Chrome has been my goto for almost a decade now. I’m the kind of person who finds it stupid to cover the webcam (unless I have a sticky note full of credentials on my fridge), so I guess its quite clear already that I’m not so high on privacy concerns but what bothered me the most was how much information Google was extracting from me.

It is indeed good to have stuff show up when you have been wanting to check it out for quite some time but sometimes Google goes overboard and that’s where things get a little creepy. It gets creepy to the point where Google starts showing you embarrassing ads.

The AdBlock extension wasn’t doing a great job at stopping these ads either. Even before I could think about switching browsers, an article showed up on my Google feed, “Why Microsoft Edge is better than Chrome?” (Oh how nice of you Google) The embarrassing ads and this article made me want to give Edge a shot, I still hadn’t uninstalled Chrome though.

I installed Edge and imported all my settings from Chrome and I was all set to go. I was pretty happy with how my extensions still worked and how it respected my privacy. I used it for 2 days and realized that Edge wasn’t as fast as Chrome and there were minor flaws and aesthetic decisions that I was nitpicking on.

I went back to Chrome to put up with its snooping in return for a good overall experience. The ad problem persisted and as usual, Chrome was devouring the memory of my base model 2017 Macbook Pro.

I usually code and have multiple tabs open on Chrome (Yes, stack overflow. No! I do not copy-paste!) with a few other apps I need in the background. So, the machine was running hot and I still did not want to look over Chrome.

As usual, Google snooped on my cryptocurrency investment activities and showed me related articles on my Google feed. Even though I have come across the BAT token, I never paid much attention to it.

One fine day, Google suggested another article to me, “Brave browser can replace Chrome on all your devices soon” (Gee! Thanks Google.)

At this point, I started thinking if Google devs themselves want people to divert to a safer place but that’s a stretch. I was reluctant to try it out at first since it was not from a reputed company like Microsoft or Google.

I read a few articles and reviews on the Brave browser and let me be brutally honest, I fell for the “get paid for viewing ads” model.

I’m the same person that hated Google’s embarrassing ads but Brave was doing it a little different and that’s in a good way.

Even though Brave is built over Chromium, the connection ends there. Brave is privacy-focused and it does its job really well while having the perks of Google like the extensions. Brave can use all the extensions from the Chrome web store and can also use Google’s themes.

I was doing some research on this new browser and came across some shocking information about how ads do more damage than I had initially anticipated. We don’t usually consider the possibility of paying a substantial amount to ISPs for downloading ads which we don’t wish to see.

#brave-browser #technology #blockchain #web #internet #software #application #browsers