Brendan Eich, founder of JavaScript and one of the former founders of Mozilla Firefox, has set his sites on a cleaner, faster, better web browser.  Brave, is a new web browser that should compete among the big players of Chrome, Internet Explorer, FireFox and Safari.   Brave has a very interesting concept and I for one like it’s stance.  By now, most know that internet advertising is a growing problem.  There are a lot of individuals who have turned to adblocking with the help of Adblock and Adblock plus extensions to name a couple.  The principle here is very easy; block all advertising.  Whew, done, right?  Let’s think about the economics of this.

Advertising ‘pays to play’.  They pay websites to advertise their products.  If users, you and I, start blocking all ads, those advertising dollars will eventually dry up, right and then we are stuck paying for each site we wish to read, right?  The problem with internet ads isn’t the existance of them, its the annoyance and placement of them and how invasive they can be.  You visit a site to read the news and all of a sudden you’re immediately attacked by a giant pop-up with some video or obnoxious ad.  This is what I have an issue with and would love to see this greatly reduced!

Enter Brave!  Brave has an ideology that I would say is in that middle ground and so far seems to be a good compromise.  They want a cleaner, safer, faster and better web browsing experience.  Have I mentioned they share a portion of the revenue?  Approximately 55% will go toward publishers, 15% goes to Brave, 15% to advertising partner and 10-15% go to the end users.  Wait a minute, ‘end users’ you say?  Yes, the idea behind this is to allow you to then pay publishers that you like a small, okay pretty small, amount but something nonetheless.

Brave not only attempts to tackle advertising, but also has security in mind.  With Brave you can enable “https everywhere”.  This will defer to HTTPS, secure websites first, and if the site doesn’t have this enabled, it will redirect to the sites HTTP or non-secure page.  In addition, they have included 1Password integration into their browser.  Those of you who use 1Password as your password manager will like this feature and personally, I hope this relationship flourishes.  While at this point, they don’t have extensions, there is a setting you can check to allow 1Password to be your password manager within Brave.

For the last two weeks, I’ve let Brave replace my standard browser for work, home and phone use.  So far, i’ve been quite pleased with it’s performance and feature set considering they have only been out a few months.  Updates flow constantly and I can only hope the enhancements will continue in the upcoming months and years.

Brave, to be or not to be?  Only time will tell how their concept plays out.  I have seen that several publishers are already cried foul claiming Brave will replace their ads and touch their content.  Brave has addressed this specifically here and has again said they will not touch ads on publishers websites nor touch first publisher ad content.  Over the couple of weeks I’ve tested, I still have seen plenty of ads, however its been a much cleaner webpage experience.