Development status Active | Written in C , JavaScript , C++ | |
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Developer(s) Brendan Eich, Brian R. Bondy, Marshall Rose, Yan Zhu, Garvan Keeley, Aubrey Keus, Sergey Zhukovsky, Brian Johnson, Brian Clifton, Community members Android 1.9.58 / November 2, 2016; 3 months ago (2016-11-02) iOS 1.3.1 / February 14, 2017; 9 days ago (2017-02-14) Windows, macOS, Linux (Dev) 0.13.4 / February 15, 2017; 8 days ago (2017-02-15) | ||
Brave is a free and open-source web browser based on the Chromium web browser and its Blink engine, announced by the co-founder of the Mozilla Project, Brendan Eich. It claims to block website trackers and remove intrusive internet advertisements, replacing them with ads sold by Eich's company. The browser also claims to improve online privacy by sharing less data with advertising customers, although the browser itself targets web ads through analysis of users' anonymized browsing history. Brave intends to keep 15% of ad revenue for itself, pay content publishers 55%, ad partners 15% and also give 15% to the browser users, who can in turn donate to bloggers and other providers of web content through micropayments. As of 2016, it is currently in beta testing for iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, and Linux.
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History
Brave is developed by Brave Software which was founded on May 28, 2015, by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy. Brave was first announced by co-founder Brendan Eich on January 20, 2016 with the stated goal of providing an alternative to the widely adopted system of providing free content to end users supported by advertising revenue that is employed by many content creators and publishers on the World Wide Web.
Eich sees the Web as facing a "primal threat" consisting of an impending conflict between advertisers, who are incentivized to collect and store detailed and, oftentimes, highly personal information about individual web users in order to deliver more effective advertisements, and users, who are increasingly averse to the collection of their personal information.
Critical reception
Critics have generally responded positively to the release of the beta version, stating that the browser is "competitive with and in some cases [outperforms] mature browsers in some benchmarks." Yet version 0.7 has been categorized as "mighty primitive" whereas others have stated that Brave is "very fast" with "quirks."