Brave Browser Passes 20M Monthly Active Users and 7M Daily Active Users

Brave is interesting because its users fall for the &#x27;VPN&#x27; fallacy.<p>Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.<p>Or - with browsers - rather than install and configure Firefox to disable the (very limited) telemetry and configure ad blockers etc, you install a chromium derivative with all the Google pieces replaced with a different flavour of mystery sauce. You&#x27;re still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.

Use Firefox, people. Brave is shady as hell. I&#x27;ll use Chrome or Edge long before I use Brave.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox two years ago.<p>But last week I swiched to Brave, because Firefox simply couldn&#x27;t deliver the performance I need for all the heavy weight web apps I use (Cloud9, VSCode, Gravit Designer, Slack, Asana).<p>Brave is overall pretty snappy and I only got problems with Recaptcha, which wants me to do a ridiculous amount of tests.

I don’t think I’m alone as a Brave user when I say that the crypto stuff and some of their default settings aren’t the greatest, but overall still provides a compelling solution to multiple problems. So while it’s not a perfect product, and the crypto stuff still weirds me out, I find it to be the best option for my personal use case. I get chromium and it’s large library of extensions, as well as having it be decoupled from Google, and some decent Adblock and tracker blocking built in. On the downside, because of the crypto stuff, I feel like I need to double check the news a few times a year to make sure they haven’t made it mandatory, or done anything shady. Overall I’m happy with Brave, and glad to see it growing.

Every, and I do mean EVERY, time Brave hits the front page people like to crap on them<p>... and yet they keep growing.<p>The more interesting conversation to have is if the growth is linear or early exponential.

Brave recently became my default browser, but I personally don&#x27;t care for the crypto stuff.<p>The current iOS beta allows users to sync their bookmarks with Windows and iOS privately, and it&#x27;s what convinced me to switch. I didn&#x27;t need to create an account with my email address, or install iCloud...just scan a QR code.<p>I wish they&#x27;d fix the captcha problem though, a lot of sites that use ReCaptcha think Brave browser users are bots (due to the security).

The one feature I wish <i>any</i> other browser would do as well as Chrome is on-the-fly translation. I think Microsoft Edge does this using Bing Translate but I guess as none of the other browser makers have a translation service they can use they instead rely on a wonky extension that uses Google Translate which isn&#x27;t anywhere near as smooth as the built-in translate in Chrome (naturally).<p>If anyone has any suggestions I would <i>love</i> to hear them as it is the only thing keeping me on Chrome these days.

Interesting that a browser designed to block analytics has built in analytics. Is this enabled by default?

The opt-in ads are a bunch of shady crypto-currency things, but I love it. I&#x27;ve actually been making like ~$5&#x2F;month from ads consistently for almost a year now.

Brave is the only browser on iOS that lets me turn off javascript on a per-site basis. VERY useful.<p>(If you&#x27;re aware of others, I&#x27;m all ears.)

Can someone enlighten me on why does literally everyone use Chromium as the engine for their browser? Why does Firefox not have anything comparable to Chromium&#x2F;Node&#x2F;Electron? Is Chrome&#x27;s JS engine that superior or what?

Recommend Vivaldi (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com</a>) as an alternative to Brave. Same Chromium based browser, but without any of the crypto stuff and has a lot of nice built-in features. Works on PC&#x2F;Mac&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;Phone.

I trouble wrapping my mind with the anti-Chromium sentiment. Isn’t monopoly a good thing if it’s an open source monopoly? I don’t seem anyone complaining about the Android monopoly for example or the Linux kernel monopoly.

If you work on brave and are reading this... can you stop showing random Crypto banners over nytimes.com and the like? It&#x27;s very tacky

It’s my daily driver. I’m happy with it. Out of the box, the web is useable. Can’t say the same for any other browser I’ve tried, other than DuckDuckGo on iOS.

I recently moved away from datahogger chrome. Google is throwing me captcha every single time I use Brave browser, but same thing does not happen when using Safari browser. Why is that?

Been using Brave as my main browser for several months now. It&#x27;s great.

I quit using Brave when I found out they injected their own referal codes in websites without my permission.

The HN crowd seems to really push Firefox. I would love to get an honest opinion on Opera. It&#x27;s a chromium fork and the biggest criticism just seems to be that it is now owned by a chinese-based consortium. It has just been the most seamless and capable browser I&#x27;ve found with constant innovation.

The software is fine, but the BAT ecosystem disturbs me. As someone who has been involved in the affiliate space, accepting a token issued by an ad network seems like a terrible idea. Separation of concerns is important in this case.<p>Instead of the ad network facing the consequences of chargebacks, unfulfilled obligations, fraud and abuse, everyone holding the token will be on the hook. With all of the horrible things that go on in the ad&#x2F;affiliate industry experienced publishers should be wary of this.<p>Also, as an expat the KYC stuff has generally been insurmountable. Hard to square that with the privacy angle.<p>However, I do look forward to innovation in this space. Brave&#x2F;BAT has issues, but at least they&#x27;re doing something.

I use Brave but mostly because it&#x27;s fast and blocks lots of ads.

I&#x27;ve been using Brave most of this year and really like it.<p>The killer feature for me is that it lets you disable scripts for individual websites or &#x27;Allow scripts once&#x27;. This basically makes most paywall news sites readable.

Weird how the affiliate scandal didn&#x27;t break their neck.

- Uses far less phone battery. - Blocks abuses of web technology, mainly advertising tricks. - Almost identical to Chrome now but not part of the Google monolith. - Use Tor w&#x2F; 1 click.<p>Disclosure: I&#x27;m invested in $BAT, the browser&#x27;s native token

Don&#x27;t be too proud. Many users just because it gives a false promises of free cryptos. Not because of search and replace chrome version.<p>Chrome+ublock is the best way.

Last I heard there were ways to farm BAT so be careful investing in it.

the agency provides :)

I was originally sceptical of Brave but now it is my main browser

&gt;&quot;Malware Passes 20M Monthly Active Users and 7M Daily Active Users&quot;

I dropped Firefox for brave because Firefox dropped support for massive amounts of simple power user features like RSS while claiming they were all “too hard to maintain”. Meanwhile they put massive amounts of time and effort into trying to be a chrome look-alike which adds zero value.

I can&#x27;t even say why I don&#x27;t want to use it without being downvoted into oblivion. I&#x27;m sure there are many wonderful people who use and develop it without going out and being a nuisance, but the fans I encounter the most are <i>horrible</i>. That&#x27;s not an association I want, and nothing the browser offers is compelling to me.