If you've read Publish0x long enough (say, for a week) you might have noticed how actively people here push the Three Browsers: Brave, Cryptotab and Netbox. And even if you raise your eyes to the top of the page, you will feel what I'm telling about. Today I'd like to see why and what is so unique about them those Browsers.

But first I would note that Brave, Cryptotab, and Netbox are not only three browsers, but three Chromium clones. They share the same Blink engine and I suspect the most part of Chromium's core codebase. Yup, it happens. Today there's quite a herd of such Chromium clones, and every one is a "browser", with its own bells, whistles, blackjacks, and hookers.

Brave

The most pushed of the three is Brave. It's "privacy- and speed-oriented" and has a built-in incentivized advertising system. Yup, the same "get paid per view" as every other faucet has. I don't know how sustainable this Brave's paid ads business will be when smart guys create auto-surfing bots and launch thousands of Brave instances on headless VMs. And I don't care, honestly.

I installed Brave on my Win10 VM -- and couldn't understand what's so unique there about my "privacy". The most Chrome clones have the same sliders switching off location tracking, cookies, crash dump uploads and so on. If it's not enough, every decent ad blocker (e.g. Ublock) can do it for you, and even more. With a decent ad blocker, you can build your own "privacy system" more elaborated than Brave's or any browser's built-in one. Besides, any decent ad cutter in any decent Chrome clone will deliver you the same surfing speed as the one Brave claims.

Actually, I didn't care that much about my surfing speed, CPU and RAM usage, or similar bullsh*t. I simply wanted to get some quick and easy BATs. So I headed straight to Rewards tab -- and TA-DAMM! Ads are not yet available for your location... Call it cryptocurrency, blockchain or whatever you like, but if you're (statistically) f*cking poor -- nobody cares of your "valuable attention". It's capitalism, bitch! (UPD. Even with "177 new countries" my location is out.)

Moreover, as far as I could understand, even if I had ads, I couldn't withdraw my BATs from my own Brave to my own Metamask without undergoing KYC at Uphold. Guys, you hype your "privacy" here and there -- and want me to send my IDs and monkey selfies to nobody knows who?! Holy sh*t!

I'm deeply disappointed with Brave, to say the least. The only reason for me to use it is if I want to tip "creators" with advertisers' BATs. For example, I could support Publish0x visiting it with Brave.

Otherwise, the Brave browser for me is largely a useless piece of sh*t (unless someone downloads Brave via my affiliate link if I ever have any).

Cryptotab

Now, what about Cryptotab? I didn't install it because I know what it is right from its website. Cryptotab is a Windows-only Chromium clone with a built-in Monero miner. If you want to rape your smartphone with PoW mining there're iOS and Android builds too.

Monero is an established coin with several interesting ideas behind (one of them is Brave's favorite "privacy" or transactions anonymity). The problem is that on desktop you don't need any browser to mine XMR. You need a miner (several of which were already created long ago) and a couple of evenings to learn how to set the miner up. Then you can equally passively mine XMR on a pool you like and swap it to any coin you like at any exchange you like keeping all the profits (less commissions and possible dev fees) to yourself (of course, if you manage to have them profits after paying electricity bills) while surfing the web with any browser you like.

The only practical use case I can imagine for Cryptotab is when you want to mine on your employer's PC, but your sysadmin closed all outgoing ports except ordinary 80/443 (I presume Cryptotab's miner uses 80/443). Or when you are really ready to torture your smartphone for 2 cents a day.

The real power behind Cryptotab is its 10-level affiliate system. You probably understand that Cryptotab's devs have a tiny earning from every running Cryptotab instance. So instead of illegally building a mining botnet, the guys decided to go the hard legal way and to use their users for building a vast mining network.

My sisters and brethren in crypto, together we can be part of one Network if you download your Cryptotab browser via my affiliate link!

Netbox

Netbox is a Russian Windows-only Chromium clone with a built-in Netbox coin wallet. The NBX is traded on several exchanges including my favorite Crex24.

The NBX coin is useful for... ahmm, actually I don't know what the coin is useful for. There's quite a long list of great expectations on the website, but the devs are clearly falling well behind their own schedule. I hope sooner or later the devs will implement everything they planned, but at the moment NBX is a typical masternode coin, useful only to trade it for BTC or to launch yet another masternode.

However, Netbox looks the most lucrative of the three, it's definitely what I would go for. NBX coin has a good price and trading volume, and the browser has staking feature and activity rewards. That is, you can stake your NBX right inside your Netbox wallet and receive more NBX, and also you get NBX for using Netbox for web surfing. When you accumulate 10K NBX you can launch a masternode. I already wonder if it's possible to launch four VMs with four Netbox instances on a server with a single IP and thus receive x4 rewards...  Yup, I care only about getting more and more NBX. And you can get them too if you download Netbox browser via my affiliate link! ("... if user comes via your referral link and creates Netbox.Wallet, each of you gets 1 NBX. Besides, each of you gets 9 NBX after the first month of using Netbox.Browser.")

"So do you mean we shouldn't use these three browsers?", you might ask. No, why not, if it makes you crypto. But none of them I would praise for "privacy", "speed" or other claimed bullsh*t. And I certainly don't see any of them as a "future of crypto". My current love Prospectors game looks more crypto-futuristic than all the three browsers together.

Finally I'd only dare say a small side remark. If you are really paranoid about privacy, security, speed, blackjack, and hookers -- in the first place you shouldn't use MS Windows, Apple iOS or Google's Android. And forget about adware no matter how lucrative it may look.

PS. I didn't receive 20 NBX airdrop from Netbox. Instead I got this:

Our antifraud filter noticed unnatural behavior. We have a sophisticated antifraud algorithm which takes into account users behavior. This algorithm prevents any attempts of faking the activity with the purpose to get rewards improperly. It detects users behavior which is unnatural, attempts to manipulate it, as well as the usage of virtual machines and lots more factors which we don't disclose for security reasons. Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with any further information or particular factors which cause the reward to be skipped, cause once used improperly, this information may do harm to the whole community. Please, try to use Netbox.Browser as main browser on your desktop computer and you will get 20 NBX coins Airdrop reward soon. This process is fully automatic. Please, be patient and don't be upset. Thank you for understanding.

Huh, it's blockchain, bitch!