I have always recommended Google Chrome to my customers as my web browser of choice, it’s always been good to me, I find it reliable, quick and has the flexibility of allowing me to add extensions to do additional tasks that I find helpful – like when I open a new tab I use an extension to automatically get the new tab to open my default home page.
I’ve never liked the defunked Microsoft Internet Explorer and the only reason I can think to use its replacement (Microsoft Edge) is to install Google Chrome and I find Firefox to be unnecessarily slow. I don’t like the Mac look of Safari and just don’t trust the security of the smaller browsers like Opera.
For some time now, however, I have been increasingly concerned with the amount of information that Google know about me. Don’t misunderstand, I haven´t moved over to the tin foil hat wearing brigade – not quite yet – but I do store a lot of information in my Google account and it’s starting to become a potential single point of failure and that concerns me.
Enter “Brave Browser”, it’s built on the same engine as Chrome so it’s got a good start there in my opinion. It easily imports all of my settings, bookmarks and bookmarks bar straight from Chrome so it’s easy to setup and looks familiar and its fast, easily as fast as Google Chrome.
If you want to give it a go then pop over to www.brave.com and you can download your own copy right there, you don’t have to get rid of your current browser if you don’t want to, it will run alongside it without complaining. The main difference between Brave and other browsers (according to them) is that they are not in the personal data business – this is what most companies like Google get out of giving you a free browser. They can track where you go and what you do and sell that information onto companies who are interested in such stuff, but Brave say that they will never do that, in fact they say “our servers neither see nor store your browsing data”, which could be why the browsing experience is quicker too – if they don’t log and track what you’re doing then the browser does less and is therefore quicker.
Anyway, I think it’s worth a try, I am going to start to use it for a few months and see if I have as good an experience using it as I have had with Chrome over the years, I’ll let you know what I find.