Mozilla co-founder and creator of JavaScript programming language Brendan Eich has unveiled his latest project: A web browser that blocks ads by default. Called Brave, the open-source browser works on personal computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system or Apple’s OS X. As for smartphones, it can run on both Android and iOS software.
Other than privacy protection, Brave’s browser also promises a big speed boost. It claims pages loading almost two to four times faster than other smartphone browsers.
“Up to a whopping 60% of page load time is caused by the underlying ad technology that loads into various places each time you hit a page on your favorite news site. And 20% of this is time spent on loading things that are trying to learn more about you,” claims the company.
“Brave browsers block everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising “dirty pipe”, impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals. By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot (so users don’t have to suffer, even a few canaries per screen size-profile, with ad delays and battery draining). We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie,” Eich in a note posted on Brave’s website.
However, according to VentureBeat, the browser still lacks some essential features like preferences, bookmark manager and history.