Co-founded by Brendan Eich, one of the creators of the Mozilla Firefox browser, Brave Browser is one of the most popular alternative browser providers. Functioning much like Chrome and Firefox, Brave Browser is a software application allowing users to browse through the internet, visit websites and use online applications. The main difference between Brave Browser and traditional browsers is the approach towards advertisements.
While traditional browsers allow publishers to post advertisements and benefit from clicks, Brave takes on a different approach. The browser’s code is structured in such a way that it automatically strips down all advertisements from a website, and replaces them with ones selected by Brave Browser instead. Users of the browsers are rewarded with Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) for viewing ads provided by Brave Browser. Aside from this innovative approach towards online advertising and rewards, Brave also boasts significantly faster search speeds. According to the official Brave documentation, the browser is several times faster than the industry leader Chrome. This is not surprising, considering the fact that advertisement scripts traditionally slow down browser functions.
Another innovative characteristic of the Brave Browser is the complete removal of ad tracking software. Many websites integrate ad tracking scripts in their code that follow users’ activity and extract behavioral data. In recent years, ad tracking software has been deemed as one of the biggest challenges to personal privacy. By removing ad tracking scripts, Brave boasts to be one of the best browsers in terms of data privacy and the protection of personal information.
Brave Browser is built on top of Chromium, Google’s open-source code, which also serves as the foundation of the Chrome browser. This allows Brave to support browser extensions built for Chrome.
While Brave Browser offers undeniable benefits for its users, the software has come under fire for stripping publishers of their earnings. Numerous publishing companies spoke up against Brave and argued that the browser is essentially using content created by them while receiving the advertisement rewards. More than fifteen newspaper publishers filed lawsuits against Brave for stealing content created by them.
Despite its controversial approach towards ads, Brave is one of the preferred browsers among cryptocurrency enthusiasts, because of the blockchain-based ecosystem behind the browser. Brave Browser aims to create a completely revolutionary approach to advertising by allowing users to contribute and reward ad providers with BAT tokens. This means that users have full control over the ads they would like to reward. Additionally, users are incentivized for viewing ads. This revolutionary approach, tightly connected with the principles of blockchain technology has made Brave one of the go-to service providers in the cryptocurrency industry.
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