Surf faster & safer + block annoying ads with Brave Browser

It’s been two years since I started using Brave browser and I couldn’t be more pleased with it, so I’m feeling obliged to share my review of this excellent browsing tool here, even if I’m rather late with it.

Brave is a fast and ad-free crypto-centric browser that is coming from the creators of the BAT (Basic Attention Token) cryptocurrency project, led by Brendan Eich. As a creator of Java script and co-creator of Mozila Firefox, Mr. Eich has a very impressive CV to begin with, which certainly helped with the launch of the BAT token back in 2017. It became the hottest ICO of the year and the token took off immediately, even before their browser was released. It is a token created to solve the numerous problems facing digital marketing. It is built on the Ethereum Blockchain and the aim of the platform is to decentralize the digital advertising marketplace, thus leaving users, publishers and advertisers to dominate by eliminating whatsoever form of a third party like the trackers, middlemen and frauds, that create a problem for the current market place.

As a browser, Brave offers a number of great features, which are mainly to do with accelerating the speed of browsing through blocking all unsolicited ads on all pages, also most of the cookies (except those that are necessary for the pages to load properly) and other scripts that may cause a delay in the page loading or might have tracking purpose.
It also offers a great interface, based on the Google Chrome (Chromium) browser that most of us are well familiar with, including all the extensions and add-ons, bookmarks (easily imported if you choose to) plus other perks, such as an eye-catching wallpaper and shortcuts to your favourite websites (which you can customise yourself).

When I mentioned all the extensions, I mean – you get these from the actual Google Play store, just as you do on Google Chrome, not like Microsoft Edge, where you have to choose from their own extensions and compromise on some of your favourites as they’re not listed… you have the full choice of extensions that you get with Chrome.
As you can see on the screenshot above, there’s even a Binance widget (optional) – for those who want to have a quick access to buying crypto with a single button.

These are only some of the many advantages of using the Brave browser. In the past quarter it surpassed Chrome and Opera as the most used browser in the crypto community and it also surpassed Chrome as the most downloaded browser of 2019, so the userbase is growing fast and for a good reason. It needed to be a decent web browser to gain any traction and quite honestly, it is.

When tested, the JavaScript speed of Brave is faster than on Chrome and Firefox, when it comes to memory use Brave uses less memory per tab than Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. These are excellent points for me as I often work with dozens of tabs – especially when I’m doing my charting and market analysis, writing or streaming my Crypto Corner news vodcasts. Since it uses the same internals as Chrome and Edge the browsing experience is as expected and I couldn’t detect any difference or anomalies in rendering, if anything, it’s an improved experience compared to all other browsers I have used.

On top of that you are able to earn BAT tokens while browsing, should you choose to opt-in for certified partner ads that you would see occasionally (and I mean really rarely, not nearly as much as you would expect). Rather than tempting you to click on adverts, Brave anonymously calculates the amount of attention you give the sites you visit. Once a month, the Brave Rewards program will compensate the sites you’ve visited. This way you are not starving the content creators from their hard-earned ad revenue.

The BAT rewards you earn are distributed to your own wallet (you set it up when you start using the browser via Uphold – the wallet provider for BAT tokens). You can then choose whether you keep these tokens and maybe trade them later or you can also use them to give cash tips to your favourite creators and influencers on various websites (and social media, of course).

Brave combines better privacy and safety with a browsing experience that’s faster Chrome.

Last but not least, let’s talk about Cyber Security. Privacy and safety is the main focus of Brave browser and they offer excellent security, a wide range of options to control your cookies and scripts you allow to run on the page and even as I’m writing this post, I can see dozens of cross-site trackers and cookies blocked as you see in the screenshot below.

You can choose to opt-in for all cookies to be cleared upon exiting a page and every-now-and-then, should you need to, you can turn off all blocking instantly, with the push of one button (for those super-limiting websites that won’t allow any browsing unless your ad blocker is turned off).

There’s another very cool feature that Brave recently added – integrated wayback machine. Users can now instantly access content that was removed from websites by checking out older versions of pages. Wayback machine is a popular tool for many crypto researchers and it has been extremely popular for fact-checking that notorious Mr. Wright when claiming to be Satoshi (and thanks to this feature his many schemes and fakery has been revealed).

All in all, Brave is great on any level and a definite winner for me as an online browsing experience, so I am surely recommending you give it a try.

You can download it from this link.

I personally have it on my phone since 2018, as well as all of my laptops and since last year, I moved all of my bookmarks from other browsers to Brave and I haven’t used Chrome since then. I still sometimes use Edge for a few microsoft-based accounts I have, just for the seamless connectivity on those, but there’s nothing that Chrome offers to me, that I cannot do with Brave, so I couldn’t be more happy to let go of the heavy RAM-abusing and slow-speed Chrome tool.

I am still thankful to Google for creating the Chromium product, which many other browsers are using as their basis, but I love more the UI and the improved speed and security that Brave offers to me as the end user.

Let me know your thoughts about Brave after you give it a test run or if you’re already a user, share your experience in the comment below.

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