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IOS Software The Internet

Brave Hits 20 Million Monthly Users a Year After 1.0 Release (zdnet.com) 37

Posted by BeauHD from the not-too-shabby dept.
One year after its first 1.0 release, Brave says it has hit the milestone of 20.5 million active monthly users. "At the same time last year, the browser had 8.7 million active monthly users, and of the 20 million monthly users, 7 million are daily users, which represents more than a doubling of last year's 3 million," reports ZDNet. "Brave added that since Apple allowed browsers other than its own to be the default option on iOS, it has seen its iOS user base increase by a third." From the report: One of the touted features of the browser is that it hates ads, and will go out of its way to block them, unless users decide to see Brave-powered advertisements. To that end, Brave has hit "2 billion ad confirmation events" and completed 2,215 campaigns from over 460 companies. The browser maker says its users have a click-through rate of 9%, way and away outstripping industry averages. The browser also has its own cryptocurrency, Basic Attention Tokens, that users use to "tip" content creators. Thus far, 26 million of the tokens have been sent to creators. At the time of writing, the blockchain-based token is trading for just under 18 cents, meaning $4.6 million has been sent from users.
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Brave Hits 20 Million Monthly Users a Year After 1.0 Release More

Brave Hits 20 Million Monthly Users a Year After 1.0 Release

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  • Again (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @05:18AM (#60686624)
    On mobile it's worth it, at least on iPhone, since it holds a native smart ad-blocker. Opt out of the Rewards program if you don't like it. But at least give it a try. Makes a real difference.

    • Re:Again (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @06:05AM (#60686670) Homepage Journal

      Wouldn't it be better to simply use Firefox? Then you can use the ad blocker of your choice (I recommend uBlock Origin) as well as many other privacy-enhancing tools. No need to opt out of a dodgy cryptocurrency scam and you get to support a non-Chromium browser too.

      • Re:Again (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05, 2020 @07:06AM (#60686766)

        Wouldn't it be better to simply use Firefox? Then you can use the ad blocker of your choice (I recommend uBlock Origin) as well as many other privacy-enhancing tools. No need to opt out of a dodgy cryptocurrency scam and you get to support a non-Chromium browser too.

        Absolutely right.

        (b) Cryptocurrency is bullshit.
        (a) I use an adblocker and block anything I don't want to see. Especially ads.
        (d) I don't care about some fractions of pennies they might pay me (or someone else), and that will involve jumping through hoops to turn it into a tiny amount of real money. It's stupid, annoying and not worth the hassle.
        (5) Brave is just another re-branded Chrome browser. Since I'm blocking everything, and don't care about getting paid, I might as well just use Chrome. Except Chrome and all Chrome-based browsers suck, so I don't.

        Even worse, the "developers" working on Brave can't even properly answer user questions about their browser because they are completely clueless morons.

        When I first tried Brave, nearly 3 years ago, one of the things I didn't like was there didn't seem to be any way to change the location of the browser cache. I posted a question on their support forum and got a reply from one of the "developers" who seemed to be genuinely puzzled and couldn't seem to understand why I would want to do such a thing.

        After some back and forth trying to explain why this is a good idea, and pointing out that every major browser (even pitiful old Internet Explorer) has had this feature since forever, I was told that someone had already submitted a request for this and I could track it at [some url].

        Fast forward to today. I check the support url and the request for user configuration of the browser cache is still open and nothing has been done. The only discussion on the issue has been someone who tried to create a symlink from the default cache location to a RAM disk, but somehow the symlink is reset every time you start Brave, and the entire discussion got derailed talking about that, and nothing else.

        Then it occurred to me, Brave is just another shitty Chrome clone. What if I just used the same command line switch that Chrome uses? Search the interwebs for "change chrome browser cache location"

        Find the appropriate command line switch -- and it works. *facepalm*
        These idiots don't even understand how their own browser works.

        Have they actually done any development work on Brave? Have they actually done anything other than search/replace in the source code, changing all occurances of "Chrome" to "Brave"?

        • What browser doesn't suck?
          It seems that browser makers are stuck in a world where they have competing priorities.
          Create a browser with the most features and support the standards as accurately as possible, to allow as many sites to work well on your product.
          at the same time
          Have the browser block content and not run said features, and not implement open standard on purpose because the web site owner decides to abuse the standards and floods their site with ads, and decides to track you. While the same featu

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Have they actually done anything other than search/replace in the source code, changing all occurances of "Chrome" to "Brave"?

          Cmon give the developers some credit! They just changed "Chrom" to "Brav".

      • You can't install them on iOS.

    • Does it support arbitrary extensions, like something like Greasemonkey? And arbitrary ad blocking lists and an element selection helper like uBlock?
      Plus no DoH, cause I'm not Homer, and pick my own DNS, FYVM.
      And is it completely open source?

      Otherwise: Are you trying to insult us?

      • Again, I said "on mobile / iPhone". Does any of your iPhone browsers support arbitrary extensions, like something like Greasemonkey? Or are you trying to insult your own intelligence?

  • Replacement ads (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Meneth ( 872868 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @05:24AM (#60686632)
    "Brave" doesn't hate ads, it just wants to replace all other ad providers.

  • The Brave BROWSER.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by 278MorkandMindy ( 922498 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @05:36AM (#60686638)

    Don't make me RTFA. I don't know what Brave is.

    • No, obviously,
      Brave is pretty cool Disney princess!
      Seh kills the patriachioid and doesn't afraid of anything!

    • Then you should have posted as AC. :D

    • Don't make me RTFA. I don't know what Brave is.

      Don't worry snowflake. We won't make you read the first line of the fucking summary by yourself. Here.

      At the same time last year, the browser ..."

      (No, I never heard of it either.)

  • Brave? (Score:3, Funny)

    by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @06:39AM (#60686710)

    The Pixar movie? I didn't think it would be that popular.

    But these are strange times. I guess the Disney streaming service is doing well. (Or they have almost nothing else on there that the kids haven't seen before.)

  • Yet another Kitchen Sink Monolith.

    A software that is one of a quintillion arbitrary permutations of any things combined, that should reallybe separate modules, layers, ends and aspects, connected via standardized interfaces.

    I meaan, tipping built-in? Really? That should be a service payment tokenIPv6 extension, really! Usually layered on top of an IPv6 extension for total encryption.
    Not this madness upon madness.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      I meaan, tipping built-in? Really? That should be a service payment tokenIPv6 extension, really! Usually layered on top of an IPv6 extension for total encryption.
      Not this madness upon madness.

      I guess the idea is that if it's installed for everyone then there is some chance of it getting enough traction to be important. If it is important enough then we have an alternative to ad-revenue for supporting websites which, ultimately, is related to the core function of a browser.

      I suppose. I'm not convinced but I don't think it's a disastrous idea.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      You realize that Brave is a layer on top of Chromium? Does it even do anything other than handling advertisement blocking and giving websites a supposedly fair replacement for advertising income? Your suggestion is dumping this stuff into the transport layer? How is that a less arbitrary combination?

  • I was about to bitch about some game I've never heard of. Oh well, I can wait.
  • Not posting this horseshit when people are looking for actual news, you fucking retards.
  • I'm using it. I was skeptical but I switched to Linux and found the performance of Firefox is abysmal compared to how it is on Mac. Didn't want Chrome so I gave brave a go. It's fast. Faster than Chrome, probably because of the native adblock. I miss the containers feature of Firefox.

    Why is Firefox such a dog on Linux? That was unexpected.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Something is wrong with your system. I use Firefox on Linux on a really crappy old PC (4GB RAM, HDD not SSD etc.) and it's fine, nice and snappy.

  • The only way to browse was a combination of noscript and some tracking blocking plugins.

    Brave did make the browser somewhat better.

    Here's a pet peeve...the in house ads they show on the top right...it stays on forever, can it be displayed for 10 or 15 seconds and go away?
  • Ordinary ad blockers were perfectly adequate until everyone started using them and web sites deployed ad blocker detectors and ad blocker blockers, to the point that ad blockers now are basically useless. I'm told it is pretty much impossible to create an undetectable ad blocker. Surely web sites can find some means of detecting that Brave is being used and to block it. It's just that up till now the user base is too tiny to bother with.

  • I've just dumped Brave. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by overnight_failure ( 1032886 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @08:56AM (#60686966)
    Their built in adblocker is just awful. Personally I found it breaks so many sites, especially ones using Paypal quick checkout. Oh and you can't permanently disable it. Oh and if you tell it to turn off for a specific site, it'll re-enable itself sometime later (that screwed me in my vain attempt to grab a 3080FE).

    Then there's the 'Cards' they like to stick on the default new tab. They keep adding them and they're turned on by default, for things like Gemini (crypto), Binance (crypto), Bitcoin, crypto.com etc. Which is funny because those things all seem to ping out to crypto sites I don't want my browser connecting to, and there wasn't a way to turn those off either (the connections, not the cards). Blocked all those sites using my PiHole.
  • The last update of something broke Chrome around 11/1. My tablet does not function with Chrome, so I am trying Brave there. I have not hooked up all my Google apps to it yet. I hope something fixed Chrome, just for the app integration.

  • I just use that so it can handle servers too even though it can't block everything like Internet app's internal ads that use the same servers as the apps. All iOS web browsers still use Safari's web engine.

  • Compared to Firefox it uses considerably less memory to perform the same task.
    In my case, I had 4 twitch streams open, and Brave used significantly less memory.

    It is now my default browser, which basically means when I click a link in an email Brave handles it, since I often have no idea what is behind the link and Brave does the best job of blocking ads you've never encountered before.

    It still isn't quite ready for prime time though.
    My workhorse browser is Firefox with uBlock Origin.
    There are two ad

  • At least that has been my experience. Several websites can detect ad blockers, and if you don't turn the ad blocking off, the website won't work.

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