‘Bitcoin Browser’ Brave Raises $4.5M, Readies for 1.0 Launch

&gt; <i>On the desktop, Brave provides a 40% to 60% speed increase, and a 2x to 4x speed increase on mobile devices. Mobile users see a direct reduction in both battery and data plan consumption. Brave also protects users with privacy and security features such as HTTPS Everywhere to encrypt data traffic, fingerprinting shields, phishing protection, malware filtering, and script blocking.</i><p>Maybe this is a good enough argument to get people to install it. But I seriously doubt you will get people to voluntarily pay money, which is slowly paid out as they surf the web, when the alternative is a free browsing experience with a standard ad blocker.<p>Also, all of their listed benefits to users is accessible on all other major browsers now with existing extensions.

I want micropayments for web content to happen. I much prefer that future to the advertising-supported present.<p>Getting there has a massive chicken-and-egg problem, of course, as you need a viable mass of both users and sites for it to get traction, and you can&#x27;t get one without the other.<p>Requiring a new browser (vs. an extension to a normal browser) takes your &quot;viable mass of users&quot; problem and makes it about ten times harder.<p>You are brave, Brave.

Last time I looked at Brave, it was replacing some served ads with its own ads. I do not think that&#x27;s ok.

What transparency do they provide about how the payments are allocated? Can I see where the money went and which publishers actually collected their payment? Or is that all opaque, where Brave actually keeps &quot;a portion&quot; plus publishers don&#x27;t actually get paid unless their payment is above some rarely reached threshold?<p>Personally I&#x27;d love to pay for using websites and get a faster experience (versus the alternative ways to do it), because I really want publishers to get paid. But I&#x27;m skeptical until I see that it&#x27;s really happening. No transparency means 0% chance I use it.

I love Brave. I&#x27;m still locked into Chrome out of habit but I&#x27;m slowly trying to push myself over to Brave. It does a much, much better job ad blocking natively, and it&#x27;s getting better with every release. The primary reason, however, is I like the idea of controlling how ad revenue is used. I think the idea of paying people to accept ads is a long overdue.

I just downloaded this and went to test it out. I went straight to a torrent site to see how it worked. The was a noticeable difference in how fast the page loaded but the pop under on the site still managed to open a tab with some shady advertising. I imagine they are still working out the kinks but when they are as effective as blocking ads as an ad-blocker and maintains its speed this will be a great browser.

Shouldn&#x27;t a browser working the other way round should be implemented : you can not use any adblocker but in exchange of your eyeballs usage you get a small percentage of the ads costs ?

I like Brave on Android from when it was just a &quot;bubble browser&quot;, but man alive it&#x27;s flakey. Every day I get random bubbles on the screen that can&#x27;t be moved or closed, or even worse, invisible full page coverage which means nothing on the screen works unless I pull down the Brave notification in the system tray to manually hide it.<p>2-3 times a day I have to force-close it.

Please fix this &quot;jumpiness&quot; on your bubble browser on Android. Every time I check Brave on Android I get angry because of this bubble hiding&#x2F;showing the whole time. Especially on websites which hide their top nav bar themself... then I have two hiding mechanism jumping all over my screen. When I visit a website I want to read it without jumping text.

It&#x27;s laughable that Brave is marketed as a new, fast browser when it&#x27;s just a Node&#x2F;Electron application. It&#x27;s barely more than a skin on a Chrome window with no possibility of ever outperforming Chrome.

Does anyone here think this might be one of those historical moments like when the Mosaic browser was released?<p>I see some potential for what could be. But, I don&#x27;t see the value proposition for the average consumer. I just don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s enough value in what they&#x27;re offering, to be a major breakthrough that will revolutionize the internet. I see it as more of a niche offering.

The only people I know who care about ads and have them enabled do so because they feel they must reward the content creators.<p>If you are replacing the content creator ads with your own, there is absolutely no reason to have ads enabled at all.

So with that Brave, BitGo and Coinbase get to know it all? Or do I have a new pseudonym per site? How does this prevent all my transactions being known to the parties involved or even the whole world?

I like the idea behind the brave browser but there UI needs some work. There are no extensions yet to make tabs behave more like chromes on the desktop. On android (where I really neeed more ad blocker options) they have this weird bubble thing like facebook chat.<p>I find it unusable until they do something about this.

I installed Brave when it first came out as the ad plan sounded very interesting. There was another attempt using bitcoin in the browser to &#x27;bypass&#x27; ads, but unfortunately, it wasn&#x27;t have been successful (in the network effect sense) I&#x27;m still waiting for the LastPass option :)

Internet users with browsers full of bitcoin... what could possibly go wrong?

I wonder how this will play with zeronet: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeronet.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeronet.io</a>

Won&#x27;t this run afoul of money transmitter laws?

isn&#x27;t this just Net Neutrality through the backdoor?