Brave

Brave is an open-source, privacy-focused web browser created by Brendan Eich (CEO) and Brian Bondy (CTO) through Brave Software. Brave has privacy features, including third-party ad and tracker blocking, fingerprinting protection, automatic HTTPS upgrades and Tor capabilities. Brave is officially available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS. Brave claims page load speeds faster than competing browsers due to its native ad and tracker blocking technology.

In addition to its privacy features, Brave offers Brave Payments, a contribution system that allows users to donate to websites and content creators on the web. Donations are kept anonymous via zero knowledge proof protocols and are denominated in a cryptocurrency token known as "Basic Attention Token". Until mid-late 2017, the system formerly used Bitcoin.

In a future release, Brave will integrate an opt-in "pay-to-surf" program ("Brave Ads" and Basic Attention Token) that will allow users to earn a share of ad revenue in crypto tokens for seeing privacy-respecting advertisements.

On desktop, Brave is a Chromium-based browser. In the past, Brave was an Electron application that featured a custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript front-end. The Electron-based architecture was developed by Brave as "Muon", intended to be a more secure fork of the Electron framework. However, in March 2018, Brave announced that it would be transitioning over to a full native, C++ Chromium front-end and abandoning its Muon architecture. The new native architecture would be named Brave-core.

The Brave web browser is co-developed alongside the Basic Attention Token digital advertising platform by Brave Software. The browser integrates the Basic Attention Token platform by allowing users to donate to websites and content creators in the platform's eponymous cryptocurrency token.

In a future release, Brave will integrate Basic Attention Token's digital advertising platform, allowing users to opt into seeing ads in exchange for a share of ad revenue. Ad revenue shares will be denominated in BAT tokens and accrue in the user's in-browser cryptocurrency wallet. Basic Attention Token's client-side ad technology allows for ad targeting without ever requiring users to reveal their data.

Brave has invested in research to improve manually curated ad block lists with machine learning. The technology was initially published as "AdGraph".