Brave Browser Discussion & Update Thread

Thanks IvoShoen...I went over to latest dev version after reading your comment. Unbelievable difference here. Liking it a lot.

 

yes i do. no to ads! this was not all the time, but i see ads growing, i see anti-adblock - anti-anti-adblock and such crap. mankind greed has no limit and the web may be some kind better without pages which are sponsored by ads. a lot of crappy and pointless blogs wont exist. i dont have problems with paid content - but those ******* cant get enough and place ads even when paid. brave browser is no exception - no ads in my used browser.

are you sure? there was no hint about that "feature".

 

Then you can just trun off Brave ads. It is and has always been optional. Well, I hate all current web ads. But it doesn't mean all ads have to be bad forever. I like some Japanese TVCM which is more of short contents (and often hard to understand what product they're trying to promote), but dislike almost all US TVCM which pushes products w/ flood of talk. IDK about German (I guess, from your writing), but sometimes I suspect that current disastrous situation in web ads may have sth to do w/ the fact who made current web is mostly American.
As far as web ads goes, the situation seems to be almost the same in all region.

That has been stated in official BAT page as well as Brave FAQ (they also cite "acceptable ads" and more). Essentially, they use crypto to make sure only the local browser can access the data while allowing fully anonymized interaction. This anonymization is not the common practice of removing PII which have been known never to be sufficient. They can't even access to anonymized ID. As to how this is possible, search for Anonize2.

As we're talking about privacy, not about dislike to ads, blocking ads & tracker is not the purpose. It's means, and the purpose it to prevent privacy risk where one can establish his/her threat model. If there's no threat, logically ads & tracking should be accepted. Privacy researchers are not wasting their time, they know needs of both side and trying to mediate the hard problem. We now have many framework to assess privacy and its threats. ε-δ differential privacy is one of promising achievement. Tho Brave seemed to take even stronger way to protect privacy, it still worth to keep it examined as privacy attack technique is also evolving (tho IDK if any of them was actually used in the wild - like crypto, most of them are theoretical). But if you turned off the feature, it's mostly not relevant.

 

Brave Browser v0.25.2 Released (October 8, 2018)
Changelog
Download / Download (Github)

 

I didn't even know that Chrome now also is blocking ads, but it will allow acceptable ads. Will Brave do the same, or does it simply block everything? To be honest, as long as ads are not annoying and do not track you I don't have any problems with them. But I just saw that Chrome allows animated ads, what a joke.

 

You can choose Brave to show its ads or block all ads. For blocking it uses Easylist and regional list (separate settings), as well as tracking protection and Spam404 & Simple Disconnect list for safe browsing (no Google safe browsing). But they are proposing ML-based ad blocking so they may change in future.

 

OK, so you're probably better of using uBlock. Like I said before, I think it's ridiculous that Google decided to allow animated ads. I wonder if Adblock Plus also allows this, if so I wouldn't call them "acceptable ads".

 

New Brave Browser Release Available for General Download on Brave.com
October 18, 2018
https://brave.com/new-brave-browser-release-available-for-general-download/

 

Wait a minute, wasn't Brave always based on Chromium? No they talk about the old version being Muon-based, what the hell is that.

 

It's been based on Muon, yes, it turns out not much secure, but its rendering engine has been Blink which is Chrome's.

 

And what exactly is Muon? Never heard of it before, and I also assumed that if a browser used the Blink engine, then it's automatically based on Chromium. BTW, I wonder when third party developers will be able to make use of the Edge and Firefox engine.

 

IDK well either, but Muon is folk of Electron which is cross-platform application engine based on Node.js & Chromium. It seems move form Muon was not security reason (my misunderstanding), but more technical reason described here.
Anyway, modern browser is massive complex of many components so using Blink does not mean it's entirely Chromium based.
EdgeHTML is proprietary so they can't, but Gekko is OK and you know there're some Firefox folks.

 

Brave Browser v0.55.20 Released (October 23, 2018)
Download / Download (Github)

 

Never really knew about this. Seems like Electron/Muon is more about the GUI, not about the browser engine. I believe Vivaldi also made use of it, but I'm not sure. Hopefully Gecko Quantum and EdgeHTML will also be free to use by third party developers in the future. Just like with IE and the old Firefox, think of Pale Moon and Waterfox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_(Mozilla)

 

Quantum is the name of a project, and the rendering engine developed under this is Servo some of which have been incorporated into current Gecko engine. Servo is FOSS published under MPL2.0.

 

Brave Browser v0.55.22 Released (October 30, 2018)
Download / Download (Github)

 

Yes now I see it, so Servo is supposed to replace Gecko. Hopefully, browsers like Vivaldi and Brave will be able to use Servo in the future.

 

Brave considered to use Gecko but they say Chromium won by every measure. IDK how the final Servo-based engine will look like, but it's unlikely they change their mind. But I see where you're from, I also don't like the current monopoly of Chromium-based browsers. I wish if Opera freed Presto engine up so Vivaldi team could continue to develop it, as Opera was good browser in that time.

 

just a quick heads up, for those who use Kaspersky, it's sort-of incompatible with Brave, it doesn't detect everything that it does with other browsers.
also security extensions like Windows Defender Browser Protection is completely broken / not functioning at all.

so far tested:
Brave + Bitdefender Trafficlight 3 | Works

Brave + Norton Safe Web | Works

Brave + Avira Browser Safety | Works

Brave + Malwarebytes Chrome Extension | Works

Brave + Windows Defender Browser Protection | Doesn't work

Brave + Kaspersky | bugged but works, yields less detection

 

Brave Browser v0.56.12 Released (November 9, 2018)
Download / Download (Github)

Spoiler: Release Notes v0.56.12

Release Notes

• Updated the Brave shields panel with a new design. (#1339)
• Added support for direct YouTube donations using the Rewards panel. (#1282)
• Added global Brave shield settings into preferences. (#1288)
• Added exclude / include option to the Rewards panel. (#1283)
• Added "Creating Wallet" message when enabling Rewards for the first time using the Rewards panel.(#1502)
• Added search engine shortcut keys. (#731)
• Fixed Hulu not playing in Brave. (#1242)
• Fixed PDFs protected by cookie based login not loading. (#1287)
• Fixed scripts not being blocked when disabling / re-enabling Brave shields. (#1991)
• Fixed favicons not being displayed for media publisher in the Rewards panel. (#1887)
• Fixed contrast so text under Rewards settings is more visible. (#1824)
• Fixed several issues with the Dow Jones promotion (#287)
• Fixed exclude / include not working when the publisher is not listed in the auto-contribution table. (#1797)
• Fixed websites not being added into the auto-contribution table after contribution has been made. (#1796)
• Fixed verified icon not being displayed for verified YouTube channels.(#1795)
• Fixed grant notifications being displayed even though there's no grants available. (#1793)
• Fixed favicons not loading correctly when enabling Rewards using the Rewards panel. (#1792)
• Fixed publisher information not appearing under the Rewards panel after restarting Brave. (#1777)
• Fixed onboarding links not being opened in new tabs. (#1739)
• Fixed Flash not properly blocking after clearing browser data. (#1727)
• Fixed websites not being added to the auto-contribute table if Rewards is enabled using Rewards Panel. (#1719)
• Fixed "learn more" link for WebRTC under preferences. (#1690)
• Fixed explanatory text in private window not displaying the correct macOS keyboard shortcuts for Tor windows. (#1688)
• Fixed Qwant in private windows and Tor windows for certain regions. (#1666)
• Fixed incorrect publisher being displayed under the Rewards panel on YouTube. (#1660)
• Fixed incorrect attention values for websites visited after auto-contribution. (#1656)
• Fixed auto-contribute entries sometimes containing "on YouTube" text twice. (#1565)
• Fixed several alignment issues under the Rewards page when minimizing the window. (#1556)
• Fixed deleted publishers being re-added into the auto-contribution table when they are revisited. (#1440)
• Fixed auto-contribution values not recalculating after removing entries from the auto-contribution table. (#1410)
• Fixed WebTorrent sometimes going blank when switching tabs/windows. (#1400)
• Fixed torrent files being downloaded twice when clicking on "Save Torrent File". (#1399)
• Fixed Brave shields not working after re-enabling in private browsing mode. (#1198)

 

The only reason I prefer the Firefox engine is because they give an option to limit the amount of browser processes being used. If I open 50 tabs in Vivaldi, I will get over 50 processes running, this is ridiculous. I will even have to buy more RAM because of this.

 

Brave promises websites will load 20 times faster with SpeedReader mode
November 16, 2018
https://www.cnet.com/news/brave-promises-20x-faster-websites-with-speedreader-mode/

 

Brave Browser v0.56.14 Released (November 20, 2018)
Download / Download (Github)

 

Can't you just use an extension that discards old tabs after a certain amount of time? That basically means the old tabs will be inactive without using any data until you click them after a certain amount of time.