What is Brave Browser — Know the Basics
What is Brave?
It’s a browser, just like chrome, firefox, safari, and others. We can browse, watch youtube, read blogs and do everything one would normally do with chrome or other popular browsers.
Brave uses V8 javascript engine, the same engine that is used by chrome and Node.js.
Brave was founded by Brian Bondy and Brendan Eich, who is also the creator of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla Corp in 2015.
How is Brave different?
Brave removes all the ads and ad tracking elements while loading the web page, replaces them with a few of its own advertisements (based on user setting) and this strategy makes it the fastest browser (faster than chrome itself) out in the market.
Ever wondered why an ad follows you on every website you visit like you got your own stalker? That’s ad tracking software that works for advertisers. Brave saves you from that sort of intrusion.
Remember those heavy news websites that would take forever to load? Well, not anymore if you are using brave.
Brave gives its users the right to choose — If a user opts to allow advertisements in the browser (also the frequency at which the ads appear), then they get rewarded for watching those ads otherwise one can change the settings and block all the ads forever.
Even though the leading browsers like chrome and safari also claim to have limited the ad tracking activities in their browser, one would wonder how is the privacy concern addressed completely given that these companies rely heavily on money from advertisements.
Would Brave declare the death of content creators?
No, it won’t.
Instead, content creators will get compensated by the brave based on the user attention the content receives and could also receive tips directly from the readers.
Users can also decide to make monthly contributions from their account (BAT not bank account)to anonymous publishers and fix a certain amount towards this. This is purely optional and one can opt not to contribute at all.
There are other plans that the Brave team has to let the users exchange their tokens for premium content and so on but that might take some more time to launch.
How Brave compensates its users?
This part is perhaps the most unique feature of this browser. The very foundation of Brave is built upon BAT (Basic Attention Token). BAT is Ethereum based token that has a current value of $0.6498 / token.
The publisher gets rewarded based on the user's attention on their site and the user gets rewarded by watching the ads. All the transactions are done in BAT.
Should you switch to Brave?
I did.
I enjoy ad-free, super-fast, privacy ensured browsing and even though I’m not sure if I would want to encash those BAT tokens I like seeing them on my home page (sentimental fool).
Brave is free software just like other browsers so I would recommend trying it out once and decide for yourself.
Brave is up to many interesting projects like “Brave Today” which curates news and is a plugin integrated into the browser. There is also an ongoing project to enhance the search feature. If interested, check out their homepage for more details.
