It seems to me that the last two are what's unique.. I think they would have greater success by refocusing on those and just developing plugins for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Getting everyone to install a browser seems like an uphill battle.
It has privacy in mind to its core.
As an example, in a recent interview Brendan Eich mentioned that they are working on making private browsing tabs go through tor in order to make them truly private.
I would argue that integrating the blocking of tracking, cryptocurrency mining and fingerprinting scripts in the core of a browser is an innovation.
And using zero knowledge proofs and machine learning to learn a user’s browsing habits without leaking personal information (or fingerprinting your browser) is an innovation. So is the integration of a micropayments system and wallet.
Also, unlike using traditional ad blocking extensions, you don’t get those annoying popups from websites wining about how they need the ads to generate revenue and asking the user to possibly whitelist their site… while they’re using scripts that track your movement all over the web.
Brave is starting where Firefox should have evolved to regarding user privacy and a way to support publishers and content creators without ads as we know them.
Not available yet, but you’ll be able to opt-in to ads that will relevant to you based on Brave’s use of zero knowledge proofs and machine learning to learn what matters to you. You’ll also be paid 70% of the ad revenue to watch them.
You’ll also have the option to pay content creators (including YouTubers) with Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), a utility token based on Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/
Brave is seeding the BAT ecosystem by regular User Growth Pool (UGP) donations; they gave 300,000 BAT last month--$221,970 at the current price--and another one is expected soon.
"Brave grants 300,000 crypto tokens to browser users”: https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-grants-300000-crypto-t...
Brave doesn’t only do ad blocking; it also handles tracking, cryptocurrency mining and fingerprinting scripts too.
In addition, browsers do not allow the kind of low-level access required to block everything Brave blocks.
From the recent Brendan Eich AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7l4033/transcri...
bat-brendaneich Admin 1:31 PM First question may be about the idea of a BAT extension for other browsers, but that is premature. The big problem with UGP grants and Gemini-phase ad revenue shares to users is fraud. Just user-funded contributions has a fraud problem too: as with buy widgets, stolen CC identity => $20 charge to buy BAT => contribution at scale via sybils/mturk-users/bots-with-enough-work => settlement to colluding but verified (small blog) publisher. That's why I mentioned sybil-resistance above. So we can't just make a wish and try monitoring Basic Attention Metrics from an extension, and attributing BAT flows and creating user wallets, from extensions. There can be other problems, which I've noted elsewhere: lack of extension APIs to do all we do for the BAT platform to work (block ads/trackers, HTTPS Everywhere, Fingerprinting Protection, BAM and the ledger), extensions run in JS sandboxes with API limits. So to put first things first, we will build in Brave while keeping our code as separable from chromium (or the mobile webview on iOS) as possible. After we have those endpoing and on-chain specs I mentioned in pretty good shape, we can assess extension feasibility on Mozilla, I can't speak for them. The friend who contacted after the BAT sale signaled interest but said it would take time, to which I said "same here" (per roadmap). I hope that answers the two reddit questions.
I’m curious because the plugin path sounds like a good idea.