Brave is the speedy browser that strips out web tracker and ads (for now)

[Shawn Knight]

Brendan Eich, the embattled executive that served as Mozilla's CEO for a brief stint in 2014, is back in the news with the launch of a startup called Brave Software.

In the world of online advertising, publishers are inclined to learn as much about their readers as possible. As Business Insider correctly notes, this allows them to build profiles to target users more effectively. Targeted ads like these generate far more money for publishers compared to "general" ads albeit at the expense of privacy.

The company's first product, Brave, is a multi-platform web browser that strips away things like web trackers and intrusive advertisements to provide a no-nonsense, fast browsing experience. As a result, websites load up to 40 percent faster on desktops and up to four times faster on mobile devices according to Eich.

Brave is currently in a test phase (evident by its 0.7 version number). Right now, the browser strips out all of the "junk" and leaves empty spaces where ads would otherwise be. Obviously, that's not a sustainable business model for a for-profit company.

Once Brave has 7+ million users, the company will use your browsing history and share industry-standard ad categories with publishers. Armed with this data, they'll be able to place appropriate ads. Is it still invasive? Sure, to an extent. But Brave is hoping users will be able to look past that and is even planning to offer a small financial incentive to do so.

Interestingly enough, Brave is based on Google's Chromium rather than Mozilla's Firefox.

Those interested in trying Brave can sign up for beta access on the company's website.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/63536-brave-speedy-browser-strips-out-web-tracker-ads.html

 

[amstech]

Nice.

 

[davislane1]

They tried to strike down Eich and in doing so made him more powerful than they could possibly imagine.

 

[psycros]

While this guy definitely got a raw deal from Mozilla, I'm getting tired of companies pretending to defend your privacy while doing exactly the opposite. This guy just wants his piece of the advertising pie because that's where the money is. If he was really "brave" he would build a FIREFOX-based browser that blocks the spyware without breaking sites, and charge $10 a year for it. No spying, PERIOD. It would sell like hotcakes and be a huge thumb in the eye to the politically erect morons that fired him.

 

[seefizzle]

While this guy definitely got a raw deal from Mozilla, I'm getting tired of companies pretending to defend your privacy while doing exactly the opposite. This guy just wants his piece of the advertising pie because that's where the money is. If he was really "brave" he would build a FIREFOX-based browser that blocks the spyware without breaking sites, and charge $10 a year for it. No spying, PERIOD. It would sell like hotcakes and be a huge thumb in the eye to the politically erect morons that fired him.

$10 a year? I'm sold. I'd gladly pay 10 bucks a year to never have to see ads again on my phone.

 

[Guest17]

After they reach the 7 million benchmark, they are going to add "NewWorld" to complete the full name of the browser.

 

[FF222]

So, in other words, this is just another parasitic person/company attempting to extract money from the web that would rightfully belong to the actual creators of content.

 

[ypsylon]

You can't put in one sentence privacy and Google. That's worse than divide by 0.

Just LOL.

 

[cbaravelli]

I run Brave .7 now. Speed performance depends on how many external links a host has. fb.com sign in page loads bit faster in comparison to Firefox TLS. drudgereport.com loads incredibly fast. Brave reserves the top border for quarter size adverts on heavy traffic HTTP hosts. It can glitch and does not have much of a tool bar (no customisation) but that will take time to work out the undocumented features (bugs).