Brave browser blocks third-party ads and plans to pay users

Google Chrome might get serious competition from the new Brave browser, especially as Google plans to block ad-blockers as revealed in their Manifest V3 proposal.

Along with Opera and Vivaldi, Brave plans not to follow Google's plan to restrict ad-blocking and keep their own ad-blocker up and running. The Brave browser servers do not store browsing data and privacy settings can be customized.

While Mozilla is planning to offer a paid premium version of its popular Firefox browser to avoid ads, the Brave browser is planning to pay you for seeing and clicking on ads.

The Brave browser not only automatically blocks third-party ads and cookies, it additionally plans to offer users to pay them for ads.

Their new advertising model which promises to pay 70% of earned revenue to the users who view and click on ads. The remaining 30% will go to the Brave browser developers. Brave Ads will remove intermediaries that exploit user data and use user tracking and surveillance and instead will offer a consent-based system.

"With Brave Ads, we are launching a digital ad platform that is the first to protect users' data rights and to reward them for their attention", the company says in a recent blog post.

The Brave ad-blocker is inspired by uBlock Origin and Ghostery's ad-blocker approach and the new algorithm is 69x faster on average than the current engine. For an overview of their ad-blocking rules, please visit their respective blog post. This should significantly improve the web surfing experience with ad-blocking in place. The browser also lets you see how many ads and trackers are being blocked on a daily basis.

Brave was initially available only for iOS back in 2018 but is now also available on Android, macOS, Windows, Linux.