Hello there. You’re probably a Chrome user who’s thinking, “What’s all the buzz about Brave about?” You’re probably wondering, “What Brave has that Chrome doesn’t?”
You’ve come to the right place. By the time you finish reading this article, you should have a pretty good idea of the pros and cons of Brave.
To start off with, both browsers should have extremely similar functionality.
Why? Because Brave is actually the exact same software as Chrome (in the software world, this is known as a “fork”). Then Brave added a whole bunch of awesome features on top of their clone.
As one reddit user says, “Brave is basically just Chrome with less Google Spyware built in”.
Let’s dive right in.
Full disclosure: I’m a Brave user, and I love it. If you are interested, you can click here to read my full review of the Brave browser.
Table of Contents:
- What do they both have?
- What does Brave do better than Chrome?
- What does Chrome do better than Brave?
- Final thoughts
What do they both have?
Remember, Brave has extremely similar functionality to Chrome.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that:
- Vast majority of Chrome plugins work on both browser.
A quick note on how to download Chrome plugin for Brave, since I myself was confused when I first started using Brave: you wanna go to the same Chrome plugin page (for example, the uBlock origin plugin page), then click download. The Chrome webpage will treat your Brave browser the exact same way as Chrome. Then you get the plugin. - Same JS, CSS engine.Chrome’s JS engine is a vaunted piece of engineering. Arguably the best JS engine out there. (P.S. for those not software experts: a JS engine is simply the software that runs webpage. The better an engine, the faster the code runs).
Since Brave forked Chrome, it’s the exact same.
What does Brave do better than Chrome?
- Brave is way better than Chrome on the phone. WAY better.This reason is so good, this alone should make you want to switch to Brave. Brave is probably the best mobile phone browser out there, bar none.
Why? Because Brave has built-in adblocker. Chrome on the phone does not.
But what about all the adblocking plugins? They only work on the desktop version of Chrome, sorry. Go ahead and try to download Adblock on your phone’s Chrome. It will ask you to go to the desktop version.
This feature alone should make you want to switch to Brave.
- Way faster. WAY faster.This video alone should convince you.
How does Brave do this? Brave has built-in adblocker. So there are some software that Brave does not even download. Meaning? They don’t have to wait for the network. And Brave doesn’t have to execute that software. Which, if it were privacy-invasive, would probably download even more software! It’s a mess.
- Far better privacy.There’s one simple reason why Brave beats Chrome on privacy: Big Brother Google tracks all your browsing data in “Incognito” mode. Yeah, you thought Google didn’t see anything in “Incognito”? No sir. They track everything. To serve you better ads. All about the money.
Brave, on the other hand…tracks absolutely nothing when you’re in “private window”. It is truly private.
That’s not all…since Brave disables privacy-invasive scripts that many sites are using, you get even better privacy on the internet. What a win!
- Much better battery life.
A testimonial from Naval Ravikant, a Brave investor, VC investor, and someone I personally highly respect. Worth following on Twitter.
How does Brave do it? Again, it’s the built-in adblocking! Lol, it’s amazing how much advantage built-in adblocking gives, doesn’t it?
Because Brave doesn’t even run privacy-invasive software, it means that there’s a huge chunk of software that never touches a single drop of battery juice. According to this cnet article, Brave uses as much as 40% (!) less battery than Chrome.
- Significantly less memory (RAM) usage.How, you ask? Surprise, surprise…built-in adblocking! The privacy-invasive software that never even runs? They also consume memory.
Here’s a post explaining how Brave uses 33% to 66% less memory than Chrome: https://www.cnet.com/news/ad-blocking-brave-gets-memory-advantage-over-chrome-on-news-websites/
And, a personal anecdote: my dad was using his Chromebook when he noticed it got really slow. When he debugged the problem, it was insanely high memory usage…from a Chrome plugin called “Adblock”! He was very angry.
- Built-in torrenting.It’s a nice perk. Sure, it’s probably not the biggest reason why you’d switch over to Brave. Still, it’s nice. Have you ever torrented? Personally, I never have and I’m a hardcore software engineer. Because it was built-in to Brave, I finally decided to give torrenting a try, and my mind was blown. Cuz, you know, all the other torrenting software just looks so shady…since Brave was trusted, and I already had torrenting software, I decided to just give it a try.
What does Chrome do better than Brave?
Look, since Brave is a upgraded clone of Chrome, it’s really hard for me to tell you what Chrome does better.
Because quickly frankly, Brave has nearly all the features of Chrome. The only thing Brave stripped away were privacy related…
- A very tiny percentage (0.1%) of Chrome plugins do not work on Brave.
I personally have no idea what those are. Have yet to find an exception. - Much better at giving Big Brother Google more of your personal information.
I know I already mentioned this earlier. But it bears repeating. Google tracks ALL your browsing activity even if you are in “Incognito” mode on Chrome. - Some sites work on Chrome, not on Brave.This part is true. There are some websites that don’t work on Brave. One personal example for me is Tinder. Not sure why…it might be that Brave blocks some Facebook tracking cookie, and Tinder relies on Facebook login.
However, it’s simple to fix this in Brave. Just disable “Brave shield” for that particular website. Brave shield is what Brave calls their ad-blocking software. Once that’s done, it should run the exact same as Chrome.
- Bookmark sync across browsers.This one is also true. Brave’s own version of bookmark sync is currently in beta, as of time of writing (Feb 2019).
Final thoughts
I apologize if my bias showed through, but it’s easy to see why Brave has been gaining so much traction.
It’s all the same features as Chrome. All your favorite plugins work.
And even better battery life (40% less).
And way better privacy (no Big Brother Google please).
And way less memory usage (33% to 66% less).
What’s not to like?
If my review was helpful in pushing you to give Brave a try out, I’d much appreciate it if you click here to download the Brave browser (it’s my referral link). It costs you nothing to download, while it helps give me a couple bucks. That’s all I ask.
Thank you!
Peace.
Life of Learning 