14 DAY TRIAL // At the start of January, Mozilla's ex-CEO and JavaScript's father, Brandon Eich, revealed plans about an upcoming project he was working on, called the Brave browser.
While it's kind of typical Silicon Valley business for a disgruntled CEO to leave or be fired from his company and then start one of his own, the irony in Mr. Eich's new initiative was not lost on us.
You see, Mr. Eich didn't find a new company that created a Firefox spin-off, but decided to twist the knife in Mozilla's ever-shrinking browser market by going with Chromium as the base, the same open-source browser project on which Google Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi have all been built on as well.
Another thing that stood out was also Brave's release announcement that said that the browser will feature its built-in ad blocking technology.
Users can choose to block ads altogether, or choose to support Brave by allowing the browser to replace ads on Web pages with advertisements controlled by the browser's makers.
Binaries are finally out, no more manual compilation
While the browser's source code has been published since January, few people took the time to compile it for themselves, which as one of our colleagues found out, was an error-filled process that discouraged many brave users (pun intended).
A few days ago this changed, and Brave's team released binaries for iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows (64-bit).
The installation process is pretty quick, and once you have it on your PC, it looks just like any other browser. Using it feels natural, but be aware that it's still an early alpha candidate.
Remember, it's still alpha stage tech
While taking the screenshots, we managed to crash it by moving the mouse too fast over the menu drop-downs, and again when pressing CTRL+D to record a bookmark.
At this point, Brave is at the same stages of development Vivaldi is, but we are looking forward to seeing where the project goes, as Vivaldi seems to be headed in the right direction.
As a side note, the comparison with Vivaldi is not accidental. Vivaldi, just like Brave, was founded by one of Opera's co-founders, after he left Opera not liking the direction in which the browser was going.
