Brave Software has announced the availability of version 1.0 of its Brave web browser. The announcement of the first stable build comes almost four years after work on the project began. One of the unique features is Brave Rewards which lets you see ads from Brave and in turn fund the websites that you visit; this feature has now arrived on iOS meaning that all platforms now support the feature.
Brave, in a similar fashion to Firefox and Safari, comes with a heavy focus on protecting users’ privacy. Every day when we browse websites various page items such as social plugins, ads, and trackers follow us around the web collecting data to target products, in some cases, this data even gets soldand finds its way into all sorts of hands.
Out of the box with Brave 1.0, you’ll be able to enable Tor for private browsing sessions, block cross-site trackers, some ads, fingerprinting, tracking cookies that operate cross-site, HTTPS is enabled where possible, and Google Safe Browsing will help you avoid malware and phishing websites.
Judging by the release notes, this release isn’t particularly groundbreaking but it’s probably an appropriate time to bump the software to version 1.0 now that all platforms support Brave Rewards.
In terms of the browser’s popularity, that is still quite modest. In June, there were over 4.5 billion people online. According to Brave Software, there are around 8.7 million users – that represents just 0.1933% of web users. It’ll be interesting to watch whether its offering is big enough of an attraction to get people to switch from bigger rivals such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Opera.
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