[justsee]

It really is great to see challenger browsers pushing the web forward like this.

Along with IPFS it's nice to see Tor integration, low-level content blocking, a privacy-respecting Zoom alternative (https://together.brave.com/) and integrated MetaMask for Web3.

Brave still has a small userbase (~24 million), but hopefully it creates the space / incentives for Firefox and others to play catch-up so we see a lot of these features standardised for the benefit of all users, regardless of browser preference.

[feross]

Also, they integrate my WebTorrent project (https://webtorrent.io) so that .torrent files and magnet: links just work out-of-the-box.

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035025231-Wha...

[aloisdg]

Opera used to support torrents out of the box back in 2006. Good old days.

[blntechie]

Opera did support torrent downloads. On quick reading of the above links, it appears this project supports streaming of torrent video and audio files directly in the browser (in addition to downloads I presume).

[samoa42]

was going to say this.

amazing what can be forgotten and reinvented in an industry moving in circles.

[jsilence]

See also xscreensaver and the recent blunder about kids "breaking into" the Gnome screensaver.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/

[0x445442]

I guess the down votes are by those too young to have lived through a few of those circles.

[the-dude]

Not only was Opera released for Linux, they even released it for FreeBSD.

[anderspitman]

Man I recently "gave up" and switched from FF back to chrome for performance reasons. Might be time to try Brave

[justsee]

Brave's noticeably faster than Chrome (because of course it renders less stuff with the low-level content blocking) and on Apple silicon with the new arm64 build the rendering speed is officially ridiculous.

Most sites now feel like they're some hyper-optimised, next.js static site generated build even if they're not.

The web experience is not unlike that first time you switched from spinning platters to SSDs.

[onelovetwo]

Brave is the new firefox...or should I say the old.

[jraph]

Not at all. It is based on the Web engine of the most used browser. Firefox is still Firefox, the big difference for me with the 2000s being the decline of its market share and that it doesn't compete with a browser with a non standard-compliant browser. Instead, it competes with a browser that defines the standards.

[roenxi]

Old Firefox was a platform that ran a unique ecosystem of extensions, had innovative features that nobody on IE6 had and represented a push towards a web that didn't quite exist yet - an open place with standards where developers were free of having some disinterested tyrant controlling what they could do.

It is still Firefox, but that battle has been won. Firefox won it, then Google came in with Chrome and pounded the old way into the dust. It is gone now, mostly forgotten and good riddance.

Brave is a more in the character of Firefox than Firefox in many ways. There is a vision in there somewhere of a new web where users are one of the primary beneficiaries of advertising dollars (!) and intermediaries like Google are cut out of the picture. That is a very bold vision. I don't think Mozilla is capable of that sort of out-there visionary approach to browser design. Succeed or fail, Brave is trying.

[pocketgrok]

Firefox is still the browser that maintains the challenger engine.

Brave is more like Opera by building in support for a bunch of additional protocols.

[FlashBlaze]

Wasn't aware of this. Thanks.