Brave solves one of the most frustrating things on the internet.

If you’ve ever tried to look up a recipe on your phone, you know what I’m talking about when I say that it’s frustrating. First, you have to scroll through acres of text as the author tells you about their life story, meanwhile the page is jumping around under your fingers as if it’s actively fighting you, and finally, ads pop up and ruin the content.

Online Recipes Suck Because of the Surveillance Economy

The culprit of all this aggravation is advertising (or as I call it, the surveillance economy): The overlong stories that go with recipes are there to provide more surface area to inject as many ads as possible, and of course as they slowly load in and try to track/learn as much as they can about you, they jam up an otherwise decent experience.

Brave to the Rescue

I was experiencing a moment of white hot rage last night when trying to look over a recipe my wife had texted me — when I remembered “oh, that’s right I have Brave!”

A couple screenshots from my phone while trying to check out this recipe last night.

OK that’s better. The recipe loaded much quicker, but more important the scrolling was smooth & unhindered by ads, and the content is legible. Honestly I’ll never look at another recipe on anything other than Brave.

More than ad blocking

I’ve always avoided ad blockers… they just didn’t seem fair to content creators. It’s true that Brave is an ad-blocking browser, but I like that it envisions alternative ways for content creators to monetize. This vision includes ideas like the ability to pay content creators directly with BAT (currently running in the desktop browser). adamgdev has a nice intro to Brave/BAT.

What’s Next?

I’m looking forward to the mobile browser getting a BAT wallet, I’m looking forward to bidirectional wallets in both the publisher side and the browser. This latter thing is of particular interest to me because I think it will make for a healthier secondary market for BAT (of course I particularly like this because we list BAT at Ethex 🤓 ).