You Should Be Using Brave

Brave has a Bitcoin wallet built into the browser.

There. Now that I have the attention of Stacker News, we can move on.

The Bitcoin wallet is actually pretty impressive, but it isn't the main reason I use Brave. The reason I use Brave is much more mundane: I got sick of the internet.

For years I was a Firefox user. I liked Firefox and, to be fair, I still do. But over time I started noticing that advertising on the internet wasn't merely advertising anymore. It was becoming invasive, distracting, obnoxious and in some cases downright offensive.

YouTube was getting ridiculous. Websites were getting ridiculous. Everybody apparently needed to know what I was doing, what I had clicked on, what I might click on next, and how many advertisements they could place between me and the thing I actually came there to see.

The breaking point for me was probably C++.

I was trying to learn C++ using LearnCpp.com, which is actually an excellent resource. The site is free and supported by advertising, and I have no problem with somebody paying the bills on a useful website.

But on my connection at the time, the experience had become absurd.

I would open a tutorial and start reading it.

Then an advertisement would load.

The text would move.

I'd find my place again.

Another advertisement would load.

The text would move again.

Then something else would load and the entire page would rearrange itself one more time.

I wasn't trying to watch a Super Bowl commercial. I was trying to understand C++.

On a slower internet connection this was even worse because the advertisements didn't politely appear all at once. They slowly materialized while I was reading, pushing everything around as they arrived.

At some point I realized that I was waiting for advertising to finish loading so that I could read text.

Think about how stupid that is.

My first thought was simple enough: install an ad blocker.

Since I was using Firefox, that was probably what I would have done. But I tend to investigate things before settling on the first solution, and somewhere in that process I discovered Brave.

That changed the equation.

Brave wasn't Firefox plus an ad blocker. The browser itself was designed around blocking a lot of the garbage that had gradually accumulated around normal web browsing.

So I tried it.

At first I kept Firefox around because moving browsers is annoying. Years of bookmarks, passwords, settings and accumulated habits don't magically move themselves because you found a new piece of software you like.

For a while Brave was the second browser.

Then something strange happened.

Firefox became the second browser.

Eventually essentially everything moved to Brave.

The biggest difference wasn't some spectacular feature I could point at. It was the absence of things.

Pages became pages again.

I clicked something because I wanted to read it, and the thing appeared.

No giant advertisement shoving the paragraph downward.

No mystery box loading three seconds later.

No video screaming at me from somewhere on the page.

No feeling that I had entered a shopping mall where somebody was following me around taking notes.

You get used to that very quickly.

And once you get used to it, going back to the normal internet feels almost comical.

Brave also happens to have a lot of other things I appreciate. The privacy controls are excellent. It has its own Bitcoin wallet. It has private windows and, on desktop, a private window with Tor connectivity.

The Tor window is especially useful occasionally when I want a more separated browsing session. I've used it for things like visiting Nostr and other places where I don't necessarily need my ordinary browsing session following me around.

It is worth saying that Brave's Tor window is not the same thing as Tor Browser. If your safety actually depends on anonymity, use Tor Browser. But having Tor connectivity sitting conveniently inside the browser is still a very useful tool.

It also exposes something interesting about the modern web.

Sometimes a website decides that you've read enough articles.

A cookie says you've visited five times, so apparently article number six is now behind a wall.

Open the same public URL in a fresh private context and sometimes the website suddenly forgets that it was angry with you.

That alone should tell you something about how much of the "internet" we experience isn't really the internet at all. It's a pile of tracking systems and business rules sitting between us and it.

We've gotten strangely accustomed to accepting whatever websites impose on us.

The website is designed this way, therefore this is simply how it is.

The advertisement covers half the screen, therefore I guess I have to close it.

The page tracks me, therefore I guess I'm tracked.

The video has three advertisements, therefore I guess I watch three advertisements.

The site wants cookies, notifications, location access and permission to send me emails until the sun burns out, therefore I guess that's the internet.

No.

Those are choices somebody else made.

You have choices too.

That realization has gradually affected more than just my browser.

Today I'm using Fedora, Brave and ProtonMail as part of my normal computing life. None of these things makes me some invisible cyber-ninja living in a Faraday cage. That's not the point.

The point is control.

I have considerably more control over my computer, my browser, my email and what I allow onto my screen than I did before.

And I find that independence extremely rewarding.

There was a time when the internet felt much more like something you explored. Increasingly it feels like something companies have occupied.

Every square inch is monetized. Every action is measured. Every pause is an opportunity to put something in front of your face.

In that sense, the internet has almost been hacked.

Not hacked in the technical sense. Hacked in the human sense.

A remarkable open network was gradually covered with tracking systems, advertisements, engagement machinery, spam and little tollbooths, and because it happened slowly we mostly accepted it as normal business.

I don't think we should.

Brave isn't going to fix the internet.

But it does give you a surprisingly effective shield against some of the worst things we've allowed to become normal.

Install it sometime and browse around for a week.

Then open the same internet in a browser without those protections.

You may suddenly realize just how much noise you had been trained to tolerate.