I have been searching for a web browser to naturally block advertisement on websites. Often, advertisements can contain trackers and sometimes even malware. Have you ever had a conversation with someone and next thing you know you see an advertisement for the thing you were talking about? Maybe it’s confirmation bias, maybe it’s that you are so predictable from your browser habits that the big data algorithms detect what your next move will be. The above situations are, of course, hypothetical; however, what if we didn’t need to think about pesky advertisements? What would feed us suggestions for our next purchase? I digress…
A quick side note, I backup and restore my computer so often that I can never keep the same Brave Browser cycle. There is probably a way to export my browser settings; however, I am not that interested at the moment.
Breaking Down Brave Browser Metrics on Desktop
Performance Metrics
Ads and Trackers Blocked
814,962
HTTPS Upgrades
12,922
Estimated Time Saved
11.3 Hours
Brave Rewards & Tips, Contributions
Estimated earnings so far this month
22.5 BAT (~ $4.11 USD )
Tips and contributions this month
57.0 BAT (~$10.39 USD )
Is The Brave Browser Safe?
Brave Browser boasts quicker website load speeds by utilizing a mechanism named the Brave Shield. According to the official Brave Browser repository Wiki, In order to protect users privacy within the Brave Web Browser, website modifications and network requests are altered.
Brave will decide what to block or modify.
Brave modifies how websites execute, and what network requests websites can make. Brave does this to protect user privacy, improve website performance, and generally improve the experience for users. This document describes both the policy Brave uses to decide what to block and modify, and the techniques Brave uses to approximate the policy in the browser. We can only at best “approximate” the policy because of the wide variety in how websites work, and the efforts trackers go to circumvent user protections. — Blocking goals and policy on Jan 3 by Brave
Sweet, no need to install additional ad-blockers, many of are detected by modern websites and forced to be turned off. The brave browser keeps a constant list of blocked advertisers which can also be found on Github. brave/adblock-lists
Why should you use Brave Browser?
In order to Accurately Predict Ad Blocker Savings, research was conducted in order to measure the performance of Brave browser by studying and visualizing energy and network advantages for Brave browser users.
Current Brave Browser on iPhone iOS
I dug deeper and found research by Brave on October 21 2019. The research was conducted by Dr. Andrius Aucinas, performance researcher at Brave, Moritz Haller, data scientist at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist.
My interpretation is that Brave gathers the analytics within the web browser as the ads are blocked and listed for the user to see. The metrics are very conservative, so the browser may be blocking even more advertisements and trackers.
we can’t typically know without loading the full, bloated version of a page, just how much of the user’s resources are saved. The way current ad networks work makes the problem even more challenging: typically a script included directly by a publisher is only the tip of the iceberg that sets off a chain of requests to many third parties. Let’s take The Verge as a concrete example: the two graphs illustrate loading the main page with ad blocking (top) and without (bottom), where the little colored lines in the illustration show when each network request happened and how long it took, and the summary bar at the bottom of each graph provides top level statistics: how many requests were made, bandwidth used, and a few load time metrics. — Accurately Predicting Ad Blocker Savings
How does Brave Rewards Tips & Contributions work?
Brave Browser users earn cryptocurrency tokens by exploring the internet within the browser.. Brave Rewards is integrated with the Basic Attention Token (BAT). People who use the Brave Browser can earn tokens by viewing privacy-respecting ads.
Other Brave Browser users can tip tokens to you and you can tip to them as well. Subscribers and followers, or anyone who views your content can automatically tip a set amount to you each month, or give one-time tips in an amount of their choice.
According to Bat Growth, a historical Brave publisher statistics site, Total number of Brave Browser Publishers is 533,693.
Historical data for Brave Publishers
How to Tell If Someone is Brave Verified
Go to a users profile, for our example we will go to @LunarCRUSH on Twitter. In the Brave Browser we can click on the Triangle and see the verified check mark.
Tipping with Brave Rewards
The tip box will pull up an area to select how much you would like to tip the creator. I will send 10.0 Basic Attention Token (BAT) which is around $1.83 USD.
The tip was sent to the content creator, and they will receive a notification that they were tipped.
Additional Options on Brave Rewards
You also have the option to receive and send tips on Websites, Reddit, GitHub, Twitch, and Vimeo. I am certain there will be options to spend your Basic Attention Token at popular physical stores.
Become a verified content creator on Brave Rewards
For free, you can sign up as a verified content creator which enables you to access the Creators dashboard, where you will manage all your tips. Join Brave Rewards.
What good things are the community saying about the Brave Browser?
The top result on Twitter resulted in the below Tweet.
Final Thoughts
It’s been a fun few years of using the Brave Browser. The community is has amazing discussion on Reddit. Twitter is always speculating the next price of Basic Attention Token, the token used to tip Brave Rewards Publishers. And overall, I actually feel like I have saved time using Brave Browser. Tipping users for creating and publishing useful content is always a great feeling. Receiving tips for my own content is an even better feeling.
Knowledge is Power! The decentralized nature of cryptocurrency makes for more free and democratic ways of accessing networks. Share your knowledge, open source your projects , participate in a community (any community!), and maybe just maybe publish a blog post about it.
Thank you For Reading
Constructive criticism and feedback is welcomed. Nicholas Resendez can be reached on Instagram @nirholas, on LinkedIn, and Twitter @nickresendez for updates on new articles.