“Brave pushes the boundaries of how user privacy can be baked in rather than having to be added”

It’s one thing relying on a swathe of browser extensions or add-ons to protect your privacy, block ads, add functionality to your browser and wishing the plain vanilla version did more. It’s quite another to jump ship from Chrome, Edge or Safari to a browser that remains niche but provides much of that extension functionality out of the box.

Historically, or maybe histrionically would be more appropriate for some fans, the alternative choices have been Firefox, Opera and any number of niche products. However, for many that choice has become easier, with one of the once-niche options starting to build quite the following. I’m talking about the Brave browser, which doubled its monthly active user count across 2021 to a none too shabby 50.2 million. And for very good reason, with the emphasis on the “very good” bit: for it really is.

Let’s be clear: Brave is still a tiny fish in a big pond. Mozilla Firefox has four times as many active monthly users (216 million), Edge is on 600 million and Chrome, according to StatCounter, has a stonking 3.2 billion. I’ve not been one of them for some time now, having found Edge to be not only quicker but also easier to use without throwing as much of