I'm not a grifter pushing Web3 or NFTs, or a sucker who's in the market for either, so I guess I'm not the target market for Brave.
But honestly, what is the strategy here?
But honestly, what is the strategy here?
He asked “how is it better”.
Plus Mozilla really isn't the same as they used to be, they're too corrupt and political now
And everything has an excellent UI for configuring things which can be done on a per site or global basis. So for instance just blocking 'x' script, or only blocking cross-site cookies, or whatever else. I believe Firefox was adding in some of these features back when I swapped, but they've been playing catch up for some time now.
There's also lots of other neat features like the topic of this thread, single click support for TOR, and I'm sure plenty of stuff I'm leaving out. I also find it to be vastly more performant/memory friendly if you're anything like me and happen to leave a gazillion tabs open because I'm totally going to eventually go read that really interesting sounding article that I opened 3 months ago.
Has a Chromium base which means a bunch of nice things: It just works better nowadays because devs make everything for Chrome and barely care for anything else. Chromium's native tab groups rock. Chromium means separate browser profiles and PWAs, which I like to have. I think Chromium's mobile UI is better.
Those are mostly just benefits of stock Chromium, but:
Sane defaults (eg. not defaulting to Google + search suggestions on). The browser has a built in uBO grade adblocker that also works on mobile and doesn't care about Manifest v3, like Mozilla, they run an independent end to end encrypted sync service for bookmarks/settings/history/etc. You get the good of Chromium without the bullshit.
Brave specifically: YouTube video background playback on mobile, they're working on vertical tabs, tons and tons of nice privacy features. I think being able to adjust video Autoplay is Brave-specific, but not sure.
Organization:
Mozilla as an organization is funded by Google, and is completely okay with others deciding what I should see on the Internet. It also just generally seems more interested in activism than browser building.
Brave from the get go tries to have independent sources of revenue (ie. their ad business, and now paid services like Brave Talk and adfree Search).
They are an organization that itself doesn't have politics except for user control and privacy, which is an increasingly rare attitude and I like a lot.
Brave maintains an independent search engine that has its own index rather than being a simple Bing frontend the way most other small engines are, and it supports DDGs !bang syntax. Plus Goggles are cool.
---
In short, they don't do anything exactly revolutionary - they just focus on making a browser, and make a browser with very little bullshit.
> …but then what product would be for you?
All else being equal, my preference is browsers that focus on internet standards rather than propping up bottom-feeders who want to privatize DNS. My daily driver is Chrome on desktop, and Safari on mobile. I really like Vivaldi, too.
I had the exact same idea as this company and I'm sure thousands of others did as well. The goal wasn't to make money (though that's obviously a pleasant aside), but to fix something that, from my perspective, is very broken. Our current DNS system entails you paying an ever-increasing and perpetual rent to a company for them to do literally nothing. You are paying them to not remove your name from a database, which is less work on their part than deleting it would be. That's seems just so dysfunctional and exploitative.
And just to also make sure we're on the same page here - when this company distributes your domain, they no longer own it in any way, shape, or form. Even if they wanted to go scummy and swap back to our current model (perhaps after gaining large marketshare), they'd be literally unable to - because they do not control, in any way, these domains once they are distributed.
Private Window with Tor connectivity
Brave never remembers what you do in a Private Window. With Tor connectivity, you get two additional benefits: your IP address is hidden from the sites you visit and the sites you visit are hidden from passive network observers. Note that Tor may slow down browsing or break some websites.
A private window with Tor makes it more difficult, but not impossible, for your ISP or employer (if you're using a work machine or network) to see what sites you visit. However, even a private window with Tor won't fully defend against tracking. If your personal safety depends on remaining anonymous, use the Tor Browser instead.