The new Brave browser automatically blocks ads and trackers, making it faster and safer than your current browser. It’s amazing how fast a page loads when you strip away everything but the real content. Up to a whopping 60% of page load time is caused by the underlying ad technology that loads into various places each time you hit a page on your favorite news site. And 20% of this is time spent on loading things that are trying to learn more about you. Brave Browser is Top Internet Browser for PC! Brave, under the hood, is a Chromium-based web browser which means that its performance and web compatibility is very similar to other browsers based on Chromium.
Brave launched in January 2016. Based on Chromium, it emphasizes security and privacy while not sacrificing features or performance. This Brave review will give you an idea if it accomplishes those goals.
The browser packs an impressive list of features, and its performance is top notch, with great speeds and low RAM consumption. We mentioned Brave in our anonymous browser guide, and for good reason. There are many handy security and privacy features, including a built-in adblocker, “shields” that block cookies and trackers and fingerprinting, and even a Tor mode.
Mobile and desktop versions of Brave include a built-in adblocker, which saves you the trouble of installing a third-party extension. You can also set up a “sync chain” between your devices so that they share your bookmarks with one another. Instead of forcing you to create an account like most browsers, Brave accomplishes that through one-time verification codes, which are available in text and QR form. Unfortunately, “sync chain” is limited to bookmarks, though.
“Brave rewards” is probably the most interesting feature in Brave. It’s the company’s initiative to change how advertising works online, and it’s a thought-provoking idea. It pays users who opt in to viewing ads 70 percent of the revenue generated with an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Tokens, which can be used to tip content creators registered with Brave.
You can also set up automatic donations to websites you visit, specify how many ads you want to see per hour and customize how much page time counts as a visit. Because users opt in, the ads are customized using local data, eliminating the need for third-party trackers and improving your privacy in the advertising sphere. The system is disabled by default, so if you don’t like the idea, you don’t have to participate.
Because Brave is based on Chromium (read our Chromium review), it can make use of its vast library of extensions. Not all of them will work, but usually, as long as the extension doesn’t do anything with the interface, it’ll function. That exponentially increases what the browser can do because you can add a host of features through extensions.
There are also extensions built in to the browser. WebTorrent lets the browser download torrents without using a standalone client. That’s handy if you only download torrents occasionally, but more frequent downloaders will prefer something like uTorrent because WebTorrent’s functionality is basic, only allowing you to start and stop a torrent. The other built-in extensions are Google Hangouts and IPFS Companion.
The Hangouts extension allows you to get notifications across tabs from the platform and continue your conversations on other devices. IPFS Companion lets you load content over the InterPlanetary File System, which is a peer-to-peer data protocol designed to make downloading large files more decentralized.
A nice but unusual feature of Brave is the ability to block social media content embedded on other websites. That includes individual settings for Google and Facebook login buttons, as well as embedded posts from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. That’s especially good if you’re setting the browser up for work and want to eliminate distractions. There’s also a reading mode function called “distill page,” which strips away all content other than text and presents it in a clean and readable manner.
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