Say hello to the ‘Brave’ Browser
What if you could have a fast fluid browsing experience while also staying safe and secure with an inbuilt ad-blocker? Well, this browser offers a brave way to do that (pun intended). Say Hello to the Brave Browser.
Installing the browser and importing my bookmarks is blazing fast
What exactly is Brave?
Just like any other web browser, you can browse the web. A few months back, we took a look at how one browser actually helped contribute to growing trees a while ago. With this one you get speed, reliability and most importantly, you get an ad-free browsing experience. It is available for both desktop and mobile and is almost the same size as Google Chrome when installed.
My Brave experience
Brave runs on the Chromium browser just like Vivaldi and Ecosia. This essentially means that your browsing experience in terms of compatibility on sites will be almost identical to if you were on Google Chrome.
Once installed, I took a look at what Brave had to offer. The first thing I looked for was a dark mode. And I was not disappointed. The next thing I checked was for compatibility with extensions. Owing to the Chromium engine, all Google Chrome extensions are supported. In fact, the Web Store of Brave actually redirects to the Google Chrome extensions store.
If you’re tech-savvy, you can use the “chrome://extensions” tag to go to the web store. The tag was automatically converted to “brave://extensions”. Similarly, any chrome tag for extensions, settings, flags, etc. can be used without any issues.
Tinkering around with the settings reminds me a lot of Google Chrome
As Brave is built using Chromium, it supports the entirety of Google Chrome’s extensions.
Brave aims to be the most private, secure and fastest browser available
Real-world performance
Results of an HTML5 test carried out: From Left to Right – Brave, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Mozilla Firefox.
I ran the HTML5 test and the results are given below. While Opera actually traded blows with this browser, Microsoft Edge, was of course at the back of the pack.
Page load times were also quite fast. My only complaint is that Brave worked a little too well for me. I set it to block all 3rd party scripts and JavaScript scripts, Gmail, Google Drive, and most other Google services had issues in loading content.
However, because I can tweak it for individual sites, I enabled scripts on those sites and continued blocking out the rest of the world. If you’re a Google Chrome user and you’re looking for a browser with the same or faster speeds as well as no compromises to your personal information and security, I will definitely recommend this browser.
In fact, I’ve already set it as my default browser on both my desktop and my laptop.
I’ve also downloaded it to my mobile and set it as my default browser as well. You can also download it for Desktop and iOS as well.
(The author is a senior tech writer for readme.lk)
Browse freely, browse bravely
One thing that the developers emphasize is anonymity and security. As such, you get a built-in ad-blocker. You can also completely disable JavaScript scripts from running as well. The benefit here is that you can enable scripts for websites that you completely trust, and block out all the rest.
With Brave Shields, you get complete control or 3rd party trackers, cookies and even device recognition. But all this is configurable. So it’s not like once you disable it, it would be the same for all sites. Rather, you’re in control over what data a site has on you. This for me is a big plus.
In addition, the next thing that made me smile was the incognito mode. Rather than just having an incognito mode similar to that of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, I actually get a private window with Tor.
This means that not only does Brave not keep track of my browsing history, private browsing with Tor means your IP address is hidden from the sites I visit as well. A drawback is that the default search engine in private mode with Tor is DuckDuckGo. While search results were not as accurate as with Google, search history wasn’t tracked so that wasn’t a big deal for me.
The Brave Shield allows you to tailor your browsing experience per website
If you want even more privacy, you can have a Private Window running through Tor as well