Brave, everything you wanted in a web browser

In recent years, there has been growing talk about attention on the internet and the attention economy, a concept that fully broke into the mainstream with the rise of memecoins. The thing is, back in 2019, giving users back the power to manage their attention had already been the core idea behind the launch of Brave, a web browser that remains the first product I mention when someone asks me for a tech recommendation to improve their daily life.

It doesn't matter if you're a company, a band, or a personal venture: the internet is the main place to promote what you do. But the downside of this trend is that content became flooded with advertising, propaganda, and sales pitches. Reading an article or watching a full video without ad interruptions is nearly impossible today. That's where Brave comes in, blocking ads and protecting your security and privacy. Plus, if you're willing to watch ads, it rewards you with its own token.

Credit where it's due: I discovered Brave through Juan, when he showed me this article for the NO supplement. I've been using it on my PC and on various Android phones ever since, and it has always given me everything I need. It's fast, secure, private, fully modular, and fully functional, because it's built on Chromium and supports any extension that Chrome supports.

Its main strength, though, is its ability to separate desirable content from undesirable content: ads, surveys, trackers, markers. Among user-friendly web browser options (easy to install, configure, and use), Brave also offers a more secure, private, and information-driven internet experience. An experience where your cognitive load is carried by the content, not the software you browse with or the thousands of interruptions it allows.

Brave itself shows you, when you open a new tab -- if you choose -- a set of counters. Since the last time I formatted my PC, it has blocked over 4 million trackers, ads, and pop-ups of all kinds. A bandwidth savings of nearly 75 gigabytes, and over 56 hours of browsing time saved.

Brave was developed by Brendan Eich, who had previously created the first JavaScript engine and is also a co-founder of Mozilla. The man knows his software. Of course, with that talent for programming, Brave has felt like premium software since its release, even though it's free. And over these six years, it has added crypto integrations, AI features, video calls, and a VPN. For web3, it has always been one of the best browsers available.

As a bonus, from the very beginning Brave has included a user reward system with its token BAT (Basic Attention Token), a cryptocurrency that once reached 2 USD and currently sits at around 0.13 USD. Brave's idea is that BAT tokens become the backbone of a creator and tipper economy: you earn BAT by watching certain ads, and the plan is for that BAT to be recycled as an incentive to reward independent websites or content creators, thereby fostering diversity in the production of culture and information on the internet.