14 DAY TRIAL // The former CEO of Mozilla and creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich, has announced the launch of a new browser named Brave that's going to treat ads in a very different way.
The launch of Brave as the browser that blocks ads is not actually accurate. There would be no point in releasing such an application, especially by someone who used to be the CEO of Mozilla. The distinction is made right from the start by Brendan himself, who says that this browser aims to block all but the trackerless ads, and that's a really big difference.
Brave will be built to provide its own spaces and ads, so it's not like users will no longer see ads inside webpages. The browser will display these ads as being a part of the page, in a more native way. With this method, it won't affect the performance of the application, at least in theory.
It's open source, but nothing is free
The Brave Internet browser is designed with a single purpose in mind: to avoid the incoming advert war. People are blocking ads, and with enough people blocking ads, the future of the Internet as a free enterprise is in jeopardy.
“At Brave, we’re building a solution designed to avert war and give users the fair deal they deserve for coming to the Web to browse and contribute. We are building a new browser and a connected private cloud service with anonymous ads. Today we’re releasing the 0.7 developer version for early adopters and testers, along with open source and our roadmap,” Brendan Eich explained on brave.com.
As Brendan explained, Brave will block everything, but it will deliver ads in special places. The annoying tracking that's currently done with the help of cookies should also disappear, and all the data about the users are kept in the cloud, and can't be tracked back to the users.
Brave is also open-source, and the source packages have been made available on GitHub, for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android. Installing on Windows seems to be out of the question, but we did manage to compile it on Linux, with the help of an Ubuntu system. Running it is another matter.
First of all, the instructions on GitHub for Linux are incomplete and I can only surmise that the ones for the other platforms are as well. The developers say that the application needs Node.js, but it also needs the legacy version. Also, a library named libnss3-dev is also needed, and one of the commands needs root access, although it shouldn't. Creating folders with root can only spell trouble. There are also a lot of dependencies involved.
All in all, compiling the application is possible, but running it is another matter. Maybe if they bother to correct the instructions, we'll get a chance of using it.