Post History

## Brave

The Brave project was started by Brendan Eich, one of the key figures in original Firefox, after he left the Mozilla foundation due to political reasons. From this, one could presume that it has greater commitment to respecting user privacy and freedom, or not.

Brave is based on the Chrome rendering engine so it behaves more similarly to that browser than Firefox, and compatible with most Chrome extensions. It attempts to provide ad blocking and tracker countermeasures as built in features, although they are not as good or configurable as extensions like uBlock.

Notably, Brave integrates support for Tor. It is probably not realistic to achieve meaningful anonymity with Brave, because it lacks the de-anonymization features of browsers like Tor Browser, so in practice you will not be hiding your identity from determined parties. However, it will deter casual tracking, censoring and blocking in that it will at least conceal your IP. Furthermore, it is not difficult and risky to use Tor to connect to sites with sensitive personal data, such as banks, so I wouldn't say using Brave in permanent Tor mode is a good idea.

Brave has an unusual monetization model where ads are hijacked by Brave's own ad service, you are paid in cryptocurrency for viewing them, and you are supposed to then somehow send these to websites you approve of so that they are still financially supported in lieu of ad revenue. This has drawn criticism because ads and tracking usually go hand in hand, although arguably it is better to be tracked by the browser than the website or ad network. However, the ad hijacking is opt-in in most versions and Brave only hides ads (with no crypto payment), it doesn't show you its own ads, unless you request it.

It is better to use Brave than Chrome. Occasionally, the privacy features will break some sites, but it is not hard to disable them in Brave's UI.