Over the past few days I’ve been checking out the Brave web browser. I’ve downloaded it onto my mobile devices, desktop and notebook computers. After a day of use, I quickly found myself wanting to make it my default browser of choice. So I did.
What caught my attention about Brave is their messaging that the current web is broken and Brave is on a mission to fix the lack of privacy and reshape support of content creators1.
Privacy and security with me as the focus is refreshing in a world today where we are surrounded and encamped with corporations and governments wanting to know every personal detail about us.
We’re not in the personal data business..
Some of the interesting builtin features include,
- Ad blocking
- Fingerprinting prevention
- Cookie control
- HTTPS upgrading
- Builtin Tor support (beta)
I’m pleased that Brave is open source and available for anyone to review the source code2. Many of the current modern popular browsers today are open source at their core, however their corporate sponsors spin and release a closed version.
An announcement 3 was published a few days ago for enhanced security using builtin support for Tor. Typically, if I want to browse the web or research a topic using the Tor network I had to use a separate standalone Tor browser. It’s refreshing to open a new-tab w/Tor support (within Brave) without opening and switching to a 2nd application.
I have found some quirks that I don’t care for.
- Importing my bookmarks from Safari did not work correctly4.
- Bookmark accessibility could be better, I’m fond of Safari and Firefox making the bookmarks accessible as a left-side panel either temporarily or on-demand.
The new Brave browser blocks the ads and trackers that slow you down, chew up your bandwidth, and invade your privacy. Brave even lets you contribute to your favorite creators automatically.
I’m still kicking the tires on Brave, but for the moment Brave has won me over.
It is available to the usual suspects, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.
- https://brave.com/publishers/ ↩
- https://github.com/brave ↩
- https://brave.com/tor-tabs-beta/ ↩
- Alternatively, importing from an
htmlfile did work fine. ↩
