What you actually get on first launch
Install Brave, open it, and third-party trackers and most advertisements are already gone. There is no extension to add, no filter list to subscribe to, no blocking level to choose. That single sentence is the entire practical case for it, and it is a stronger case than it sounds, because the browsers people actually use are the ones they never configure.
Alongside the blocking, first launch gives you fingerprint randomisation, private windows that can be routed through Tor, HTTPS upgrading, and end-to-end encrypted sync that works from a code phrase with no account to create. The default search engine is Brave Search, running on the company’s own index, rather than a placement sold to whoever paid most.
That is why Brave sits at the top of our private browsers ranking, which scores defaults rather than options.
The conflict at the centre of it
Brave Software funds itself by selling advertising.
Not by injecting advertisements into other people’s pages, which is the accusation people sometimes reach for and which is not what happens. The programme is opt-in: you choose to receive Brave’s own notifications, and you are paid in BAT, a cryptocurrency token the company created. The matching of advertisement to user is documented as happening on your device rather than on a server, which is a materially better design than the industry norm.
It is still an advertising business inside a product sold on blocking advertising. When the same organisation both decides what gets blocked and earns money from what does not, the incentive is not aligned with the reader by construction. It is aligned by the company choosing well, repeatedly, forever. That is a weaker guarantee than a business model with no conflict in it, and it is the honest reason our category page keeps a caveat attached to Brave even while ranking it first.
The token brings its own problems. Cryptocurrency features are present in the interface whether you want them or not. They can be hidden. They cannot be fully removed, and for a large share of users they are noise attached to a product they chose for calm.
The 2020 affiliate link incident
In 2020 Brave was found to be autocompleting certain cryptocurrency exchange addresses typed into the address bar into versions that carried its own affiliate referral codes. Type an exchange name, and the browser could complete it to a link that earned Brave a commission.
The company apologised, described it as a configuration mistake, and made the behaviour opt-in. No browsing data was exposed, and the fix was quick.
It remains relevant for one reason. The product’s entire pitch is that you can trust it with the part of your computer that sees everything. Quietly changing what a user typed, in the direction of the company’s revenue, is a small breach of exactly that. It was six years ago, and nothing comparable has followed, but a review that omitted it would be doing the reader’s homework for them badly.
Chromium underneath
Brave is built on Chromium with Google’s own services removed and its privacy behaviour rebuilt on top. Day to day, using Brave does not send data to Google.
What it does not do is reduce Google’s control over the engine. Web standards decisions, extension platform changes and rendering behaviour originate upstream and arrive downstream. Every Chromium-based privacy browser is in this position, and every one of them is a skin on an engine owned by an advertising company. Only Gecko in Firefox and WebKit in Safari sit outside that, and one of those is Apple’s.
If your goal is a quieter, less surveilled browsing session, this does not affect you much. If your goal is that the web should not be defined by one company, it is the whole point.
What is blocked on first launch
| Behaviour | Brave | Firefox | Chrome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Third-party trackers | blocked | blocked | not blocked |
| Advertisements | blocked | not blocked | not blocked |
| Fingerprint defence | randomised per site | available, off by default | none |
| Telemetry | on by default | on by default | on by default |
| Search default sold to a bidder | no | yes | n/a |
| Tor routing available | yes, in private windows | no | no |
The row that decides this table is advertisements. Firefox blocks trackers but not the advertisements themselves, so a fresh Firefox still shows a cluttered page. Brave does not. For a non-technical person, that visible difference is what makes the privacy setting stick, because the browser feels better rather than merely claiming to be safer.
The iPhone app
Our App Store analysis for Brave this cycle draws on a sample of 50 recent reviews collected from a single storefront, which is small enough that the star average within it should not be read as a verdict. In that sample the mean rating is well below the listing’s own average, and the most common critical themes are iOS integration problems at 12 per cent of reviews, crashes at 8 per cent, and misleading advertising complaints at 8 per cent. No billing complaints appear, which is unsurprising for a free product.
The public listing sits at 4.78 stars across roughly 647,600 ratings, which is a large and genuinely favourable base. The gap between the two numbers is the usual one: a listing average accumulated over years against a snapshot of recent, mostly negative, freely written reviews.
Remember that every iOS browser is WebKit underneath because Apple requires it, so Brave on iPhone is a blocking and interface layer over Safari’s engine. The blocking is still worth having. The engine argument is not available there.
Who it is actually for
Almost everyone who is not going to change any settings. That is not a backhanded compliment, it is the largest and most under-served group in privacy software, and Brave is the best answer to it that currently exists.
If you are the sort of reader who will configure things, Firefox with the right adjustments gets you an independent engine and no advertising business in the room. If you need anonymity rather than reduced tracking, neither of them is the answer and Tor Browser is. And whichever you pick, the browser fingerprint test will show you what your current setup exposes, which is usually more persuasive than any review.
Ownership records for Brave and every other product on this site are on the ownership explorer.
What we have not tested
We have not measured Brave ourselves: not what it blocks across a fixed set of pages, not how identifying the fingerprint it presents actually is, and not its performance against other browsers on the same machine. Everything above comes from the company’s published documentation, ownership records, and our own analysis of App Store reviews. The scores marked pending on this page stay pending until we have run those tests.