Brave

I have been putting this one off because browsers are the software I argue about the most, and Brave specifically is the one I have the most mixed feelings about in my personal list. I use it. I recommend it. I also roll my eyes sometimes. Let me explain.

If you are young you will not understand why I am so cranky about web browsers specifically. I started on Netscape Navigator. Actual Netscape. The one that came on a floppy or three. Ok, it was for a short period and the Internet was kind of a luxury over a dial-up modem that was going like 2 kB/s max speed. But I am trying not to bore you to death with my old memories.

Then Internet Explorer ate Netscape, then Firefox came along and was glorious, then Chrome came along and was faster than Firefox so I jumped ship like everyone else, and then slowly, over about ten years, I realised Chrome had turned my browser into a data hoover attached to an advertising company.

Ok, this deserves a special mention. I got a punch in my face from Mark Straver, the developer of Pale Moon who openly criticized me (and he was 1000% absolutely right) for indirectly supporting the "Chromification" of web. Mark, if you read this - I want to apologize for not doing the right thing earlier.

The final straw for me was when Google announced Manifest V3, which is their polite way of saying "we are going to cripple ad blockers because our whole business is ads and we cannot have you blocking them". At that point I started looking around properly. I avoided Pale Moon because I was and I still feel guilty about it but I will have to live with it. I tried LibreWolf, I tried hardened Firefox with a wall of about:config tweaks, I tried Vivaldi, I tried Brave. Brave stuck. Mostly.

Important: There are many Brave Browser releases and we will list only the most popular ones on dAppCDN. It makes no sense to list all versions as we think it would actually confuse users.

What Brave actually is (ripping Google out of Chromium)

So what is Brave. It is a Chromium fork, which is the bit that makes privacy purists gnash their teeth, but hear me out. The team led by Brendan Eich (yes, the legend who invented JavaScript back at Netscape, so he knows a thing or two about browsers) takes the Chromium source and then runs a whole patching pipeline via something called brave-core that rips out or replaces the Google bits. And when I say rips out I mean properly rips out.

Ok, I was looking at a picture of Brendan Eich

An then I read this ...

Google Accounts integration gone. Metrics reporting to Google gone. DNS prefetching disabled by default so you are not leaking where you are about to click. The Google URL Tracker that normally pings Google's domains in the background, gone. Google Cloud Messaging, gone. The FLoC thing and the Topics API from Google's "Privacy Sandbox" (which is the most Orwellian name for an ad-targeting system I have ever seen), gone. Web Environment Integrity, which Google tried to push and which would basically have let websites refuse to load unless your browser was "approved" - Brave explicitly refused to implement it. Good. WebBluetooth and NFC APIs, disabled, because why on earth does a web page need Bluetooth access to my machine. Again, still thinking and looking at Brendan Eich picture - that's how you build and earn trust, at least it worked in my case.

The Ad Blocker is written in Rust and does not care about "Manifest V3"

Here is the part that I actually care about as an old paranoid. The ad blocker, which they call Brave Shields, is not an extension. It is compiled into the browser itself, written in Rust, sitting inside the C++ core. It intercepts ad and tracker requests at the network level before the bloody things even get fetched. This matters massively because uBlock Origin, which was the gold standard for years and which I loved, is going to get nerfed by Manifest V3. Extension-based blockers are on borrowed time. Shields is not an extension so it does not care about Manifest V3. It just works. On my Android phone the difference is night and day - pages load noticeably faster and the battery lasts longer, and Brave's own testing on a Pixel 6a showed about 21% faster load times than Chrome with 9% less CPU and 4% less battery. Those numbers match what I see in real life.

The usual - a little bit of history

Back in about 2005 I was running a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM and I used to keep Task Manager open on a second monitor just to watch what was eating my memory. I could literally watch Firefox balloon to 400MB just from having a few news sites open. Most of that was advertising JavaScript. Most of what you think is "a slow computer" is actually "a computer being forced to run fifty tracking scripts per page against its will". When you block that stuff at the network layer it is like unplugging a vacuum cleaner from your leg. You suddenly remember what the internet felt like in 2003. Of course I would lie if I would not admit that I've reset my computer more times than I remember.

Fingerprinting and the silly name they picked

The fingerprinting protection in Brave is the other bit I respect. They call it "farbling" which is a daft name for a clever idea. Websites try to identify you by building a fingerprint from little bits of your browser - canvas readback, the audio stack, WebGL info about your GPU, how many CPU cores you have, how much RAM. Brave feeds all those APIs slightly randomised values. Not completely random, because that would break things, but deterministic per-session and per-site. The same site gets consistent (but fake) values during a session, and a different site gets different fake values, and tomorrow everything resets. Your fingerprint becomes a moving target.

It is not perfect. If you want proper anonymity you still want Tor Browser, which goes the opposite direction and makes every user look identical so you blend into the crowd. But for daily browsing Brave's approach is a massive improvement over just sitting there with your real WebGL renderer string flapping in the wind.

Brave also does this thing called ephemeral storage partitioning. Third-party frames (the iframes that adverts and social widgets live in) get their own little sandboxed storage area that is unique per top-level site, so the tracker on site-a.com cannot read the cookies it set on site-b.com. And the moment you close the last tab for a site, that third-party partition gets nuked. Safari's version only clears on browser restart. Firefox's old version just kept them forever. Brave is the most aggressive of the lot and that is exactly what I want.

Sync done properly (finally)

Sync is the feature I was most suspicious of, because any time a product says "sync" I assume "your data is now on their server unencrypted", but Brave Sync v2 is actually done right. You get a 32-byte random seed generated locally on your machine, encoded as a BIP39 recovery phrase (the same kind of phrase Bitcoin wallets use, twelve or so words). That seed feeds into HKDF-SHA512 to derive an Ed25519 signing keypair, scrypt is used for key stretching, and everything gets encrypted with AES128-CTR-HMAC before it ever leaves your machine. The Brave servers (sitting on AWS somewhere) just see opaque encrypted blobs. Staff cannot read your bookmarks or passwords even if they wanted to. That is how sync should always have been built. If you lose the recovery phrase you are toast, obviously, but that is the price you pay for actual security. Write it down on paper. Put the paper somewhere safe. This is not hard.

Speedreader and Cookiecrumbler, the quiet heroes

Speedreader deserves a mention because it is genuinely clever and nobody talks about it. Normal "reader mode" in other browsers loads the whole page, ads and trackers and all, and then strips it down after the fact. Brave's Speedreader uses a machine learning classifier to decide if a page is an article before it even loads, and if it is, it does a document tree translation before rendering. The numbers are stupid. Median load time drops from around 1.8 seconds to about 0.08 seconds, data downloaded drops from 2.3MB to about 0.03MB, memory usage goes from 197MB to 82MB. That is a 22 to 27 times speed improvement and an 84 times reduction in data. For news sites it feels like teleportation.

Cookiecrumbler is another one. Instead of the "auto-consent" extensions that just click "reject" for you (which still loads the consent framework, which still tracks you), Cookiecrumbler stops the consent framework from loading in the first place. The GDPR popup plague is one of the worst things that has happened to the web and I will take any tool that makes it go away.

Vertical tabs at last

One thing I nearly forgot to mention because it is "just UI" but it actually changed my life. Brave finally added proper native vertical tabs back in version 1.52 in 2023, and they have been improving them ever since. As of version 1.84 you can set the tab panel to hide completely when minimized, so you only see it on hover. This is not an extension - it is built into the browser itself, right-click any tab and pick "Use vertical tabs" from the menu, done.

Why does this matter? Monitors are wider than they are tall. Always have been. Putting tabs on top is a waste of vertical space and once you have more than about fifteen of them they become unreadable stubs. Vertical tabs on the side give you proper titles and more room for actual content. Microsoft Edge had this for years and it was the one thing I genuinely missed, and now Brave does it properly. If you are coming from Edge or Vivaldi this alone removes the last reason to stay.

Brave search and the Goggles trick

I switched my default search engine to Brave Search about a year ago and I am not going back. The independence story had a rough start - when they launched in 2021 they were quietly using the Bing API for long-tail queries and pretending to be "truly independent", which was not really on. They have since got it up to a 92% independence score and discontinued the Bing fallback, though you can still opt in to an anonymous Google Fallback for queries they cannot answer well.

But the reason to actually use it is Goggles. This is the feature nobody talks about and it is brilliant. Goggles let you apply community-created re-ranking filters to your search results. Tired of Pinterest clogging up image searches? There is a filter for that. Want tech-blog-only results instead of SEO-spam listicles? There is a filter for that. Want news from a specific political angle (left or right, your choice) so you can see how a story is being framed? There is a filter for that too. There is even one called "1K Short" that basically downranks the 1000 biggest websites to push you toward smaller independent sources. Goggles left beta in January 2025 with eight presets shipped in, and if you are tech-savvy you can write your own in a little rules language and host it on GitHub. It is the single most empowering search feature I have used in twenty years, because for the first time the ranking algorithm is not a black box - it is a file you can read and modify.

The crypto casino

BAT, the Basic Attention Token, the whole Brave Rewards thing. I understand why they did it. I understand the argument - you opt in to seeing occasional notification ads, the matching happens entirely locally on your device (no browsing data uploaded anywhere), they use zero-knowledge proofs called "blind token confirmations" to verify an ad was viewed without revealing which one or who saw it, and 70% of the revenue goes to you as BAT tokens. Intellectually I respect it. Architecturally it is actually privacy-preserving, which is more than almost any other ad system can say. But I think I am subjective here and it is more related to a personal experience I had a few years ago. At one point I secured a personal investment into BAT token and I wanted to use it as a "treasury" to back up FossHub. It was a crazy idea but then I started to read more about security tokens. It was 2019 and I got caught up into - is this legal? How can I explain the purpose so I slowly started to drop the entire idea. Actually, there's much more but I tried to be short with this story.

Anyway, if you hate the idea of crypto the good news is you can just turn "Rewards off" entirely and pretend it does not exist. First thing after install, go to settings, disable Rewards, disable the Wallet, disable the crypto bits on the new tab page, and enjoy the browser without the "casino".

Leo, the AI sidebar nobody asked me about

The newer annoyance is Brave Leo, their built-in AI assistant. It showed up in the sidebar sometime in the last year or so and now it is just there, winking at me. To Brave's credit, they did Leo about as privately as an AI chatbot can be done. Your prompts go through a reverse proxy that strips your IP before hitting the model, conversations are discarded from their servers after the response is generated, chats are not used to train the model, no account is required for the free tier, and the Premium tier ($14.99/month) uses unlinkable tokens so your subscription payment cannot be tied to your actual usage. They also have a "Bring Your Own Model" feature that lets you point Leo at a local Ollama instance so the whole thing runs on your own box. That is genuinely better than any other browser AI I have seen.

But. I do not want an AI assistant in my browser - I think there's an AI everywhere - I want a browser in my browser. I am an old paranoid who types his own search queries and reads his own articles, thank you very much, and every pixel of chrome dedicated to "ask Leo" is a pixel not dedicated to the web page I am trying to read. If you feel the same, go to Settings > Leo (or brave://settings/leo-ai) and turn the whole thing off. It will stop appearing in the address bar suggestions, stop appearing in the sidebar, stop reminding you it exists. Done.

The feature creep problem

This is where I have to be honest about the broader problem. Brave is no longer just a browser. It is a super-app. In no particular order, Brave now tries to sell you Brave Firewall + VPN (a paid VPN service baked into the browser itself), Brave Talk (video conferencing in your sidebar), Brave News (a curated news feed on the new tab page), Brave Wallet (the non-custodial crypto wallet), Brave Playlist (for offline video), Leo (the AI assistant), and Rewards (the BAT advertising thing). That is a lot of surface area for something that is meant to just render web pages. Not sure, it feels weird to me - the same with cars - they become more like a walking computer rather than "a car".

The LibreWolf crowd have a point when they say Brave is trying to monetize its user base in seventeen different directions at once. The counter-argument, and it is a fair one, is that every single one of these things can be disabled and most of them are opt-in to start with. You can absolutely run a de-featured Brave that looks almost identical to hardened Firefox. But you do have to go in and turn the bits off, one by one, and that is work the LibreWolf user does not have to do. If you want a shortlist for a clean install: go into settings, disable Rewards, disable Wallet, disable Leo, disable News on the new tab page, and you will have a browser that feels like a browser again.

The 2020 affiliate link incident

The 2020 affiliate link incident still bothers me and I think it should still bother everyone. Brave got caught auto-appending affiliate referral codes to URLs when you typed crypto exchange names like Binance and Coinbase into the address bar. It was on by default. Eich apologised, they made it opt-in, but the "trusted agent" brand took a proper hit with me that day and I have never quite forgiven it. A browser that sells itself as the user's agent should never be rewriting the user's URLs silently. But what can I say, we all make mistakes - maybe we don't have "evil" intentions but it is really just that much until you trigger something and people will accuse you of bad intentions.

The IPFS retreat

And here is the sad one. For a while Brave was the only mainstream browser with proper native IPFS support, meaning you could paste an ipfs:// link into the address bar and it would just work, with the option of running a local go-ipfs node right inside the browser. It was the first deep integration of IPFS in any browser and I genuinely thought it was a glimpse of the decentralized web becoming normal. Then in August 2024, in version 1.69.153, they ripped it out. Their reasoning was honest at least - their own privacy-preserving telemetry showed that 0.1% of users had ever turned it on, the maintenance burden for each kubo update was real, and it was adding attack surface for almost nobody. The IPFS project wrote a migration guide pointing people to IPFS Desktop instead. So if you read old reviews talking up Brave's IPFS support, those reviews are out of date. The ipfs:// scheme no longer works natively in Brave. It is a real loss and it is one of the main things that used to set Brave apart architecturally from Chrome and Firefox, and now it does not.

The hardened Brave setup

For the truly paranoid there is a "hardened Brave" configuration hidden behind brave://flags where you can turn on Strict Fingerprinting Mode (be warned, some legacy sites will break), block all cookies including first-party (expect to add exceptions for every login site you use), disable WebRTC non-proxied UDP which stops IP leaks if you use a VPN, and turn off all the crypto flags for what the community affectionately calls a "de-crypto'd" experience. I run most of these. The browser is perfectly happy.

Private Window with Tor is also there if you need casual censorship circumvention, but remember it is not a substitute for actual Tor Browser. It routes through three Tor relays but it does not do the uniformity protections that make all Tor Browser users look identical, so you can still be fingerprinted in Brave's Tor mode. Use it for "I do not want this search in my local history", not for "my life depends on this being anonymous".

Finally

Is Brave perfect? Nope. The Chromium monoculture argument is real - every browser except Firefox and its forks now runs on Google's engine, and that is genuinely unhealthy for the open web in the long run. LibreWolf is the option I would recommend to somebody who wants "Brave's philosophy without the crypto circus and without contributing to Chromium dominance", and for desktop use it is excellent. But LibreWolf's mobile story is not there, the performance on my Android device is worse than Brave's, and for the average person who just wants "a browser that does not spy on me and blocks YouTube ads out of the box without me configuring anything", Brave is easier to hand to them and walk away. That matters. My non-technical friends will never install uBlock Origin and tweak about:config. They will install Brave and it will just work and they will stop complaining about their phones being slow.

If you are running Chrome right now and reading this, please just try it. Install it, import your bookmarks, spend ten minutes turning off the bits you do not want (Rewards, Wallet, Leo, News) and another five minutes turning on vertical tabs and picking a Goggle, and then spend a week with it. Probably, the ad-free YouTube experience will make you a fan of the Brave browser.

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