I love using the browser and want to share my experience with you. In this post I will showcase Brave and its features.
Privacy 🕵️
In my opinion privacy is the most important feature of a browser. A modern browser should protect you while you surfe the internet. Brave does have a lot of privacy features build in. And most important a lot more than Google Chrome which lacks a lot of privacy features.
Open Source
Open Source makes sure that what a company promises is what a company gives to its customers. Brave is Open Source on GitHub. This makes sure that everybody can control the software deployments. You can check it out right here.
Shields
The idea of Shields is to stop Online-Tracking. With this in mind Brave blocks following contents by default. The user can optionally disable the blocking for specific websites.
Shield Features
- Block third party ads
- Block third party trackers
- Resource Replacement
- CNAME uncloaking
- Block cross site cookies
- Ephemeral Storage
- Randomizing browser APIs
- Block Browser-language and font fingerprinting
- Block Phishing Sites
Build-in Tor
With Brave it is possible to open a new private window with Tor. It makes it really easy to use the Tor network
without installing a new tool. It is also possible to open links with the .onion TLD.
Brave Search 🔍
Of course you can choose every Search-Engine available but Brave Search offers an alternative to Google Search. It is really new and of course at the moment not as good as Google Search but I think it is usable.
Cross-Platform 📲
Brave Browser is available for all major platforms:
Sync
Brave offers the feature “Sync”. This feature allows the user to sync whatever the user wants with other devices. So you can have all your Bookmarks and co. on every device. It does not matter if you are on Mobile, Linux, Windows… it just works. In addition to this there is no account required for this feature. To Sync your stuff you just need to scan a QR-Code and select what you want to sync. (It is also possible to display and type in a view words)
Speed 🥇
Brave says it is three times faster than Chrome and uses less memory. In my experience that is true. Just try it out 😉
A new way of advertising 💲
Brave Rewards is a new way of provisioning ads. Brave blocks every ad by default. From a user perspective this is awesome of course. But as a creator point of view this sucks. They just don’t make money anymore. A lot of content is free and the creators get paid with the add revenue. This does not exist if all ads are blocked. So Brave developed a new way of provisioning ads. Brave can optionally serve ads to the user. BUT! this is completely privacy focused and does not track you. Also the user gets 70% of the money in form of the BAT Crypto-Currency, 15% gets the Website-Creator and the last 15% gets Brave itself. I think this is a pretty good deal for everybody. In my opinion the own data should be owned by yourself and this way of advertising supports that. In addition Brave offers the ability to give BAT back to the Creators. This can be done automatically or manually. So you can support the websites you use and like directly and specifically.
Crypto 🪙
Brave offers the ability to store your Cryptocurrency’s directly in your browser. They can be secured with a backup and it offers a lot of different Blockchains out of the box. But it is possible to add any additional networks.