Brave Review: Putting the Hurt on Trackers and Ads

 While everyone in the Microsoft community was excitedly updating their pre-release versions of the new Edge last week so that they could see a new icon in action—yes, seriously—I was quietly undertaking a different but related experiment: I switched over my PCs and smartphone to another, less well-known Chromium-based web browser, one that offers many of the advantages­ of the new Microsoft Edge and even better tracking protection than Firefox. It’s something you need to know about. And it’s called Brave.

Brave has been on my radar for a while now, but I’ve only discussed it a few times. I wrote about the release of the first beta way back in September 2018, for example, and it was my Windows Weekly app pick of the week in December 2018 and then again this past June.

Like the new Microsoft Edge, Brave builds on the open-source Chromium foundation that Google also uses for Chrome, its dominant web browser. And like the new Edge, Brave strips out all of the awfulness of Chrome—like Google’s tracking, account sync, and search suggestion functionality—while leaving intact the core benefits of Chromium, including its industry-best Blink rendering engine and excellent extensions functionality.

But Brave goes much further than even Microsoft Edge. It blocks more trackers than any other web browser by default—more than even Firefox and Safari, Brave says—and it blocks all advertising and auto-play media. The result is a web browser that is much more secure than Chrome, and much lighter and faster than Chrome or Edge. In fact, Brave claims that its browser is 3 to 6 times faster than Chrome in real-world usage. Microsoft Edge, to date, has offered no measurable advantage over Chrome in this regard; in fact, Microsoft has simply replaced most of Google’s functionality with its own.