll
slide out as just another
notification from your
Diving into the Settings reveals what else Brave has in store. Windows’ Action