Brave Browser

SECURITY FOCUSED.

Free, iOS/Android

While most browsers now make privacy a pillar of their development, Brave has always had an intense focus on making it the absolute core of its foundation. Literally every part of the experience is related to making sure it knows as little about you as possible, and the open web even less so.

Brave looks and feels like everything else – it has a tab system, it has bookmarks, it has a dark mode. It matches all the major features of competition like Edge, Chrome, and Safari. But where the benefits lie are in many of the built-in features that tend to be extensions elsewhere – like a free ad blocker, script, cookie and strict tracker blocker, and HTTPS everywhere support.

Brave also offers its own search engine and rewards system, which works on a crypto token that it pays out when you view ads from search or on the home screen. This function varies however – during my testing it was in and out of a beta on iOS but seemed to be solid on Android. I did appreciate the shared revenue feature however, especially when you’d always normally pay to surf via watching ads.

The other benefit to cutting out the large bulk of cruft that infests the corners of the modern web is that Brave is insanely fast. I compared it to both Safari and Chrome and in its default state, without any extra extensions, and it was at least twice as fast loading pages, especially news sites, which tend to have a lot of ads and trackers.

On the flipside, Brave’s attempt to cut the crusts off also means some web sites just flat out don’t work at all. Thankfully this is rare, but I did notice in some cases I had to muck around with some of the settings to fix a number of pages that refused to load properly. It’s also a little difficult to white-label some sites you would like to support as the default option is quite strict.