In an advisory board meeting in early 2020, Lauren, The Brave House founder, voiced that one of her dreams is to have an app for the non-profit. I heard that and said: “Okay, let’s do it” :)
About 4 — The Brave App. We co-designed BeSafe with people who use drugs. During the process, we learned safe (r) use isn’t as simple as calling 911; we needed to prioritize privacy, anonymity and autonomy of our callers. The way we did that is by making BeSafe Bring Your Own Game Plan, or “BYOGP.”. Version History. We have updated our branding to match our new identity as 'The Brave App'. Folks know us as 'Brave' and referred to 'Be Safe Community' as 'The Brave App'. For the sake of clarity, we decided to make it our official name. Nothing else has changed. Same app, same people, same service.
After months of ideating and prototyping our app, Kevin Hylant, an incredibly gifted software engineer, volunteered his time to implement our solutions.
We launched the Brave App in January 2021, which gives its members greater access to resources and direct connection to our growing community. Features include:
Virtual event calendar, with RSVPs, reminders, and feedback function, streamlining access to programming.
Private peer-to-peer messaging center and group chat, fostering community.
A vetted, immigrant-friendly resource database in a range of mission-relevant areas, organized by category.
(Coming summer 2021): a private “My Case” section where members can engage with one-on-one legal support and a Case Summary containing information about each member’s case. We are currently consistently working on improvements and updates for the app, which is being used by all Brave House members.
Slant is powered by a community that helps you make informed decisions. Tell us what you’re passionate about to get your personalized feed and help others.
When comparing DuckDuckGo vs Brave, the Slant community recommends Brave for most people. In the question“What are the best Android web browsers?”Brave is ranked 4th while DuckDuckGo is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Brave is:
Takes privacy seriously by blocking ads and trackers and not tracking people's searches. Things like HTTPS everywhere and no tracking are standard with Brave. In most other browsers, things like these are optional at best.
Specs
PlatformsWeb, Android, iOS
Browser EngineBlink
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
DuckDuckGo does not collect or share any personal information. Their privacy page has a great rundown on why privacy is important. The most important repercussion of this is that DDG doesn't use the data collected to tailor results, avoiding exposure to the 'Filter Bubble'.
The ads are clearly labelled as ads and are non-obstructive. The ads are based on the searched keywords and there's no tracking involved on their visibility. You just need to remember that the site the ad links to might track you.
DuckDuckGo results page is an infinite scrolling page, so you don't need to be clicking through pages.
For select queries DDG pops up a box that supplies the exact answer. For example, searching 'stopwatch' will pop up a stopwatch, asking for 'words like...' will show a list of related words, typing 'password' will generate a password, etc.
What Is The Brave App On Android Phone
Allows searching from specific sites using bangs
Bangs are commands that allow searching via a different website's local search engine, using keywords or abbreviations with an exclamation mark (!). For example searching 'world war ii !wiki' will automatically redirect to Wikipedia.org and show results for the query 'world war ii' there, instead of DuckDuckGo, using Wikipedia's search engine.
The more common sites have shortened alternatives for these commands. Such as !g for Google, !i for images and !yt Youtube.
The whole list of bangs can be found by typing '!bang' in DuckDuckGo.
Only accessible from Tor.
DDG allows customizing almost any aspect of the search engine's appearance including fonts, page width, alignment, header behavior, site icons, etc and has a selection of premade themes available as well.
The search engine allows freely disabling ads.
DuckDuckGo does not filter your search’s with the data that they have. You get to see everything the Internet has to offer in a safe, private way.
Of course, it's nicer when enabled, but it's not required. Some browsers are too limited (mobile, terminal) or turn it off for security reasons (tor, etc.), and DDG still works.
DuckDuckGo has an API with some websites. With the help of this API, if you search for a fix of a problem in Linux, you can easily find an answer to the problem. For example, if you search for 'How to update linux', you will get a message like this: How to install updates via command line Try this:
sudo apt-get update # Fetches the list of available updates sudo apt-get upgrade # Strictly upgrades the current packages sudo apt-get dist-upgrade # Installs updates (new ones) --SirCharlo
For example, if you search 'Color Picker' , you see a color picker.
Duckduckgo lets you watch videos right from their site, so you can have more privacy than watching on youtube.com.
Sometimes the search results are better. Most of the times, they're at least as good as.
You can go to the Wikipedia page for pigs by doing !w pig
Takes privacy seriously by blocking ads and trackers and not tracking people's searches. Things like HTTPS everywhere and no tracking are standard with Brave. In most other browsers, things like these are optional at best.
Like fingerprint tracking.
Released to the community under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), this software respect the FSF's four freedoms, including the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute with or without modification freely.
Other apps make it difficult to block ads without rooting your phone or going through unoptimized add-on stores, but Link Bubble blocks them out of the box, making browsing much less crowded. Contains an optional 'Allow Brave Acceptable Ads' So you can support the site you truly enjoy.
Option to pay supported sites based on view time percentage
Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly donation among the top sites you visit.
And/or, you can decide which sites get what percentage of your donation. It’s called pinning.
Optional feature for you to get reimbursed for viewing ads
Basic Attention Token; you can decide to opt into a new blockchain-based digital advertising system, giving publishers a better deal and users a share of the ad revenue for their attention.
The fastest browser out there.
Brave consistently beats Chrome in speed, might have to do with less tracking being run in the background.
It's now a faster, less intrusive Chrome.
Developed by creator of Mozilla and Javascript
Option to synchronize data between devices using peer-to-peer connections. No sign-in required, only a sync code.
Brave regularly adds new functionalities like decentralized domain support and a native crypto wallet long before Chrome considers them. These features to be disabled in settings.
Cons
In search results, there are no dates when the pages were published, which doesn't allow you to immediately know if the page is outdated.
They store no information about you (theoretically a pro) but this results in absolutely awful search results, and having to modify your search terms 4-5 times to get what you are looking for.
Owner would compromise his service/customer privacy
In a question to Weinberg, “if you were served an NSL or were commanded to compromise your service/customer privacy in any way, would you and could you just pull the plug like Lavabit did or would you run into opposition from shareholders/investors that would prevent you from doing so?” Gabriel Weinberg said: “No one is preventing me from doing that.”
Results are quite often not as good. They just lack resources to do it, for now.
Based in US, so they cannot guarantee there is no backdoor
Android Brave App
It uses Bing for the query.
A referrer is an HTTP header field that identifies the address of the webpage (i.e. the URI or IRI) that linked to the resource being requested. By checking the referrer, the new webpage can see where the request originated.” Basically it tells a website where you came from. DDG does give this out.
Search using language other than English is not so great
Korean would never use it.
What's duck's goal or quest?
DuckDuckGo is owned by Gabriel Weinberg who is is the founder, current CEO and controlling shareholder. Investors/shareholders include Union Square Ventures and several others(https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/duck-duck-go-series-unknown--5d9c6644). DuckDuckGo generates it’s income from advertising (Bing Ads) and collects affiliate revenue (Amazon, eBay).
Bangs do not protect user privacy and can be misleading
Using these bangs will instantly connect you to the service you requested. For example typing “!g white cat with green eyes” and hitting return, drops you off on the Google website to display your results (thus logging your IP, search term and browser info immediately). It does not get you Google results inside DuckDuckGo. It is reasonable for DDG users to assume and expect a private search engine warns if there is a risk to that privacy being lost, like it does with Youtube videos but in the case of Bangs this does not happen.
When searching for images only, it shows too few of them and only a handful are related to the search terms.
Since they don't track you the results are not tailored to your interests.
Search results are often unrelated and limited
Common conversions do not work, i.e. searching for 15F to C does not give you the conversion but just a bunch of conversion websites. Very frustrating. It's a simple thing but makes a huge difference to the browsing/searching experience. Also location based only works for the country you're in. Searching for, say, McDonalds only gives country results for McDonalds and no local results such as where a local restaurant may be. Not very helpful.
Cloud save and the ability to pull up your settings on any device is a nice idea but the implementation needs work.
Form over function (overall search experience is poor)
It's nice to adjust the settings and all but after a couple of days you will want to go back to a more functional search engine.
Sure DDG looks shiny and !bangs are great but many wouldn't consider it as a viable alternative. Better results for search queries is more important than fancy looking CSS.
Since it's based on Chrome.
Brave Software is a for-profit company (though users must opt into Brave ads and Brave doesn't track users.)
Power hungry, uses much more battery power than other browsers
Per default Brave enables hardware acceleration which results in a much higher energy (battery) consumption than the most other web browsers.
On the desktop: Brave uses the same browser engine as Chrome, meaning it has the same security-holes as Chrome. Chrome is a big target for hackers (being the most popular browser in the world), and a webpage that will hack Chrome may also hack Brave.
However, Brave has security features that Chrome doesn't (such as a built-in adblocker). Those features will stop many hacking attempts.
Download package is very large considering it as a browser
Brave takes on a lot of roles besides just browsing so it is understandably a larger file.
Unable to sync extensions, no cloud sync (only device sync).
Can be accessed with an extension though.
In previous versions, Brave felt more like Firefox. Now it's been dumbed down, it feels more like Chrome/Chromium. For example: There's no menu-bar.
Promotes search engines that track users such as Bing and Google
Google Search is the first search engine on the list.
On reopening Brave, it often returns you to the 'search results' page, rather than the webpage you had previously browsed to from the search results page. Might just be a specific configuration.
Bookmark management is not as seamless as other browsers.
No options to customize apperance, and make the bookmarks appear on the home page, for instance.
Only customer support available in Brave community. Mods usually does not help.
Most creators don't use it and so will not profit from the crypto system.
Quite intrusive advertisements, especially on Windows
Advertisements keep popping up in the Windows notification center. Must opt in to ad system, but no option to disable sound for ad notifications only.
Hypocritical/deceptive stance on privacy and advertisement
Brave is advertised as a browser that respects your privacy and blocks ads while still supporting content creators. However, at the same time the company is making deals with Facebook, Twitter and others to whitelist their trackers and ads
Bookmark button located on the left side of the URL bar and can't be moved
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