Brave Becomes the Most Downloaded Web Browser in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Brave Becomes the Most Downloaded Web Browser in Japan

usethebitcoin.com

24 pointsUTBUTB11 comments

I actually find the Brave model bizarre. You get paid for viewing ads but you can't cash it out. So you have this model of virtual (useless) money moving between publishers and consumers at all times. And then you have centralization in both on-boarding publishers and also handling payments (Uphold) that provides single point of failure.

I wish Google Contributor[1] was more popular and covered more websites. I would gladly pay $15-$20 per month to not see ads and also not get tracked throughout the internet.

1. https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

This raises the interesting question; how much is our attention really worth, say, per month, when it comes to ads? Per this vox article, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/24/18715421/internet-free-..., it would cost $35 per person in the US per month to replace ads in the US to cover the profits from ads. Maybe this isn't the right way to think when pricing attention though.

It depends on various factors like region, person's interest etc.

Facebook valued North American user at about $112 per year while globally it is about $25/year. Twitter is about $ 9 per user and SNAP is about $6 per user.

Source: https://thespring.io/investing/facebook-makes-more-revenue-p...

The title is not correct. It would be more accurate to say that Brave is the most downloaded web browser in Japan over the past 30 days, on Android.

As an aside: It seems that all of the OP's submissions are from usethebitcoin.com. Why not link directly to the reddit post which the article cites? Or perhaps the Google Play rankings themselves? https://www.appbrain.com/stats/google-play-rankings/top_free...

According to the linked Reddit post, Brave has 2M "recent" downloads, whereas Firefox has 500k. But FF has 100M+ installs whereas Brave is in the 10M+ bucket. Of course, none of this counts the system default browser, which it's unlikely Brave will ever supplant.

Still, having 1/2 as many recent downloads as LINE is impressive.

I've found that Brave is the best web browser for my old Android 4.4.2 smartphone. Firefox is far too slow, Chrome is fast but it doesn't block ads, and those fake VPN ad blocking apps make my phone get hot, drain the battery, and adds an additional troubleshooting step if my internet stops working.

I don't get how people can use the bookmarks reliably, ever since I tried it long ago it has been plagued with issues, many still unresolved..

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/search?q=bookmark+syn...

Seeing 'Yahoo! Mail' at number 3 on that list is interesting, didn't realise many people still used it

Yahoo Japan is still fairly popular. It's one of several areas where Japanese internet users seem to have different tastes than everyone else.

In Japan, Yahoo is still among the champions.

I checked what the other guy said and its true.

Braves fingerprint is more unique than Chromes. There are plenty of.vectors you can deduce from someone is using Brave (even without useragent) and those vectors more often than not easily uniquely identify someone.

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