It may seem like one of many alternatives that are planted to fight with Google and Mozilla, those that do not have many differential aspects to offer. This is not the case this time, we are in front of a browser with very clear ideas and with the intention of giving power to the user, instead of taking it away.
Everything that Brave Browser offers us
Brave is an open source web browser based on Chromium, created by the Brave Software company in 2016, founded by the co-founder of the Mozilla Project. Fortunately for those who want to find a new alternative to the Google browser, Brave has some peculiarities that make it very interesting and competitive. One of the main reasons is that Brave is built on the Chromium platform, an open source project maintained by Google on which the Chrome browser was developed. Therefore, it supports almost all the extensions of the Mountain View ones.
The current version has five search engines by default, including its business partner, DuckDuckGo. The other options that we can find are Google, Bing, Ecosia, Qwant or Startpage.
This browser has a wide range of security features. The security menu, located to the right of the address bar, provides an excellent summary of everything that is blocked or allowed on the open page and it also allows you to control its configuration, being able to handle points such as tracking protection, forcing HTTPS connections and blocking scripts, cookies and device recognition.
A browser that allows you to play YouTube videos in the background
One of the newest features in the Brave app is power play a Youtube video in the background to hear its sound although we have other applications open. It’s perfect for listening to long reviews in the background or just turning YouTube into a music app. You choose the YouTube video playlist and they will be heard as if it were a music application in the style of Spotify or Play Music.
We will have to go to Settings> Website Settings> Multimedia> Background Video and activate the option marked as experimental, but it really works without problems. Once the browser is restarted, we simply have to go to YouTube and the “Activate sound” tab will appear. When pressing the video it will be shown in the notification bar and from then on even if we exit the application, open WhatsApp or anything else the sound will continue to play without cutting off.
A business model based on “benign” ads
Brave is free to use. However, like any project, there must always be a way to finance itself. One of the keys to the future of Brave Browser is a new advertising business model. The company achieves its income thanks to an innovative model in which users can enable ads on certain sites and earn Basic Attention Token (BAT) to view paid content. They can then spend these ‘tokens’ to ‘tip’ creators, such as Wikipedia, which has just become a verified editor in the browser. This represents a reinvention of the online advertising market and is an ambitious attempt to return power over advertising content to users.
The idea is that of offer advertising, but in an “acceptable” way. At Brave they believe that the evolution to intrusive advertising is abusive for users, but that the original advertising model was valid. The browser displays valid advertisements in which there is no collection of user data.
That’s where the so-called Brave Payments come in, a system that “truly provides anonymity to the data associated with your browsing”: users contribute payments to content providers they visit (the more they visit, the more the providers of that content will charge).
What is the difference between Mozilla Firefox and Brave Browser?
On the other side of the coin when it comes to Brave’s novel advertising, with the Firefox browser, they prefer to keep things simple. Now showing what Brave Browser offers, Firefox blocks by default many third party trackers, crypto miners, and fingerprint trackers so they don’t follow you. However, Firefox, outside of private browsing mode, chooses not to block the appearance of ads on the screen. Unless you install one of the extensions specifically designed for that purpose.
The Firefox browser also offers users the ability to sign up for a Firefox Account. Having a Firefox account is the key to unblocking synchronization between devices, you also get the added benefit of products like Firefox Monitor that monitors your email addresses and alerts you if your information has been involved in any data leak known. Brave, meanwhile, has also recently acquired the ability to sync data between popular operating systems and devices, although it doesn’t have a master password like Firefox does.
