What is Brave?

Brave is a web browser alternative that implements a new approach at handling privacy and ads in the world wide web. It is an open-source project (you can access the source code on Github if you’re into that kind of thing) by a company with offices in San Francisco and London. They aim at none lesser goal than “fixing the internet”, claiming that the current way of accessing it is broken with content being cluttered with ads and tracking pixels making it difficult to find and focus on the actual information one is trying to access. Thus, they implemented a hardcore ad blocker that filters almost everything suspicious by default, then leaves the fine-tuning to you so that you can still access everything that might have been filtered by mistake. Oh, and yes, you can earn crypto tokens by just using it – more on all these points in this article. 

Shields up!

A shield in Brave is a blocker for potentially disturbing content. To mention some examples, there is a shield for blocking ads and tracking, a shield for blocking 3rd party cookies and a shield for blocking scripts.

By default, most shields are up (or at least that’d be my recommended way of setting up your Browser). They are so effective that I did not see a single ad on any page I visited since I fully switched to Brave. The developer team seems to be (rightfully) very proud of this and reports the amount of blocked ads and trackers when you open a new tab. After just a couple of usage days these numbers will be in the thousands.

Brave even offers advanced shields like one for HTTPS upgrades that tries to upgrade any HTTP connection you might establish to HTTPS or a fingerprint blocker for mobile sites.  

Shields down?

You might wonder what happens when Brave blocks content that is actually required for the site to work. Fear not, you can easily turn down the specific shields that may be cause of the trouble for that site only. However the algorithm behind the shields is so good that I only had to do this once so far, when trying to read a book that I previously had uploaded to my Google books library. Google told me that I’d need to allow 3rd party cookies for that, so I changed this particular setting to “All cookies allowed”. Now when I re-open the Google start page (or any other Google page for that matter), 3rd party cookies are still blocked, but my settings for the online e-book reader subpage have been saved by Brave and I can access my books without having to make that change again on every visit.

Needless to say this might not work as smoothly for shopping reward or cashback portals (for instance Shoop to mention just one popular one we have in Germany), which rely on tracking pixels and cookies that are exchanged between sites you should switch to Microsoft’s Edge which is the browser with the smoothest tracking in my experience. 

Brave on Android

There also is a mobile version of the browser for Android and iOS that helps complete the browsing experience. Simply open the settings menu in your desktop version of the browser or directly call brave://sync to add mobile devices. Bookmarks you set in one device will then also be available on the other.

As of writing it is not possible to have other data synched which is a pity especially for passwords that you have to enter and save on each device but the bookmarks sync is a start and according to the dev team password sync is currently undergoing implementation. 

Earn crypto token BAT by browsing

While Brave hides all the ads from the websites you are visiting, you may explicitly opt-in to see Brave’s own ads. Why you would do this? Because viewing one of these ads will earn you a small amount of the Basic Attention Token BAT. Activate the rewards feature in your browser settings to start earning.

How many ads you get is quite irregular in my experience and seems to depend on various factors that also seem to take your activity level into account – so simply leaving the browser open and sitting down in front of your XBox won’t do it. I received between 30 and 40 ad notifications in a week by using the browser just occasionally on the evening’s and on the weekend. This amounts to approximately 1.5 BAT which currently equals 0.50 $. Surprisingly checking your e-mails every day and reading a blog post or two before going to bed still does not make you rich, but over time the coins accumulate and if this project reaches mass adoption or crypto starts flying again the value of your BAT wallet might just multiply (note that it also might not). 

What is a bit annoying about these ads is that they appear as a pop-over in the lower right section of your screen and stay open until you press the close button. Then again, this should not be too much trouble as it is just a mouse click away.

If you intend to save your BAT make sure to turn off the auto contribute feature that is explained in the “Earn crypto token BAT by creating” section.

It should be mentioned at this time that the rewards feature is still very new and might still undergo changes. Mainly wallet improvements are to be expected as today it is not yet possible to send BAT directly out of your browser wallet (this is feature is in their development backlog and coming) and it is also not yet possible to share a wallet between desktop and mobile version of your BAT installations (they appear to be working on this as well).  

Earn crypto token BAT by creating

Are you hosting your own website or social media channel? It might pay off to register as publisher with Brave. As users view your content they can tip you BAT. Some will even do so unknowingly by the auto-tipping feature when spending time with the content you created. The auto-tipping feature evenly splits a fixed monthly amount of tips among the pages who got the user’s most attention. That is why the token is called Basic Attention Token. If you are trying to earn by browsing it’d be advisable to turn this auto-tipping off in the rewards settings, but you may want to consider leaving a tip behind for your favorite publishers nonetheless.

If the publisher is not yet registered with Brave, the platform will collect the tips until they sign up. So as a publisher you may already have a hat filled with tips waiting for you ready to be collected! 

Limited time: Coinbase Earn

When the reward program was launched Brave offered 5$ worth of tokens to every new user. Unfortunately, this campaign has run out, but there still is another one going on that will earn new users free crypto: To promote Brave and BAT Coinbase is offering 10$ in BAT for watching three short learning videos answering an easy question to each and installing the browser. This is part of the Coinbase Earn program that also exists for other currencies that newly became available on Coinbase. After you worked through the tutorials and completed the BAT lessons, download brave and open the link provided by Coinbase to log into your Coinbase account through Brave to have the reward deposited in your Coinbase wallet.  

Conclusion

Brave offers the known and beloved speed and user interface of a Chromium browser with awesome improvements in terms of privacy and content blocking built in its core without the need to install additional add-ons. The mobile app does not need to hide behind its desktop version sibling, rather than that they offer a cross-device synch chain that provides a smooth browsing experience. On the flipside in this rather new browser project there are still missing features like credential sync or rewards earning on mobile. You also need to keep in mind that the user base is small and that add-ons and external tools may not be supported. I noticed this when I wanted to use my anti-virus’s secure-browsing mode that works fine in Edge and Chrome, but not in Brave. Then again Brave already implements all the “secure” features in its default mode and as the other small missing features are most probably also not implemented in your current browser setup this should not keep you from giving Brave at least a try.

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