The best 2019 browser: Brave

First, clarify that it is the best browser for my preference and you will see the reasons. Of course there are many browsers each with their good and bad things, but Brave is by far the one I like the most today.

Brave is a browser created by Brendan Eich, I’m not tired of saying it, this man is not only co-founder of the Mozilla Foundation but also invented the great javascript programming language. Brave is a browser designed to protect the users’ privacy while helping us maintain fast and comfortable browsing and doing something that no other browser does that is to block ads from web pages without eliminate their income, but I will explain that later.

If you want to try Brave yourself you can do it from the official website.

If you don’t know what Brave is, I recommend you read the entire article, it is worth knowing this browser.

Main features of the Brave browser

Brave is based on chromium, the open source project on which Chrome and a multitude of browsers are based.

Stability and speed: Here each browser sweeps their home and unless we look at an independent study if it exists, everyone says their browser is the fastest, including Brave. From my experience I can say that in the mobile version Brave is as fast as Firefox or Chrome, I don’t notice a difference.

For the desktop version, in my case Fedora, Brave works very fast, more than with chromium and firefox. I repeat, it is my experience, not the absolute truth or a technical study, this is a personal opinion blog. As for stability, it seems more stable than Firefox, Brave has never failed me in that sense as if Firefox does sometimes.

Extensions for the Brave browser: When I started using Brave, more than a year ago, I barely had extensions, nowadays it is integrated with the chrome store, so you can use any extension available for chrome, which gives you access to millions of extensions. So nothing to envy the giants Chrome and Firefox in this regard.

There are extensions of all colors; password managers, there is an extension that fills the discount codes of the stores where you buy, document extensions, cryptocurrency extensions such as metamask, etc. Millions.

Other options: Other options that Brave has is that we can choose to delete things every time we close the browser, from cookies to passwords, all the information we want will be deleted by simply closing the browser.

Another option, this is very typical of all web browsers nowadays, is the option to make an account in the browser, totally optional, in order to be able to log in to any device and synchronize the configuration and boomarks, in this way we will not have to configure the browser on each device or if we lose our device, this option is called Sync.

It also allows us to safely fill and save payment methods. Among many other options.

Brave is available for the following operating systems, and others:

You can download Brave from the official website.

The 2 main features of Brave that makes it a unique and different browser

Don’t get me wrong, just with the previous features it is already a great browser but it has 2 things that no other browser has. The first is privacy.

How Brave protects your privacy and the shield

To start, it comes by default with the DuckDuckGo search engine, a search engine that does not track you, but you can always change it and set another one by default, either an alternative one that protects your privacy such as Qwant, startpage, etc. Or you can choose Google, Bing, etc.

One thing I do not support is that there are browsers that claim to protect your privacy but their aren’t open source, so how the hell do we know that they respect our privacy? Anyway, they may respect it but it is difficult to know because although security experts will sooner or later find out this is always a posteriori …. I give an example to Kaspersky and the NSA, is Kaspersky a good antivirus? Yes, does it protect your privacy? We will only know later. If Kaspersky can cheat to NSA others can cheat us.

Well, as I said, Brave is open source, a point in his favor.

Do you use extensions that block advertising and trackers? Adblock or my favorite, uBlock Origin? As Brave does not need it, it has it “factory” integrated, it is called shield and you will see it to the left of the addresses or URLs, the lion logo.

 

The Brave shield blocks ads, even third-party cookies (for example, when you visit Amazon Brave is not only blocking Amazon cookies but also cookies that Facebook or Twitter widgets have that they could have on the Amazon website, among others), It also blocks scripts even from third parties and also blocks the fingerprint, which most adblocks does not do.

Of course these features, you can activate and deactivate or moderate intermediate areas, to your liking.

Another feature of the Brave shield is the encrypted connection, which allows us to have an encrypted connection with those websites that do not yet have an https connection.

It also has an integrated password manager, so you don’t have to remember them if you don’t want, the password manager is optional.

 

Integration with TOR: Another great and interesting option is the integration with TOR that Brave brings us in its latest version and that when you open a new tab, you can not only put the private mode as in other browsers but you can use the TOR network to browse both TOR with its .onion and you can browse the normal websites and google more anonymously since your IP connection will be routed like an onion and it will be difficult to know your IP, where you connect, etc.

In addition TOR encrypt the conexions.

When you use an adblock, whatever your browser is, and you don’t see the ads, you’re contributing to the websites “dying”, I don’t blame you, the ads are often abusive, I often used to use uBlock Origin. What if I tell you that Brave also has the solution to that? Wouldn’t it be ideal to stop abusive ads while we pay(free for us) websites for their work? Brave has a solution to this problem, I present you BAT.

The other great feature of Brave: the BAT cryptocurrency

What is bat? BAT is a very important cryptocurrency today if we take into account the total value of the network, which today exceeds 200 million dollars (USD). Here you have a widget of BAT value in real time (if you do not see the widget deactivates the adblock):

BAT means “Basic Attention Token”.

BAT is a token created in the Ethereum network, like so many other tokens. Then you will see why it is called as it is called.

The point is that as the Brave shield blocks the ads, it gives us the option to change the ads on the websites for Brave ads, these ads obviously generate an income, the advertisers pay Brave and Brave pay us in the BAT wallet integrated in our Browser.

In this way (it is totally optional, you can let the ads block and that’s it) we will get BAT tokens that accumulate in our browser and that we can do several things with them, for example, let them be donated to the web pages that we visit in proportion to the time we stay in each one, this is done automatically but we can change it to donations in manual in which case we can choose ourselves how many BATs to donate to each website.

In order to receive BAT, websites must be verified by Brave, through a simple process. Yourgeekweb, the blog you are reading right now, is verified by Brave and you can donate the tokens you want 🙂

How to know if a website is verified? Because in the Brave browser they tell you, near to the URLs wrhere the BAT logo appears and says “Brave Verified Publisher”.

Important: Part of the income generate is for website as you can see, other part is for Brave Company and other part is for you.

According to the study of BAT in the USA, each user generates about $ 25 per month in revenue with the ads he sees.

Another thing you must to know about donations is that you can charge your BAT wallet using others cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin.

Note: Both webmasters and Brave users will be able to withdraw their profits in cryptocurrencies or in fiat money (centralized money such as dollars or euros) through the electronic wallet Uphold.

I prefer spend my money directly using cryptocurrencies in several online shops 🙂

In Brave Adwards, within the browser, you will find a long phrase, save it, it is a password to restore your cryptocurrency wallet in case you lose the program or device you’re using, to access the wallet on any other device with Brave you just have to provide that phrase .

In cryptoworld this is called “seed phrase”.

But will not Brave ads be very low personalized due not using our data? No, each browser has a machine learning algorithm incorporated, so they will target us and  they will use our personal data to show us advertising that interests us and thus generate greater benefit for all, but the trick is that this data of our vavigation remain locally in our browser, so our privacy is not affected. We can also be sure that this is the case becouse all the source code is publicly available on github.

In addition they often give $ 5 in BAT among users who have downloaded Brave … why? Marketing, they need a solid user base to function, Paypal for example did the same thing in its day in the USA giving away $ 5 to those who registered, the same in Germany. This promotion has ended in the United States because there are ads available but in Spanish-speaking countries the ads are still beta and the promotion continues.

To end

Brave is a very particular browser, its user base has exploded during the last year, and has become my favorite browser, I would never have imagined such a browser, we can only wait and see if it will end up changing and influencing the Internet advertising industry or not, meanwhile it is an excellent browser with many integrations to protect our privacy.

You can download Brave from its official website here.