Small browsers try to find a way to live by finding an unattended point by the others. And Brave is one of those browsers that has done it well.

Brave has attracted more attention than most alternate browsers, somewhat because of a famous co-founder that was one of those who kick-started Mozilla’s Firefox, and partly because of its peculiar business model. That model depends on depriving every site of ads and personalizing substitute ads and pocketing the revenue of advertisement which lots of online publishers heavily lean on.

What is the Brave browser?

Brave is roughly a standard browser that allows users to do whatever they do on other browsers such as navigate websites, run web apps, and display online content. Like other browsers, it is free to download and use, remembers site authentication information, and moreover can block online ads from appearing on sites.

However, Brave Software as the Brave browser’s creator is not an old player in the browser battles, since it previewed the browser in January 2016. While its main competitors Google’s Chrome launched in September 2008 and Microsoft’s Edge traces its lineage to July 2015. The firm was co-founded by Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla which was deprived of him after a few years.

What does Brave have in its pocket?

Brave is proud of the security it has been able to bring to its users by blocking ads. But you’ll probably be shocked to learn that Brave is built atop Chromium, the open-source project Google and others maintain.

But before making any judgments, it is best to know that, other browsers like Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Qihoo 360 as one of the most popular Chinese-made browsers, all depend on Chromium.

What is the Brave winning card?

The Brave flaunts its more guaranteed security and privacy, which owes both of them to the removal of ads. Thus, it is not far from the truth to say that the Brave has hit three birds with one stone. That is, removing ads, has both improved the security of its users and made their privacy more serious, and more importantly, it has changed the financial nature of advertising in its favor.

But there is still more. The fourth bird that Brave hits with the only stone it has, is speed. The browser loads pages three times faster than Google’s Chrome, the world’s No. 1 browser. The speed increases are not surprising. By eliminating ads and ad trackers, Brave downloads much less content from a website than any browser sans an ad-blocking extension.

For the privacy part, Brave has blocked advertisers’ efforts to both identify and follow users. It has also repeatedly stated that it does not, and will not, store any user data on its servers.

What is the Brave advertising system?

Brave scrubs sites of both ads and ad tracking, and then replaces those ads with its own advertisements, which are not individually targeted but instead aimed at an anonymous aggregate of the browser’s user base. Brave has said, it went that route rather than a simpler all-ad-elimination model because, while few users relish ads, many realize that without them, the commercial web as it now exists would be nigh impossible. That’s why as Brave says: it not only swapped its advertisements for those originally displayed by a site but built a crypto-currency-based system that can, theoretically at least, compensate those same websites.

Wanna Pay? Pay with Brave token

BAT is Brave’s native cryptocurrency, and a user can earn it when they opt to view anonymous and privacy-preserving ads. As a Brave browser user, you can earn revenue in the form of BAT (Basic Attention Token) by simply opting to view ads, which are push notifications, rather than on-page display ads.

This service is entirely optional, and ads are presented to the users in the form of push notifications rather than on-page. BAT tokens earned this way are stored in a wallet built into the browser, and can be traded for other cryptocurrencies or fiat currency.

The BAT system will only take off if lots of sites take advantage of what it offers: ad-free content support and letting the users earn by giving their attention to a site’s advertisements. Brave claims that over 500,000 content creators and publishers participate in the program. The company also makes a compelling case that most of the ad money on the web is going to Google and Facebook these days, rather than to the actual content publishers.

While the revenue is not something to quit your day job for, extrapolating that to several hours per day could help stuff your digital piggy bank. In any case, the intention of the BAT cryptocurrency is to fund information sites, rather than to earn you a living.

Where can I download Brave?

Brave can be downloaded from this page of Brave Software’s site.

The page should automatically recognize the device’s operating system and offer the appropriate version. If it doesn’t, select from the choices at the bottom.

Mobile versions of the Brave browser (iOS and Android), are also available in the App Store and Google Play, respectively.