Brave
Brave is an interesting experiment in browser
technology. It’s based on Chromium and really
looks and feels more like Chrome than most
browsers. If you’re used to Chrome, you’ll feel
at home with Brave, and you can use almost
any Chrome extension.
But Brave is especially focused on privacy and
security. It has rather extensive built-in ad blocking
and tracker blocking. This greatly speeds up page
loading, but it can sometimes break websites and,
of course, it robs them of revenue. It’s easy to turn
‘shields down’ for a site if you need to.
Brave can show you its own ads as notification
pop-ups, for which you’ll earn a currency called BAT
(Basic Attention Tokens). You’ll also earn them at a
lower rate just for browsing the web. These tokens
are then used to pay out participating sites and
to pay you, the user. You can turn them in for real
money, or to tip websites or content creators.
It’s a novel idea, but it’s a little annoying to sign
up for the whole Brave Rewards programme, and
even more annoying to link the account with the
third-party Uphold service in order to actually turn
BAT into money. And it’s useless to any website or
creator that doesn’t similarly sign up to be a part of
the revolution.
Brave has an iOS app loaded with privacy
features (HTTPS everywhere, script and tracker
blocking, pop-up blocking...). And there’s a
nice bookmarks syncing feature that doesn’t
even require you to make an account and log in.
