As someone who has grown increasingly evasive in my online habits when it comes to advertisements, (Ad-blockers, Track-blockers, DuckDuckGo, VPNs, etc) the concept of the Brave Browser was a welcome addition to my defensive arsenal against unwanted intrusion by overzealous marketers and their 'affiliates'. The online world seems bloated in its current state with equal parts content and the ever presence of constant endorsements.
From benign appearing Google ad-words (really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the treasure troves of data the company is collecting on each of us) to those ridiculously annoying web-page take-overs, to prominent You-Tubers unabashedly inundating their fans by showing off all their free company-specific swag, the internet is turning into a 24/7 shopping zone.
As someone who comes from the advertising world, and has seen the behind the scenes metrics of conversion rates and CPMs I can certainly sympathize with the difficulty in ad-revenue profit models. But as a consumer, ads are just way too annoying. Enter: Brave.
Claiming to be a browser that blocks any and all ads and has the potential to reward users and companies alike with opt-in advertisements, the keystone of their business model is the mass adoption of the Brave Browser.
Which, after giving it a try for about a month now, has led me to seriously question the viability of their strategy.
This is definitely a non-technical perspective on my experiences with the browser, but after loading Brave on 3 separate systems (Mac, PC, Mobile running iOS) I have somewhat disappointingly returned to using other browsers over Brave for a few basic reasons:
Pros:
Speed. Brave does indeed load many pages much faster than other websites. These sites are predominately the most well traveled, W3 compliant pages that serve thousands of views on a daily basis.
Ad-Blocking. Brave does block a good many ads including the basics like Google ad-words and many Youtube in-video ads like pre-rolls.
Cons:
Functionality. Brave, created by the same creator that helped bring us Firefox runs an awful lot like Firefox. That is to say, its rather buggy. There are many sites that I've tried loading with Brave (and Firefox) that simply hang. Either due to the websites own errors, they simply don't load. Compared to say Chrome or even Safari, which presents broken sites with areas that are marked as such, Brave (and Firefox) suffer from complete in-operability when they meet a site they don't like.
Not all Ads-the-Same. I also notice that Brave is not 100% effective at blocking all ads. Especially with YouTube. Each time Youtube rolls out changes to counter Ad-blockers, the extensions for Chrome have been able to counter them fairly effectively. Brave conversely, several times I've had to sit through pre-rolls and on some sites that have those annoying video ads, Brave doesn't block these at all.
To me, the Browser feels much more like a Beta than a final browser, which is what Opera usually feels like. I greatly appreciate the attempt to mitigate ads, but the lack of extension-support and the up-hill market-share battle the browser faces, especially when everything they are trying to do can be duplicated in other more popular and long-standing browsers makes their endeavor feel very, very shaky. Add to the entire 'opt-in' concept by customers as a means of rewards and the simple fact that I find it hard to believe these 'rewards' would be anywhere near parity with the annoyances of seeing ads while browsing, and I don't see people 'signing' up for ads in consistent numbers. (Earn.com is banking on this concept as well, but really, the idea of getting paid a pittance in crypto to shill to every person I've ever emailed seems incredibly short-sided)
With the current bear market, alt-coins are being increasingly vetted for exemplary profit-making business models. After seeing their product, and reading through their roadmap(outlined in their white-paper) I just don't see BAT or Brave being anything but another Netscape [R.I.P.]