Tag: brave

Most modern web browsers support memory automatization to reduce the memory consumption by changing the status of loaded websites to inactive, if they have not been used for a period of time.

The main idea is to make sure that the browser does not use an ever increasing amount of memory on a device.

Brave Browser calls this feature Memory Saver and it is set to balanced by default. Balanced means, that the browser balances memory saving and the time before websites are set to inactive. The browser reloads the inactive website when its tab is selected by the user.

While the feature is helpful in taming memory use, it may interfere with sites that require constant activity. Maybe it is a live ticker, an auction site, or a chat site.

The most recent version of Brave Browser introduces an exclude list. You may use it to add sites to a list of exemptions. Any site put here is never set to inactive in the browser.

Using it is simple:

1. Load brave://settings/system in the browser’s address bar.
2. Find “Always keep these sites active” on the page that opens.
3. Click on the “add” button to add a new site.
4. Select any current site or add a site manually instead.
5. Confirm the change with a click on the “add” button in the add-sites-interface.

Once you have added at least one site, you see it listed under the menu item. You may edit or remove each individually with a click on the three-dots icon next to the site name.

Brave Software, maker of Brave Browser, announced the launch of Brave Accounts yesterday. While the main idea of introducing native accounts is similar to how other browsers handle user accounts, that is, allowing users to sync data and use other services associated with the account, Brave Software uses technology that is vastly different.

Instead of sending hashes or encrypted passwords to remote servers, Brave Software says that passwords never leave the browser in the first place. It is “never transmitted”, which eliminates the need to trust a company securely storing password data in the first place.

Brave writes:

Here’s the short version: when you sign in to a service built on Brave Accounts, your password itself is never sent to our servers: not encrypted, not hashed, nor “briefly held in memory and then discarded”. The password is never transmitted, so you don’t have to “trust” that we are keeping it safe for you. We don’t know it at sign-up, we don’t know it at login, and if someone were to steal our entire password database tomorrow, with high probability they still wouldn’t know it.

Brave uses OPAQUE, “an augmented password-authenticated key exchange” for that. The underlying idea is that it allows the client — the browser in this case — to prove that the password is known without revealing it.

Technically the system relies on an Oblivious Pseudorandom Function.

This means that: you blind your password with a random value and send the blinded version of it; the server applies a secret key it holds and sends the result back; then, your device unblinds it. The output is a value derived from both your password and our server-side secret (the secret key), but the server learned nothing about your password, and you learned nothing about the key.

There are three advantages to using this method instead of the traditional password-hash checking according to Brave Software:

• Passwords are never transmitted.
• Attackers can’t use password dictionaries in their attacks.
• The export key can be used for other tasks, such as end-to-end encryption.

Email Aliases

One of the first features to make use of the new account system is email aliases. It allows Brave users to keep their personal email addresses private by creating aliases.

Sites communicate only with the alias, which forwards messages to your “real” email address.

After you create a new Brave account, you get the option to use email aliases right in settings or while signing up for a new account on any website.

The main new address seems to be bravealias.com, which should work for the time being on most sites. Eventually, some sites will start to block and it would be a good idea to get additional options regarding the alias domain that one can pick for the alias.

All users get five free email aliases once they have set up a Brave account. Brave Software plans to introduce a paid upgrade option in the future, but has not revealed any details on that at the time of writing. It is very likely that it will feature higher limits, if any, and maybe also other alias options.

One of the search engines that I use regularly is Brave Search. I have several reasons for that: it is fast, uses its own search index that is fully independent from Google Search and Bing Search, and often good at uncovering results that are burried deep under pages of “what the search algorithms believe is better content”.

For Maps, I do rely on Google Maps. While there are other maps services out there, I found most of them lacking in one way or another. However, in some countries, like Korea or China, I do use different map apps as Google Maps does not work well there or at all, or because they are better.

I stumbled upon Brave Maps just recently. It is not brand new, but Brave does not appear to advertise or link to it much at this point. From what I can tell, it appears to be based on OpenStreeMap for the most part.

You can run searches for places and get information, descriptions and reviews taken from TripAdvisor. One downside is that directions is not baked in but redirects to Google, Bing or OpenStreetMap route planners. That is somewhat of a let-down and will hopefully get addressed in future updates.

Another issue is that reviews are not fully baked in. You get some for a location, but they may be cut off and after three or so, a link to Tripadvisor points to the rest of the reviews. This is a main issue, as you can’t use Brave Maps to search all of the reviews for certain information.

All in all, it is good to see that Brave is adding a Maps feature to its growing list of services. However, at its current stage, it lacks essential features and that reduces its usefulness quite a lot. It is probably one of the reasons why Brave is not heavily advertising the feature yet.

Still, if you are looking for non-mainstream maps services, this is one to keep an eye on to see how it evolves in the coming years.

With Google terminating support for Manifest V2 extensions in Chromium and thus most Chromium-based browsers, only some companies have announced solutions to keep support for select extensions.

The latest version of Brave Browser addresses one of the main problems with the migration from MV2 to MV3: the removal of MV2 extensions from the Chrome Store.

What happens when you need to install a classic extension on a new PC or new browser profile? Unless you happen to have a local copy or know how to download it from GitHub or other repositories — if it is provided there — you may be out of options.

Brave Software implemented an option in the browser to replace “known Web Store MV2 extensions with Brave-hosted equivalents”. Up until that point, users had to walk through the process manually. This also meant that settings were not carried over.

With the new process, at least for “known extensions”, Brave is automating things for the user. A benefit of this is that Settings are carried over, which means that you do not have to reconfigure the entire extensions.

There does not seem to be a list of extensions that get the treatment, but a screenshot highlights uBlock Origin, NoScript, uMatrix and AdGuard.