Web Browser is one of the most used Application software. I mean, look at you, reading the post in a Browser. And the unshaken king of Browser's Market share has always been "Google Chrome". I mean, look at this pie chart I have created by data from this source.
I will not take these percentages to the face value, but it is quite clear that Chrome dominates the market.
The Brave Browser which I am going to talk about in the article does not even make an appearance. To be fair, they are relatively new to the market which is being dominated by some of the old players who have got great development team behind them with a lot of experience. So, they have years worth of head-start in their hand. And the amount of growth Brave has seen over the years, it sure is getting the attention it deserves. Here's why I think you should give a shot to brave browser.
Open-Source
Brave is an open source browser developed by "Brave Software". The company founded by Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla Firefox) and Brian Boundy. Since the browser is open-source, you are free to view the source code and even build as according to your wishes (if you want to). Here's the github repository of Brave. The Browser, in its core, uses Chromium which is a web browser project. Most of browsers, with exception (Apple's Safari and Mozilla Firefox), are build upon Chromium. Chromium itself is open-source too and is actively maintained by Google.
Built-in Ads and tracker blocker
The browser has ads and tracker blocker built into the browser itself. "Brave shield" allows you to block tracker and ads in "Standard / Aggressive / No blocking" modes. You can also block cookies (or only Cross-site cookies) and fingerprinting too. The shields works great in my opinion and you can turn them "on/off" for any particular site. The browser will remember the settings until you clear them. So, basically a browser with built-in ad-blocker. Custom filters (if desired) can also be added. What else?
Crypto-wallet, IPFS, TOR
Brave is aiming to be the browser for WEB3. The Browser also has inbuilt crypto wallet known as "Brave wallet". The wallet can communicate with hardware wallets too. Initially, the wallet was based on the almighty "metamask". Since then, they have created their own wallet natively and integrated it right into the browser.
The Interplanetary Filing System (IPFS) is a blockchain network which anyone can use to store files trustlessly and oepnly. Then rather than using the good-old HTTP(s) to communicate with website, a user can get the same content on IPFS. Brave browser allows you to communicate with IPFS. Head over to learn more about IPFS here.
The Onion Router (TOR) is a way to communicate with the web anonymously (The degree of anonymity depends on the user). In a nutshell, it allows you to connect to any website without them knowing that it was you they connected to. This is done by moving your data over a number of Nodes on the network in such a way that any particular node only knows about the node which sent the data and the node to which it will pass the data on. So, the entry nodes (to which you will initially send the data ) only knows about you but still they don't know the content because of encryption. Since, this post is about Brave I will not go into the technical details about TOR (maybe an article on it?). Anyhow, Brave browser has TOR protocol built into it. So, you can connect to the TOR network from Brave Browser (only Desktop version as of now).
BAT
Who doesn't love free crypto?? Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a cryptocurrency which was created with an idea that "A user will be get paid for the attention they give". So, In Brave Browser, their is an opt-in feature called "Brave Rewards". If you turn it on, you will be greeted with non-intrusive ads. These ads show up as pop-up notification or home-page background in your browser. You will be paid for every ad. There is no need to even interact with the ads. The number of ads you want per hour can be customized.
But what about privacy? Well, the ad creator will only want to show you their ad (and pay you for it) only if they think that you might buy/use their product. But that requires tracking. So, what the Brave browser does is this: There is a pre-trained Machine learning model built right into the browser that checks how the user is using the browser (All of this is done locally). NO information about your history etc is sent to Brave. But the model will tell the Brave Ad server which type of ad it thinks should be shown to you in a generalised way. Maybe you are crypto-enthusiast or love fast cars etc. And you will get the ads accordingly.
What is ingenius about this is that it is a radical change to the Ads we are accustomed to seeing everyday. Traditionally, a website will show you ad popups or maybe send you notifications etc. And if you interact with it, they earn money, you get nothing. In Brave Rewards, you do not need to interact with any ad you are shown. "Got a Notification" Swipe it right and you will still be paid the same amount of BAT you will get when you click on it!!. "Just viewed an ad on the homepage background?" You got paid!!!!
So, how does this work? Basically every ad publisher will pay Brave for showing their ad for a certian period of time. The ads will be shown to the user and the revenue that the Browser generated will be split in 70-30. 70% will be given to the USERS.
Brave Creators
If you have a social channel or blog then you can link it to a "Brave creator" account. By linking, any Brave user can send tips to you right from their browser. 5% of the tip will be deducted by Brave and rest 95% will smoothly flow into your creator account monthly. As of now, you can link your Reddit, youtube, github account, your own website and many more. A user can also set a monthly-contribution for a particular creator if they want to.
Brave Search
Brave search is a decentralized search engine which they have built from scratch. It uses an independent index of web. The search engine does not track your queries, nor your clicks, nothing! The Search engine also support the "Bangs" feature of DuckDuckGo. Now, they also have something cool they call "Independence metrics". So, suppose you search for something "XYZ" and brave will try to find the result regarding the query in its index. However, the number of results that it find similar is less than desired; in that case, result from Third-party search engines will be mixed with their result and displayed to you.
The % of result that were provided by 3rd party will also be shown to YOU!!! The independence metric tells you what percentage of results came from their own search indexes. Yet, there is no possible way for 3rd parties to track you from these queries because brave search is querying them on your behalf (as a proxy). And an additional plus point is that if you donot want to use brave browser, you can still use Brave Search.
Other than all of these features,there is Brave Firewall + VPN for IOS users, Brave Talk for every Brave Browser user which allows you 1:1 free unlimited calls and a subscription plan is avialable for group calls. The Brave Sync allows you to create a sync chain across various devices on different platform to ease your workflow. Example being: me sending a tab about of information regarding "Brave ads" from my smartphone to my laptop.
I have been using brave browser for almost over a year. According to the privacy statistics, It has blocked more than 126K trackers and ads over a period of last 3 months on my smartphone. Now, Let's be real not all of the trackers are bad but the thing is that when you save alot of bandwidth and it speeds up your browser while also consuming far too less memory.
Lastly, the IOS users cannot use the "Brave Reward" feature because of Apple's strict policy that the only allowed currency in an app on an iphone is In-app purchase. So, to adhere to the rules, the rewards were discontinued for the IOS users.
Do share your thoughts and point out any mistake if you can!!! Peace.
