Brave Web Browser

2 points·sqwrell··2 comments

Being that Brave Web Browser is focused around privacy and security - it's odd that we don't hear much about it and it's not even that popular. Any opinions about this? I am thinking of using Brave instead of Chrome. Brave is faster. But I live in my browser and it's a big move. I use Windows, iOS and Linux - home, work and school - so I would be all in if I switched.

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Brave claims to have more than 50 million monthly users, that's nothing to sneeze at (almost 1/4 of Firefox). I think the reason it's not that popular at least on HN is because of the whole cryptocurrency aspect of the browser. You can however turn all of that off to the point it feels like using a vanilla Chrome (without all of the recent privacy BS and with a built-in ad-blocker that's not affected by Google's attempts to cripple the API ad-blockers use).

https://brave.com/transparency/

https://brave.com/2021-recap/

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

I've been using Brave for about 3 years. Not sure it's that big of a move coming from Chrome.

I think the only pain point is that the shields might make a few sites misbehave, e.g. getting an error during a card payment due to some 3rd party library being blocked, so you might need to disable the shields and try again. If you already use uBlock Origin this shouldn't be any news.

And as a sibling comment said, the crypto aspect is just a detail.

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