[halfeatenpie]

How decent is Brave as a browser? I've been very hesitant on it as a primary browser due to them starting up their own cryptocurrency (BAT), adding automatic affiliate cryptocurrency links in pages, and a history of serving their own ads on top of others.

[soundnote]

It's essentially stock Chromium with a bunch of tinfoil on top. This means good Chromium UI things like tab groups, which are a digital form of meth.

They have a built-in adblocker (not an extension, a modification of the browser itself so it doesn't care about Manifest v3. It can also do CNAME uncloaking, which is what makes uBO better on Firefox than Chromium), a lot of anti-tracking features.

Importantly, they maintain their own end to end encrypted sync architecture like Mozilla does.

They have miscellaneous sideshow features like a torrent client and a Tor implementation (but AFAIK recommend the Tor Browser still)

A big thing is that the adblocker is that it's there on mobile. They're also the only mobile Chromium browser that can play YouTube videos in the background as far as I know.

As far as the crypto goes, it's actually a decent system:

Brave sells adspace (which they deliver as new tab backgrounds and toaster popups, entirely separately from websites), gets paid in Money™. They keep a cut, take the rest and buy BAT with it, give it to users. They have a tipping system where users can then tip content creators with the BAT and get creators some compensation for Brave's part in killing tracking ads.

(this can never be a full compensation, since Brave's ads don't track, and should thus be less valuable than evil ads)

---

If you want bigtime UI innovation, I'd look elsewhere - Brave's angle is stock Chromium, privacy, and standalone infrastructure to provide independent revenue. The big UI innovators in Chromium land are Microsoft (if you don't care about privacy, Edge is sadly a disaster on that front) and Vivaldi (who are also very no tracky and run their own end to end encrypted sync service. Both have a lot of fantastic UI customization features. Microsoft's more well-designed ones that are both pleb friendly and powerful, Vivaldi's more of the "here's all the toggles" type. To illustrate their type of overkill, they have THREE separate tab group implementations built in. And a mail client, calendar, RSS reader, a barebones notes module - did I mention these guys used to make Opera?

[ricardolopes]

As decent as any Chromium fork with built in ad/tracker blocker can be. The cryptocurrency is opt-in, the only affiliates I know of are in their start page widgets, and their ads don't sit on top of others, they're opt-in notifications.

[des429]

You can disable the cryptocurrency stuff and if you're worried about ads you could install whatever ad blocker youre currently using. Underneath everything it's just Chromium. I've been using it for a year or so.

[jonathansampson]

We launched tipping with Bitcoin, but had to pivot when network fees and congestion were unbearable (our users would buy $5 at a time, pay nearly as much in fees, and wait for what seemed like an eternity to receive their funds). BAT (ERC-20) offered immediate relief.

Brave has never added affiliate links into pages. Brave has never served its own ads on top of others'.

[smoldesu]

Just use Ungoogled Chromium. I'm also the kind of person who's made uneasy by crypto involvement, and Brave's developers have lambasted me in the past for asking why such a ridiculous feature needs to exist in the first place.

Oh, and 30% of your Basic Attention Tokens go straight to lining Brendan Eich's wallet. I'll just browse on my own, thank you...

[BrendanEich]

Here it seems you mean I personally get 30% of gross ad revenue (below you seemed to say I got 30% of all BAT; false also). No, the 30% goes to the company, commissions and costs come out of it, and I get nothing directly tied to it. I get a lower-six-figure salary. Smearing me on false information is a bad look. Doing it again would be lying. Knock it off.

[smoldesu]

Great, the browser that was supposed to take a stand against Google only managed to cave in to their exact monetization scheme. Somehow I'm not surprised by the fact that you have nothing better to do than respond to Hacker News comments.

[BrendanEich]

No, Brave's opt-in and private/anonymous ad system is not "their exact monetization scheme". Saying it is the same just parades your ignorance or dishonesty. Which is it?