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The Brave Web Browser is Official: Meet The “ANTI-Chrome”
Is it the next Chrome? The Brave web browser has some unique attributes that will make it VERY attractive to some users
Michael Grothaus
15:10, 10 Aug 2016
Growing up, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was king of the web browser world. Then came Firefox and Apple’s Safari. But the new king of the web is Google’s Chrome browser, available for virtually every computing platform out there. However, a new browser has entered the ever-expanding web market called Brave. It’s a browser that’s gotten a lot of attention lately.
But why? And just how is Brave different than the rest? Here’s everything you need to know.
What is the Brave web browser?
It’s a web browser in the traditional sense of the term. It allows you to surf the web, explore sites, and do all the general internet stuff you can do in other browsers. It’s open source and built on top of the Chromium web browser that Google’s own Chrome is based on. Brave was created by the co-founder of the Mozilla Project, Brendan Eich.
If Brave is just another Chrome-like browser?
No! Brave is like the “Anti-CHROME” browser…
Because the creators wanted to build a browser that addresses the privacy concerns of today’s users, who are fed up with all the ad tracking most browsers allow. The Brave browser blocks the Tracking Pixels and Tracking Cookies that advertisers use to track your clicks around the web. These are the cookies that remember you viewed a certain gadget on one website last Tuesday, and so it serves you up an ad for that gadget on a website you are viewing today. Since Brave blocks both of these, it makes it harder for advertisers to build an anonymous profile of you.
It also blocks ads – kind of
Brave also has ad blocking tech built directly into the browser. With many growers you can add on third-party ad blockers, but Brave wanted to make this process both simple–and also not lethal to the websites people visit.
If everyone uses ad blockers on the sites they visit eventually those websites you love reading so much won’t exist. Advertising allows sites to keep the lights on and pay the writers who make the content. No advertising dollars means no money to pay the bills, which means those sites you love will eventually fold up shop or put everything behind a paywall, forcing you to pay a monthly subscription fee to view the content.
So instead of blocking all ads, Brave seeks out the really intrusive ones–those ones known as “Malvertising” that can install malware on your computer without your knowledge–and replaces them with Brave’s own advertising that is less intrusive on your privacy.
The company will then keep 15% of the ad revenue for itself, pay 55% of the revenue to the content publisher whose site the ad appears on, give 15% to ad partners, and finally, give 15% of ad revenue to Brave users, who can then donate that money to bloggers and other content providers via micropayments–meaning that you decide which sites of those you love gets the cash for the ads.
Brave is fast
Because Brave strips out many of the tracking features of ads, it greatly speeds up page loading times. Brave says this allows its browser to load pages almost twice as fast as other web browsers. Also, because many of the data-heavy ad’s are stripped away, you’ll be hit with smaller data usage bills on your cellular networks. You can see Brave’s page loading speeds in the video below.
What platforms is Brave available on?
Brave is available on Windows 7 or higher, macOS 10.9 or higher, Linux, iOS, and Android. You can download it for free here.