What is Brave?
Brave is a new open-source web-browser available for many platforms with user privacy, security and experience in mind. The new Brave browser blocks the ads and trackers that slow you down, spend your bandwidth, and invade your privacy. You have the option to block the ads or replace them with Brave Ads that fund the website owners of the sites you visit and Brave users like yourself. The idea that Brave has is to rely on Bitcoin for micropayments by users and for users and site owners, so that everyone can be happy by getting better experience and some extra revenue for doing what they normally do for free - browser the Internet.
In a sense you can find similarities between Brave's idea and Steemit's idea - to reward users for contributing quality content, as well as helping find other good posts and grow a nice community. They are both things that you would do anyway even without getting paid by browsing many websites every day or by posting interesting content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever other social network that profit from your time and effort and does not give you anything back. With Brave and Steemit however these things that you do can now earn you extra money or should in theory...
Platforms Brave is Already Available For
The Brave browser is still in beta, but already available for download, so you can get it installed on your computer or mobile device and give it a try. Most of the functionality is already there, though some is still missing such as Bitcoin micropayments support and Brave Ads that can replace other ads.
The Brave browser is currently available for:
- Windows, Mac OS and Linux Computers
- Google Android and Apple iOS Devices
Brave for Windows requires at least Windows 7 or newer and is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Brave for Mac requires Mac OS 10.9 or newer. Brave for Linux comes in two versions:
64 bit .deb for Debian/Ubuntu and 64 bit .rpm for Fedora/openSUSE.
Brave for Apple iOS devices require iOS 8.1 or newer and works with iPhone and iPad. Brave for Android requires Android Jelly Bean 4.1 or newer and works with both smartphones and tablets.
How does Brave use Bitcoin (BTC)
Brave is still developing the system that will be suing BTC, it is open source on github.com, but at this point what they know is they will use Bitcoin only for permissionless payment delivery to user and publisher wallets that will be created using BitGo's APIs (the partner used for Bitcoin payments apparently is BitGo). The idea is to let expert users "bring their own BTC" to self-fund their wallets and auto-micropay for as much of their browsing as they like. As already mentioned the Bitcoin micropayments part is not yet implemented in the current version of Brave available, so no need to go look for it yet.
The Brave Browser User Experience
The Brave browser comes with a familiar interface that is clean and simple, closer to what Chrome and Firefox are offering. It is easy to work with, works fast loading pages and rendering them properly, interactive websites work well and everything seems to behave nicely for a new browser that is still in beta and there is a reason for that. The Ad-blocking part works relatively good when ads are being served from a different web servers, but if ads are being served from the same server where the website you visit is at you may notice that some of the Ads are not properly blocked.
You should know that Brave is founded by Mozilla's co-founder Brendan Eic, who is also the creator of the JavaScript programming language. Interestingly enough Brave is based on the Google-backed Chromium browser, and not using the engine from Firefox for example. So the new Brave browser is powered by rather good backend for the part that should load and render the websites you visit as apparently the main goal was not to start a brand new browser from the beginning, but focus on the features that matter and that differentiate Brave from the other established browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others.
If you are wondering how Brave works with video streaming websites such as Youtube.com, well we should tell you that there are not issues with them. Brave uses the HTML5 version of the player for videos and not Flash and clips play just fine and without any problems. Many of the larger video streaming websites already do offer an alternative HTML5-based playback of videos they host for people that do not want to rely on Flash as they may deem it as an extra security risk and just don't have it installed or enabled all the time. So these should work just fine with the Brave browser, but there is also an alternative for websites that might not work without Flash.
Do note that Brave does offer support for Adobe Flash, however by default that support is not enabled and you need to enable it from the Brave Settings under Security. Do note that Flash support is experimental and requires Pepper Flash to be installed from Adobe. However you should still be able to use interactive website that do rely on Flash for some functionality, you just have to enable it. Flash-based banner ads should of course be blocked when detected, so that should not be a problem either.
The Brave Shield
The Brave Shield is a quick popup menu that you can access on per website basis by clicking on the lion icon on the right of the browser window. It shows you the basic stats and settings that are currently in action for the specific website, on the screenshot above you can see the details from the Brave Shield on steemit.com. You might be familiar with this type of control interface if you have used some ad blocking plugin on your existing browser, do not that you also have a switch to completely Enable / Disable the Brave Shield and thus the protection it provides.
Interestingly enough the Brave browser finds a blocks 1 Ad / Tracker on steemit.com, it does not switch to HTTPS protocol for secure communication as steemit already uses that, no Scripts are being blocked and no Fingerprinting methods as well.
By default the HTTPS Everywhere option is enabled so any website that has HTTPS should be switched to using it, also by default the Block Phishing / Malware is enabled. The Block Scripts and Fingerprint Protection are not, but on steemit there were no concerns for these two, so they don't need to be enabled.
The Conclusion
This is a brief introduction and some initial first impressions from the new Brave browser, hoping that it can help you get an idea on what to expect and if interested you might want to give it a go. Be warned however that this is still beta software and there could be various issues with it, though from using it for a bit already no serious problems were discovered and it actually behaves quite well.
The Brave browser is indeed looking good and promising at this point, but we are yet to see how it will handle the part where it will be showing different Ads, the revenue of which will be used to reward users of the browser and website owners as well as how the Bitcoin micropayment parts will be implemented.