Brave Browser finally exits beta; version 1.0 now available

Since launching the beta in January 2016, fearless is now drawing in 8 million monthly users, and today it's finally ready for the big time. All the ad matching operations happen directly on the users' devices.

It includes a native adblocker as well as many features that block tracking, autoplaying videos, and more. The team behind Brave Browser last month claimed that the beta version of the software is used by around 8 million people per month. To accomplish this, courageous automatically blocks third-party advertisements, trackers and autoplay videos, as well as phishing and malware attempts.

Users can support publishers and content creators from within the browser by activating Brave Rewards and the integrated Brave wallet. Instead, Brave uses a blockchain-based method of revenue generation called "Basic Attention Tokens". In its early days, courageous actually started with Bitcoin as the currency for this, but as Eich noted, that quickly became too expensive (and since the price was going up, users wanted to hold on to the Bitcoin instead of donating it).

Brave Rewards is a system in which users can earn tokens by "viewing privacy-respecting ads", with the ability to curate just how many you'll see per hour. Brave also aims to make participating in Brave Rewards an experience with much lower friction for the user.

Despite this, fearless is the only one that claims to block all tracking by default.

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More on the Brave Rewards program can be found in this documentation page, here. For Brave, speed and ad/tracking protection are obviously interconnected, and all the other benefits accrue from that. Users can now confidently browse the web knowing that their interests and reading habits are not being tracked. Thanks to this, the browser loads websites up to 6 times faster than other browsers and it even helps you save a significant amount of memory and battery life.

Do you use fearless? "Brave also uses less memory than other browsers, with an improvement of 40% over Chrome and 47% over Firefox".

"As the conversation around data privacy and transparency moves increasingly into the forefront, fearless shows us that it's possible to create a more equitable value exchange between brands, content creators and consumers", said Nick Coronges, Global Chief Technology Officer at R/GA and Partner at R/GA Ventures. We'll share a full review of the browser in the near future.

Courageous offers extension support as well as an easy system to import bookmarks, passwords, cookies, and browsing history, making it easy to transitio from browsers such as Chrome.

Available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, Brave boasts that it "blocks ads and trackers that slow you down and invade your privacy". These can be cashed in for vouchers or gift cards through Brave's partner Upload, or they can be given to an article's writer or website creator.