What is the best browser? I think if you randomly ask this question to 100 random people, the vast majority of them will say Chrome, regardless of the platform they use. This is logical, because Google's proprietary browser is really very convenient, intuitive and functional. But be that as it may, his authority could not be eternal and had to end someday. Apparently, this is about to happen, if it hasn't already. After all, many users are already abandoning Chrome and switching to the new Brave browser.

The total audience of the Brave browser  has grown to 20 million users. This was stated by Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of the Brave project. In the last year alone, audience growth has exceeded 130% of the previous year. This was to be expected, Eich said, as more and more users today are concerned about the safety of personal data, and using Chrome, this is almost impossible to achieve. Whether it's Brave, which offers "privacy by default". As for now, you can download Brave for Windows for free without any payments.

Why is Brave better than Google Chrome?

The Brave browser is faster and more secure than Chrome. So, at least, its creators say

People are tired of surveillance-based capitalism, and millions of Chrome users have already switched to Brave to take advantage of the new web ecosystem where they get paid to advertise, taking back control of what they watch. The global privacy movement is rapidly gaining momentum, and what Brave is today is just one step on our journey to ensure the right to privacy for all Internet users, both mobile and desktop, Eich said.

In fact, Brave  is quite an interesting project that is at least interesting to learn, and perhaps even use to experience the advantages over Chrome. All further comparisons are provided by the Brave developers, so I recommend taking them with a grain of salt:

• Brave is 3 times faster than Chrome;
• Brave consumes one third less memory than Chrome;
• Brave provides up to an hour more web surfing than Chrome;
• Brave does not follow you and blocks all trackers that track you on the network;
• Brave blocks all ads that appear on websites by default;
• Brave pays you in BAT cryptocurrency to view ads if you choose;
• Brave supports the same extensions as Chrome;
• Brave has a built-in firewall and VPN available for a fee (iOS only).

Many will probably ask, how is it so certain that those who switched to Brave were actually Google Chrome users? Well, it's actually very simple. As you know, Chrome occupies 87 and 93% of the market on desktop and mobile platforms. Accordingly, it's highly likely that most of Brave's new users come from ex-Chrome fans. After all, even if among them there are those who used something else before, it is obvious that they are an absolute minority there, given the prevalence of alternative browsers.

Is it worth switching to Brave?

Brave has both a desktop and a mobile version, but I personally am not ready to switch to it yet

To be honest, I had little experience with Brave. But, when I first downloaded it, it was still in beta, so I somehow didn’t get its external design, and I didn’t want to use different browsers on my smartphone and computer at all. So I gave it up. However, in the time that has passed since my experiment, Brave has matured, acquired new features and has become quite usable. Another thing is that about six months ago  he was convicted of tracking visits to crypto- currency exchanges .

It turns out that Brave noted when a user visited the exchange site, and substituted his referral link if he registered. This allowed the creators of the browser to earn on user registrations, receiving a good commission from their transactions. Of course, the developers did not warn their customers about this fact, which seemed to me not very clean, and did not allow me to switch to Brave  completely. Still, the surveillance that Google is doing doesn’t really bother me, but the surveillance — albeit on such a small scale, but from an outside browser — is even more annoying.