The Brave Browser

Operating Systems & Open Source
1

Anyone ever used Brave? From what I've seen it really does make a difference on the performance side vs running an ab-blocker which is just a plugin. Adblock in Brave is built-in, meaning they get to write their adblocker in a much lower-level fashion. The Brave browser's buillt-in adblock is written in C (for developers, see source: https://github.com/brave/ad-block).

Seems like you can get it to run Chrome extensions (see: https://blog.brave.com/loading-chrome-extensions-in-brave/). For me this makes it a truly viable alternative to Chromium.

Note: Brave is based off Chromium (source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-new-browser-eich-returns-with-chromium-browser-that-replaces-ads/).

1 Like
2

I'm fairly sure I used Brave for a bit the last time I attempted to install Manjaro on my laptop.

Seemed to work just fine.

EDIT: Just downloaded it again and remembered why I used it for ~20 minutes before switching.

  1. For whatever reason it just won't open in a maximized window
  2. Setting the start page to Home does jack.
  3. And now the home button itself doesn't always work.
3

I'm using firefox until our lord and saviour @wendell shares his secret sauce for chromium, no other browser does it for me.

3 Likes
4

This one?

I think its the Canary Build.

5

But he does some secret black magic to it

6

what sort of?

7

The sort that manages inactive tabs in such a way that they use less CPU and/or memory. It has something to do with disabling or pausing animations and scripts when the tab is inactive.

I didn't find the method Wendell was talking about (it's in the WAN show around 39 minutes in), but I did find some guy asking about it on stack overflow, you can check if that Tabs Outliner thingy works as the other guy suggested.

1 Like
8

Yeah, when I heard that, I went to google to see how to do it and couldn't find anything worthwhile. Then again, I don't think my search terms made sense XD

9

I never had any issues with the number of tabs personally, but it looks like its just a Chrome plugin so it would work with Brave as well.

Not quite sure how it does it but it seems that it saves the tab state into leveldb.

10

Looks like they're probably going to add proper extension support pretty soon: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/6530. Looks like they're tracking things here: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/projects/1

The only thing holding me back from using Brave at the moment is the lack of extension support for things like my password manager.

@w.meri I'm not getting any of the issues you're having. Maybe something else is at work here? I'm using version 0.12.15 from Ubuntu GNOME.

11

I'll stick with vivaldi I think. It works like I want it to whick is nice.

12

I really hope they add synchronization between devices down the road.

13

Besides the general usability problems, it also wants protection money to let you use what is essentially an ad-blocker:

That and any performance gains are placebo at best:

14

I honestly have no idea what was happening.

When opening it would open a large window, but it was never fully maximized and locked in or whatever.

The only way for it to show the homepage on startup was if I set new tabs to be the homepage rather than the normal blank new tab page. I wouldn't mind if it wasn't for me also wanting new tabs to show the new tab page.

The home button issue was inconsistent, but it could be fixed by pressing refresh and then home immediately after.

Currently I'm on W8.1 with version 0.13.1 or whatever the newest version is.

15

That and any performance gains are placebo at best:

None of these benchmarks test for what Brave is optimizing, which is taking out adds from pages. If you can find some sort of benchmark which tests the browser in the wild I'm all ears. From my very limited testing it manages to shave off about 1 second of load time on complex pages with adds such as Youtube - and thats compared to running another browser with an adblocker.

ps. Not really worried about the privacy element - worst case people can just fork the project. What I'm most interested in is the performance benefits from having an adblocker built-in, written in C.

16

Brave is source-available, not really open source. Also: add-block addons would make up that difference without sacrificing the useability and perforrmance that comes with the alternatives.

17

Brave? Isn't it the one which replaces ads with its own?
Fuck this shit.

18

How is brave not really open source? Its licensed under MPL which afaik is effectively open source.

19

I use Opera Beta 43.0 as my daily driver (and I'm on the browser now as I type my comment) which is based on Chromium and it can use Chrome extensions (with the use of this here). I been using Opera since 2004 when the browser was based on Presto and haven't looked back since. The time they rolled over into Chromium which was around version 15.0 (July 2013) almost made me uninstall the browser from my computer and quit using it altogether but as more updates released it eventually included most of the features it lost after the Chromium transition.