- Hey, guys, what's up?
I'm Christian Taylor, and welcome to another browser war.
Now today, it's a fight between Brave and Google Chrome.
Brave is a new browser founded by the co-founder
of Firefox and the creator of JavaScript.
Now Brave's claim to fame is to be a faster,
more secure, and more safe browser,
and Brave accomplishes this by essentially a built-in
browser plug-in that blocks trackers, has HTTPS everywhere,
and also blocks ads.
The other signature feature of the Brave browser
is Brave payments.
This is a way for you to support websites
because you have your ad blocker disabled
and still be able to financially give back to them.
Now how this works is by using cryptocurrency,
so you set the amount per month that you want to give.
This can be in Braves BATS, or Basic Authorization Token.
You can also give bitcoin and a couple
of other cryptocurrencies.
But you set a budget and you connect it
with your cryptocurrency wallet, and that much every month
is taken out or your wallet and dedicated towards
this payment system.
Now how it works is when you visit a website,
the payment is given to that website based on
the amount of time you spent there.
So if you're going to spend one bitcoin a month ...
I know that's a stupid amount of money,
but just go with me for simplicity,
and you visit one site 75% of the time in that month,
they would receive .75 bitcoin.
Now, this is a browser comparison, so enough explaining.
Let's get right into the nitty gritty.
I used Brave browser for one week.
How does it compare to Google Chrome, which as you
may or may not know, is the browser war champion as of now,
and no browser has beat it.
So starting with the first impressions,
I had to reinstall Brave.
I got it up and running, but it was weird.
There was no shortcut, and I could not find the program
.exe file.
So that was a little hiccup.
Once I got it reinstalled, everything was working fine.
Some of the first things I noticed
was that shifting tabs around is a nightmare.
It's just glitchy and buggy, and it's not smooth
like any of the other browsers I've used.
Hovering the preview tab is a nice feature,
and I was pleasantly surprised to see that in Brave.
Bookmarks have no favicon.
This is one of my biggest annoyances about the browser
that can very easily be fixed,
and I'm almost sure that they will fix this soon.
But it is just a pet peeve.
I really enjoy having those favicons on the bookmarks bar
in Chrome, and I'm not sure why that's not there in Brave.
Now I like that private tabs are in the same window
and not their own.
This is something unique to Brave that I've never seen
in another browser, and I really like it because it shows
you everything that's open, and you don't have multiple
windows where you can forget to close a private window
because you went back to the regular window.
It's a very nice design in my opinion.
Now when it comes to speed, Brave for desktop
is just slower and glitchier to me.
I had a lot of times, especially near startup,
where I would open up Brave and it would just
kind of lag along with starting.
Sometimes it would freeze when other programs would be fine,
so it definitely wasn't my computer.
I could open the start menu, interact with other programs.
In fact, sometimes I began so frustrated I ended up
launching Chrome and using that for a while
because Brave was just so slow.
Now I'm going to get into my rant I've had on my past two
browser war videos, which is plugin selection.
It is not good in Brave.
However, I understand that this is a very new browser,
so I'm cutting it some slack.
It supports LastPass, so for that reason,
I can get behind this browser, and I can give it a shot
because LastPass is my number one most important plugin.
The other ones I would consider a necessity,
but I can still see how this browser would work
for other people.
So up to this point, in my experience, Brave browser
was a meh experience.
If you ask me, it's worse than Firefox or Chrome.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the built-in ad blocker,
but I really didn't see much of a speed improvement
of using that built-in ad blocker
versus the ad-blocker plugins I've used for years
in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.
But let's remember, what is the claim to fame
for the Brave browser?
Well, it's the Brave payments.
So I tried to set this up, and it was convoluted,
to say the least.
Now as a disclaimer, I'm going to admit
that I do not own any cryptocurrency,
and so I'm not familiar with the process.
So I assume that if you are in the cryptocurrency world
or if you're slightly more nerdy than me,
this would not be a problem for you.
However, I'm looking at this from the average consumer here.
I was not able to set up Brave payments.
I could not figure it out.
Now here's what I tried.
First of all, I looked up, how do you buy
Basic Authorization Tokens?
I was not able to find anything out.
If you guys know, please let me know in a comment.
I would really appreciate that.
But I noticed you could use bitcoin, so I thought,
"Okay, a bitcoin can't be that hard to buy.
"It's all the rage now."
So I created a Coin Base account.
I tried to link to my debit card.
It was kicking it back.
I tried to link my bank account.
I got a call from my bank saying
there was fraudulent activity, blah blah blah,
because Coin Base is a company based in the U.K.
I cleared everything up.
I said, "No, it's fine, I did this."
I was able to verify my bank account,
and then it still wouldn't let me buy bitcoin.
Now why am I telling you this?
Well, if it's this hard for me to figure out
as a tech enthusiast and as a tech savvy person,
the average consumer is not going to go out of their way
just to spend their own money to support others.
It needs to be easy, and I wish,
at least during the startup, they would just accept
cold hard cash.
I would have liked to see the ability
where I could just say, "Hey, I want to give $5 a month,"
put in my credit card or pay with PayPal, and just be
done with it.
I like the concept of Brave payments.
I really do.
It's just that if it's not easy to set up
for the average consumer, I really don't know
who Brave is for.
I mean, maybe it's for tech enthusiasts
who know how to by cryptocurrency,
but it just feels like they're missing something.
Wow, editing Christian here, and I realized
I forgot to mention the biggest benefit
to the Brave browser, which is the mobile app.
Now when I test out these browsers and do these comparisons,
I also try the mobile app for a week,
and I gotta say, I've switched to Brave
as my primary mobile browser.
Now Brave for both desktop and mobile
is based on Chromium, which is the open-sourced platform
that Google Chrome uses.
So the Brave browser for mobile makes total sense
because it's exactly the same as Google Chrome
except with the added functionality of blocking trackers,
and blocking ads, and HTTPS everywhere.
Other than that, it's just as fast or faster,
but just with no ads.
It's basically like Google Chrome but with a plugin.
So I'm a huge fan there, and I would definitely recommend
the Brave mobile browser.
Alright, back to the video.
There's a browser plugin called Flattr for other browsers
that is kind of what I'm saying.
You pay them a monthly amount, and people who are
signed up to use Flattr will receive money
based on how long you spend on their site.
And I like this because you can use any browser
you're comfortable with.
So in conclusion, I really cannot recommend Brave.
It's not something like Firefox where it's decent
but it's for other people.
I'm just...it's not there yet to me.
Whereas Firefox and Opera are well developed,
and they're fast, and they do have their audiences,
I don't think Brave is ready.
So for now, I will personally be sticking to Google Chrome,
but if you like the Brave browser, I'd like to know.
Please leave a comment below,
and tell me why you make it your browser,
or let me know what browser comparisons I should do next.
And by the way, I am doing a podcast episode
for small content creators about Brave,
what it means for them, how you can sign up for it
and make sure you are going to receive that portion
of the money if someone using Brave visits your site.
So check that out at the link in the description
Thanks so much for watching, guys,
and I'll talk to you guys next time.
See ya.