Brave Reviews

Brave comes with a handful of original built-in features for you to explore. Like many other popular modern browsers, it lets you synchronize all your devices, but contrary to those same browsers, it doesn’t force you to create an account. With Brave, you create what it calls a “Sync Chain” that allows you to synchronize your devices through one-time verification codes. Unfortunately, for now, Brave only synchronizes bookmarks.

Moreover, Brave also comes with a built-in ad blocker, which saves you the trouble of installing a third-party extension. Speaking of extensions, being that Brave is a chromium-based browser, you can install most of the applications available on the Chrome Web Store.

Other features you can count on are WebTorrent, which lets you download torrents directly from the browser, Google Hangouts, and IPFS Companion. However, the most intriguing feature from Brave is the reward system.

Making money with Brave

One of the main objectives of Brave is to change how advertising works on the internet. Therefore, by combining an ad blocker and its “Brave Rewards” system, Brave gives you the option to watch its own ads, with 70% of the revenue for the publishers and content creators, 15% for the users, and the other 15% for Brave’s developers.

It’s the first time such a business model is presented in the browser industry, and it’s a game-changer in the online advertising system. Not only do all the parties involved win with the advertisements, but it also saves advertisers money by giving them certainty that users are interested and welcome their ads.

It’s clear that Brave wants to change how the web works, and not just through transforming online advertising. Beyond that, Brave also wants to make sure that it protects its users from nefarious websites, as well as safeguard their privacy.

Brave comes with various built-in shields that you can easily access through the ‘shields’ menu located to the right of the address bar. This menu gives you a rundown of everything being blocked, such as trackers, cookies, device recognition, and scripts. Moreover, it will also force connections to be upgraded to HTTPS, a safer transfer protocol than HTTP. All of this without having to install any extensions – could it be any simpler?

Brave makes sure that your privacy is safe at all times as well. First of all, it doesn’t log any browser data on its servers. Secondly, it supports Tor, which can be enabled every time you go into incognito mode. Thirdly, it provides the DuckDuckGo search engine off the bat, so you can search for everything you want without being tracked. Moreover, even the ad personalization from Brave Rewards is done locally, which means that no data is sent to Brave or the advertiser.

However, Brave uses Google Safe Browsing that sends data to Google and is enabled by default, but it’s easy to disable it under the privacy and security settings. Unfortunately, Brave does not come with a built-in VPN like other browsers do. Nevertheless, you can install any VPN provider with a Chrome extension.

Although the interface may change a little bit on each platform, the features are mostly the same and you will get all shields as well as the “Brave Rewards” system on both mobile and desktop. Moreover, you will get some extra neat features on mobile, such as the possibility to turn any website into a PDF file. However, while you can add any search engine to the desktop app, on mobile, you are stuck with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and StartPage, which, to be honest, is a tiny detail compared to everything Brave offers.

Interface aside, one of the best things Brave offers is its performance. Chromium-based browsers are usually resource-hungry, but not Brave. Not only is the browser faster when compared to other popular browsers, but it consumes less RAM as well.