• last year
After introducing the current web browser landscape, I'll demonstrate two of my current favorites. LibreWolf is a no-nonsense Firefox fork with Mozilla telemetry and advertising removed; Brave is a feature-filled Chromium fork with enhanced privacy protections.

Try LibreWolf: https://librewolf.net/
Try Brave: https://brave.com/

Get a copy of my EasyList AdBlock filters and share your own here: https://nerdonthestreet.com/forum-topic/tech-talk/easylist-adblock-ublock-brave-shields-etc-filters
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Transcript
00:00:00 Hello everyone, I'm Jacob Kauf and I'm the Nerd on the Street and today we're talking
00:00:02 about web browsers.
00:00:12 Okay everyone, this is a video that I've been meaning to make for a couple of years now
00:00:15 and I just never seem to get around to it.
00:00:18 And it's fitting in a way, because web browsers are one of the most used applications that
00:00:22 we have.
00:00:23 But how often do you actually think about which web browser you're using?
00:00:27 You probably have one installed on your computer, it might be the one that came with your operating
00:00:30 system or it might be one that you added on after the fact, and you probably open that
00:00:34 web browser up and use it almost every single day without actually considering if you should
00:00:39 switch to another one.
00:00:40 Now obviously, similarly to Linux distros, we all have work to get done and it's good
00:00:45 to sort of settle on something eventually and not think about it too much.
00:00:49 But at the same time, it is good every now and then to step back and take a look at the
00:00:53 experience you're having with your computer and consider, is this experience the best
00:00:57 that it could be?
00:00:58 Is the web browser that I'm using right now the correct choice for my needs?
00:01:01 Now there are two main web browser engines in existence in the world right now.
00:01:05 The first one is used by Google Chrome and its open source counterpart Chromium and it's
00:01:09 called Blink.
00:01:10 And the other one is used exclusively by Mozilla Firefox, it's called Gecko.
00:01:15 Now most web browsers out there today are actually using Blink under the hood, a lot
00:01:19 of them are actually using Chromium's entire code base under the hood.
00:01:22 Because Opera back in the day, the Opera web browser had its own rendering engine called
00:01:26 Presto, they discontinued that back in 2013.
00:01:29 They switched to WebKit, which Chrome was using at the time, and they're using Blink
00:01:33 today.
00:01:34 Back in the day, Internet Explorer used to use its own browser engine called Trident.
00:01:38 Microsoft replaced Trident with its own Edge HTML engine when it first created Microsoft
00:01:42 Edge, but then it later dropped that engine and switched Edge to Blink.
00:01:46 So the situation we have now is that every user of Windows and of Android by default
00:01:52 is using Blink.
00:01:53 Now the big exception when it comes to what's included in operating systems is Apple.
00:01:57 Apple is amazingly still using the WebKit browser engine in Safari, and WebKit was originally
00:02:02 a fork of KHTML from the KDE project actually.
00:02:06 It's ironic now because the KDE framework has switched away from WebKit and they're
00:02:10 basically using Chromium code, they're using Blink now behind the scenes on KDE.
00:02:14 So Apple is really alone in continuing to maintain WebKit now.
00:02:18 But Apple doesn't even publish Safari builds for Windows anymore, they never published
00:02:22 them for Linux.
00:02:23 So unless you're in the Apple ecosystem, WebKit and Safari, it's not really an option for
00:02:27 you.
00:02:28 Now you might be wondering why it's a bad thing that all browsers would be using Blink.
00:02:32 In fact, maybe it would be a good thing that all browsers use the same engine, because
00:02:36 that means compatibility on websites is going to be pretty standard across different browsers.
00:02:40 The problem is the key word in there, "standard," when all browsers use the same engine, and
00:02:44 that engine is developed by an entity which is Chromium, Google, that means that Google
00:02:49 basically gets to decide what web standards get implemented in all of the web browsers
00:02:54 and which ones don't.
00:02:55 So even though there are open regulatory bodies for the internet who come up with proposals
00:03:01 and publish what they think should be browser specifications, in effect, browser specifications
00:03:07 don't really mean anything unless Google decides to adopt them in Blink.
00:03:10 Likewise, if Google comes up with a new proprietary feature and puts it in Blink, websites are
00:03:14 probably going to start using it eventually, because almost every web browser is going
00:03:18 to support that feature, but it won't work in those few web browsers not using Blink.
00:03:23 In addition to that consideration, there's also the fact that Google is an advertising
00:03:27 company, they provide a lot of free services, and they make most of their money off of ad
00:03:30 revenue.
00:03:31 So even though Google is pretty good at security, they do not have the best reputation for privacy.
00:03:36 Their entire business model revolves around collecting your data, and so if you're using
00:03:40 a web browser that's using the Blink engine underneath, especially if you're using one
00:03:44 closely connected to Google like Chromium or Google Chrome, Google is incentivized to
00:03:48 collect as much data as they can directly from you through the browser.
00:03:52 They are also incentivized to make sure that websites are able to track you when they're
00:03:56 using Google's ad platform.
00:03:57 In recent years, we've heard stories, and so far it seems like they've mostly been scare
00:04:02 stories that hasn't actually come to fruition yet, but we have seen news stories suggesting
00:04:06 that Google is on its way to banning advertisement blockers, ad blockers, from web browsers by
00:04:13 basically breaking compatibility with them in the Blink engine.
00:04:16 You know, the browser engine is what's actually rendering the content on screen, and so if
00:04:19 Google says they're not going to allow extensions to hook into that display mechanism anymore,
00:04:25 then ad blockers might just not work anymore on any of those browsers using Blink under
00:04:29 the hood.
00:04:30 Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, a lot of browsers.
00:04:33 So in order to combat that monopoly effect that Google currently has over web standards,
00:04:38 some people go out of their way to use a different web browser that does not use Blink under
00:04:42 the hood.
00:04:43 As I mentioned earlier, basically the only modern option, the only option that's still
00:04:47 being actively developed is Mozilla Firefox with Gecko.
00:04:51 So that might leave you thinking, "Well, why don't I just use Firefox if this is an issue
00:04:54 at all?"
00:04:55 Firefox is a pretty decent web browser.
00:04:57 I've used it myself in the past.
00:04:58 However, Mozilla as an entity is actually a little bit controversial if you peek under
00:05:03 the hood.
00:05:04 For one thing, in recent years, Mozilla has made monetary donations to political groups
00:05:09 that might be considered radical, depending on who you ask.
00:05:12 And for another thing, Mozilla seems intent on shoving a lot of features into their web
00:05:16 browser other than web browsing.
00:05:18 I work with a lot of computers in my day-to-day life, my day-to-day work, and Firefox is usually
00:05:23 installed on most of those computers by default, so I end up opening it up a lot.
00:05:28 Some people would say that things started to get bad when Mozilla acquired Pocket a
00:05:31 few years back.
00:05:33 Pocket is a proprietary extension.
00:05:35 Mozilla's running the servers on their end.
00:05:37 And in addition to basically duplicating bookmark functionality, Pocket also recommends news
00:05:41 articles for you that it shoves into your face through the new tab page on every new
00:05:46 Firefox install.
00:05:47 In addition, Firefox often pops up messages every single time you update.
00:05:51 It asks if you want to change your theme.
00:05:53 It uses really creepy wording when it's talking about the theme to make it seem like you're
00:05:57 making an ideological statement when you change the colors of your web browser.
00:06:01 And you'll get toolbars in Firefox from time to time, either asking you to submit feedback
00:06:06 via surveys or even just letting you know that Firefox is tracking you and sending your
00:06:10 data to Mozilla by default because telemetry is opt-out.
00:06:14 So in my opinion, Firefox has a lot of little annoyances here and there.
00:06:18 To qualify that, for one thing, depending on what Linux distribution you use, you might
00:06:22 or might not be exposed to some of those quirks.
00:06:24 For example, Pop!_OS is the only distribution I'm aware of that disables those Pocket-recommended
00:06:29 news articles on the new tab page by default.
00:06:32 Some other distros, like Linux Mint, used to disable telemetry by default, although
00:06:35 Mozilla eventually pressured them into shipping their upstream default settings, or at least
00:06:39 convinced them to do that as part of a larger negotiation.
00:06:42 We also saw that when Canonical switched their Ubuntu package from a Debian format to a Snap
00:06:46 format that was actually Mozilla's idea, not Canonical's.
00:06:49 A big part of Mozilla's rationale for that was because they wanted users to get Firefox
00:06:53 quote-unquote "straight from the source" without any extra patches or default settings changes
00:06:57 being applied.
00:06:58 And of course, everybody's aware of when Debian used to have to rebrand Firefox into Ice Weasel
00:07:03 in order to apply security patches without violating Mozilla's trademark policies.
00:07:07 That effort goes to show that even though Mozilla doesn't want distros to change default
00:07:11 settings, distros can still exert some level of influence over the Firefox experience.
00:07:15 The Mozilla bloat in Firefox is probably worst on Windows, which is kind of funny, in addition
00:07:20 to macOS.
00:07:21 Since you don't have the package curated by any third party before it gets to you on those
00:07:25 operating systems.
00:07:26 But even on those platforms, lots of people will tell you, "Well, it's not that bad.
00:07:30 You can just go into the settings, you can disable telemetry, you can disable surveys,
00:07:34 you can X out of the theme switcher every time it pops up, you can choose not to use
00:07:38 Pocket, you can drag it out of your toolbar, you can turn off the recommended articles
00:07:42 on the new tab page, and then if you want an ad blocker, you can go and search for that
00:07:45 on the web and install it.
00:07:47 And you can do those six or more things every single time you set up a new computer with
00:07:51 Firefox.
00:07:52 It's not that bad.
00:07:53 Do you not like having a checklist of things you need to do every time you set up a new
00:07:56 computer with Firefox?"
00:07:58 That's what some people say.
00:07:59 Personally, for me, it gets a little grating.
00:08:01 I acknowledge that Firefox is open source, and that a lot of Firefox's annoyances can
00:08:05 be toned down through the settings.
00:08:08 However, I just got tired eventually of having more and more cruft shoved into my face by
00:08:13 Mozilla.
00:08:14 Eventually I said, "You know what?
00:08:15 Enough is enough.
00:08:16 All this ideological stuff about using a different browser engine is great, but I also want a
00:08:20 browser that actually works well and is a nice experience to use."
00:08:23 Well, if you're on the same page as me, I have good news for you, because today I'm
00:08:26 going to show you two web browsers.
00:08:28 One of them is actually based on Firefox, so even if you care strongly about that browser
00:08:33 engine diversity thing, one of the browsers I'm going to show you is based on Firefox.
00:08:38 It's called LibreWolf, and it basically takes Firefox and it just strips out all of the
00:08:42 Mozilla stuff.
00:08:43 You might have heard of a project called UnGoogled Chromium.
00:08:46 It's basically a build of Google's Chromium browser, the open source version, and it tries
00:08:50 to remove as much of the Google services and Google tracking stuff as possible.
00:08:55 LibreWolf is similar to that, and it's just doing the same thing for Firefox, and it's
00:08:58 removing, like I said, all of the Mozilla tied services and tracking and features.
00:09:04 It actually does still have optional syncing, which I'll show you, but that is the first
00:09:08 browser I'm going to demonstrate here.
00:09:10 The second one I'm going to show is called the Brave browser.
00:09:12 It's actually a little bit older than LibreWolf, and it is based on Chromium, so you will be
00:09:17 using Blink if you're using Brave.
00:09:19 Depending on who you are, that might be a bad thing.
00:09:21 It might also be a good thing if you want the best possible browser compatibility with
00:09:25 all the different websites out there that might be targeting Chrome.
00:09:27 Now Brave is a little bit less neutral.
00:09:29 It goes out of its way to remove as much website tracking stuff as possible.
00:09:33 It goes farther than LibreWolf by default.
00:09:35 Both of these web browsers have ad blockers built in.
00:09:38 LibreWolf is basically the simple option, the neutral option, for if you really want
00:09:42 to keep content and browsers separated.
00:09:45 Brave is the more feature-filled, exciting option if you're somebody who gets excited
00:09:49 about using web browsers.
00:09:51 So that's what we're talking about today.
00:09:52 Maybe a little bit of a long intro, but I wanted to address those things and point out
00:09:56 some of the major reasons why if you haven't considered switching your web browser, you
00:09:59 might want to consider it while I show you these two today.
00:10:03 So keep that in mind, and with that, we'll cut to the desktop.
00:10:05 And here we are on the desktop.
00:10:07 The first browser we're going to take a look at, like I said, is LibreWolf.
00:10:10 And before I open this up, I want to let you guys know that I have completely removed all
00:10:14 of the configuration and cache folders for both LibreWolf and Brave before I started
00:10:19 recording.
00:10:20 So what you're about to see is what you will see if you install this browser and open it
00:10:24 up for the very first time.
00:10:26 So I'll click on LibreWolf here, and it's going to launch to our new tab page.
00:10:30 And that is it.
00:10:31 That's all that happens when you launch LibreWolf for the very first time.
00:10:35 Compare this to Firefox, where you open it up, you get three different tabs.
00:10:39 You know, you've got your new tab page, a welcome page, Mozilla's privacy policy page,
00:10:44 and you've got pop-ups on your new tab page asking if you want to set up sync.
00:10:47 You've got news stories that start loading from Pocket.
00:10:50 All of this different stuff that you see when you launch Firefox.
00:10:53 In LibreWolf, you know, that was the first launch, and then here's our second launch.
00:10:57 And once again, you have no toolbars asking if you want to review your privacy settings,
00:11:02 because they're all pretty much set optimally to begin with.
00:11:04 And you have nothing being pushed at you here on the new tab page.
00:11:08 The only thing we have is a DuckDuckGo search bar.
00:11:10 So like I said, if you want a web browser that really has no extra bells and whistles
00:11:14 other than letting you browse the web, LibreWolf is the way to go.
00:11:18 We can customize the new tab page a little bit here.
00:11:20 You can turn on shortcuts so you can pin websites that you use often manually.
00:11:24 You can also turn on recent activities so that you'll see recent pages that you visited.
00:11:29 Those are both off by default.
00:11:30 I personally do like having those on.
00:11:32 And customizing the rest of the web browser is going to be the exact same as Firefox.
00:11:35 You can hit Control + Shift + B to hide or show your bookmarks toolbar there.
00:11:39 Personally, I'm not a fan of having this centered URL bar.
00:11:42 I want it to go all the way across.
00:11:44 So to make that happen, I can right click here, I can click Customize Toolbar, and I'll
00:11:48 just drag those spaces right out of the toolbar and click Done.
00:11:51 And the one other thing I want to draw attention to before I navigate to a website is uBlock
00:11:55 Origin, which is pre-installed here in LibreWolf.
00:11:58 This is pretty much the only thing that is not vanilla Firefox that LibreWolf actually
00:12:02 adds rather than removing, is they have installed uBlock Origin by default.
00:12:07 This is my preferred ad blocker when I'm using a web browser that does not have one built
00:12:11 in.
00:12:12 It has been my preferred ad blocker for years.
00:12:14 And it's been many people's preferred ad blocker.
00:12:16 It's open source, it's quick, it's efficient.
00:12:18 And it's largely replaced other extensions like the older AdBlock Plus extension and
00:12:22 the pre-fork uBlock extension after those both started allowing some ads.
00:12:27 So this is one extension that I think everybody really should have installed anyway.
00:12:31 You know, it's the kind of thing I haven't installed on my parents' computers just because
00:12:34 it's such a quality of life improvement not having ads everywhere on the internet.
00:12:39 It's not just something for power users, it's something that really makes sense to include
00:12:42 by default in my opinion.
00:12:44 I do like to have that shown on the actual toolbar, so I'm just going to pin it to the
00:12:48 toolbar here.
00:12:49 It shows up and it shows you how many elements are blocked on a page, which can be useful.
00:12:53 In case the ad blocker breaks a web page, you can look up there and see if the number
00:12:57 is non-zero, then one of the troubleshooting steps would be turning it off.
00:13:01 But once again, this is default LibreWolf.
00:13:03 So I'm going to go ahead and go to nerdonthestreet.com to start with, just to show you this navigating
00:13:07 to a web page.
00:13:08 I will go ahead and hide my Bookmarks toolbar there.
00:13:11 And by default, the Bookmarks toolbar only shows up on your new tab page.
00:13:14 I think I forced it to show up on all web pages when I turned it off and on the first
00:13:18 time.
00:13:19 So as you can see here, this is my website and it is displaying as expected.
00:13:23 Now there's an advertisement section in the sidebar here.
00:13:26 I normally have a Google ad on the sidebar of my website, which only brings in a few
00:13:30 bucks a month, but hey, it helps pay for the hosting costs.
00:13:33 Now one way to hide that advertisement is if people join the Nerd Club here on my website,
00:13:37 if you subscribe to that, then when you log in, this ad will not be sent from the server
00:13:42 side.
00:13:43 However, if you're not a Nerd Club member, you still won't see an advertisement if you're
00:13:46 using LibreWolf, at least not by default.
00:13:48 If we go up here, you can see there are two items that were blocked on this page by uBlock
00:13:52 origin.
00:13:53 And if we want to see what the website looks like without doing that, I can turn that off
00:13:56 and reload.
00:13:57 Now in this case, the ad is actually still blocked because of enhanced tracking protection,
00:14:01 which is a native Firefox feature.
00:14:02 I can turn that one off as well.
00:14:07 And now we see an advertisement.
00:14:08 So there are kind of two different layers here blocking ads.
00:14:12 I'm going to turn both of those back on, but that was just to show you, you know, my website's
00:14:16 pretty reasonable.
00:14:17 It's really just one ad in the sidebar and I think one maybe at the bottom of certain
00:14:21 pages and that's about it for me.
00:14:23 But there are other websites out there that have a lot more ads.
00:14:26 And having an ad blocker can really clean them up.
00:14:28 So it's great that that's there by default.
00:14:30 I'm going to click on a recent video here and it's not going to start playing automatically
00:14:34 because LibreWolf, just like regular Firefox, it blocks auto-playing videos by default.
00:14:40 So in order to allow my website to work properly, I'm going to go ahead and allow audio and
00:14:43 video since this is a video website.
00:14:46 I'll hit refresh there and this time when the page loads, it is going to start playing.
00:14:51 Going to go ahead and mute that.
00:14:52 But we do have a video playing now, so you can see media works perfectly fine.
00:14:56 This is a regular old HLS stream.
00:14:57 I can also select a quality here and it's going to load an MP4 file, which also plays
00:15:03 perfectly normally.
00:15:04 So everything's about as you'd expect it there.
00:15:06 Now I'm going to open a new tab here and next I'm going to show you a web search.
00:15:10 I'll go ahead and un-maximize this window and I'll just search for my own channel or
00:15:14 company name here, Nern on the Street.
00:15:16 Now as I'm typing, notice that we are getting some suggestions from our browser history,
00:15:21 but we are not getting any search suggestions from our search providers.
00:15:25 Some web browsers like Chrome and Edge are going to send everything that you type in
00:15:28 the URL bar to your search providers so that they can send back suggestions on what you
00:15:32 might want to search for.
00:15:33 LibreWolf has that disabled by default.
00:15:36 Now the default search provider is DuckDuckGo.
00:15:38 There are a number of other providers installed by default.
00:15:40 You can see we have two different DuckDuckGo icons.
00:15:43 One is for the main DuckDuckGo search engine.
00:15:45 The other one is for DuckDuckGo Lite.
00:15:47 And there's also a few more.
00:15:48 We have Start Page pre-installed and Start Page is a Google proxy search engine that
00:15:52 I've enjoyed using a lot in the past.
00:15:54 And of course you can install your own search engines as well.
00:15:56 But I'm going to go ahead and hit Enter to search with DuckDuckGo by default.
00:15:59 And DuckDuckGo is pretty good at its search results.
00:16:02 Almost everything on this front page has to do with me.
00:16:04 Looks like we've got one at the bottom that's not related to Nern on the Street.
00:16:07 And you might notice here that DuckDuckGo has searched with a white background.
00:16:11 This is its Lite theme.
00:16:13 You can change that right here in the DuckDuckGo settings manually, but the reason it defaulted
00:16:17 to the Lite theme rather than a dark theme to match my OS is because if we go over here
00:16:21 into a new tab and we open up our browser settings, we can scroll down to the website
00:16:25 appearance section and you can see that LibreWolf enables a feature called resist fingerprinting
00:16:30 by default, which disables the automatic Lite or dark theme selection on websites because
00:16:36 websites can potentially track you or at least narrow down who you are based on whether your
00:16:40 browser requested a Lite theme or a dark theme.
00:16:43 Now LibreWolf does a pretty good job at adding links to their documentation that explains
00:16:47 what these features are and why they're enabled.
00:16:50 Features being disabled or broken in Firefox was kind of an issue with LibreWolf earlier
00:16:55 on, but they have gotten better about adding tool tips like this to explain what's going
00:16:58 on.
00:16:59 Now most of the settings in this settings page are going to be the same ones you get
00:17:02 with Vanilla Firefox, but LibreWolf adds a section of the settings here called LibreWolf.
00:17:07 And this basically shows you everything that LibreWolf is doing that's not default behavior
00:17:12 or standard behavior for Firefox.
00:17:14 For example, here DuckDuckGo might be forced onto a Lite theme now that I've actually clicked
00:17:18 that button, but I'm just going to go to Google.com and show you that that is also on a Lite theme
00:17:23 by default.
00:17:24 If I go back over here and uncheck this resist fingerprinting option, then I can go back
00:17:28 to general.
00:17:30 We can see that the Lite or dark theme is set to automatic by default.
00:17:33 So if I refresh Google, maybe I do a control shift refresh.
00:17:38 There we go.
00:17:39 Google is going to default to a dark theme.
00:17:40 If I go back over to DuckDuckGo, looks like it did pick that automatic theme up as well.
00:17:44 So if you find that there are any convenience features that you want to work that aren't
00:17:49 working by default in LibreWolf, it is very easy to go in and tweak based on how much
00:17:53 you care about privacy or how much you care about those convenience features.
00:17:56 Now one other really cool thing about this LibreWolf settings page is that we can actually
00:18:00 click these question mark icons and it will show you the underlying Firefox config options
00:18:05 that those are actually toggling.
00:18:07 These options are going to correspond to, if you go to the about config section, this
00:18:12 is a feature in vanilla Firefox that allows you to set a lot more manual options than
00:18:16 you get in the regular settings.
00:18:19 In this case, we can see that enable resist fingerprinting is going to turn on the privacy.resistfingerprinting
00:18:24 setting.
00:18:25 So I can search for that over here, privacy.resistfingerprinting, and it is set to true.
00:18:30 When that is checked, when we uncheck that, it's going to be set to false.
00:18:34 So if you're wanting to see exactly what LibreWolf is doing under the hood in Firefox, a lot
00:18:38 of these things, they're not actually patching the code, but they're giving you default settings.
00:18:42 And you can see what those settings are so that you can go and turn them on on a vanilla
00:18:45 Firefox instance if you wanted to, for example.
00:18:48 Now I want to show you down here, there's an option to enable Google Safe Browsing.
00:18:51 They have that disabled by default.
00:18:53 We can click on the question mark icon there, and it actually sort of explains when you
00:18:57 might want to enable this option and why it's disabled by default.
00:19:01 Now as you can see, this feature actually downloads a database and does all of the checking
00:19:04 locally.
00:19:05 It does not actually send your current browsing to Google.
00:19:07 So this setting is not a privacy concern.
00:19:09 They have it disabled for censorship reasons because this feature, this database, basically
00:19:14 lets Google decide what websites everybody's web browsers are going to block by default.
00:19:18 But if you did want to turn this on, you can check that option.
00:19:21 And I wanted to show you once again, this is basically one setting that you're turning
00:19:24 off or on in LibreWolf.
00:19:26 But if you were in vanilla Firefox, in this case, it would not just be a single config
00:19:30 option that you're manually setting.
00:19:31 It would be seven different options.
00:19:33 So having a single checkbox that turns all of those on and off at the same time is really
00:19:36 a huge time saver, even when it comes to manually configuring things.
00:19:41 So those are the LibreWolf preferences.
00:19:43 And the one other thing I want to show you is how to set custom rules in this ad blocker.
00:19:47 I'll show you why you might want to do this.
00:19:49 If we go to a Twitter page, for example, I don't use Twitter often, and I don't recommend
00:19:54 that you would, but we can go to twitter.com/knotts_network as an example here.
00:19:59 And we can take a look at the tweets on the Nerd on the Street account.
00:20:02 I'll X out of this sign in with Google box that Twitter pops up there.
00:20:06 Now as I start to scroll down and read some of the tweets, we see this what's happening
00:20:10 box in the sidebar of Twitter.
00:20:12 And another pop up, thank you, Twitter.
00:20:14 Now personally, these recommendations from Twitter, they are extremely rarely anything
00:20:18 that I actually want to be thinking about or looking at.
00:20:21 You know, in this case, we've just got, it looks like a sports item, a couple of sports
00:20:25 items.
00:20:26 We've got one, maybe two entertainment items, and then possibly a political item down here.
00:20:31 But when you're just trying to check out tweets from somebody specific, you're going here
00:20:34 to read Nerd on the Street's tweets, for example.
00:20:37 You know, this is a distraction.
00:20:39 This is almost worse than advertisements because it's pushing things in your face.
00:20:42 It's saying, "Hey, look at this happening.
00:20:44 Look at that happening."
00:20:45 One of these can catch your eye and it can very easily suck you down a hole of wasting
00:20:49 your time reading about things that you did not intend to look up at all when you logged
00:20:53 onto your computer today.
00:20:55 So what I've started doing is I've started writing ad block rules that block this kind
00:20:59 of element from web pages.
00:21:01 Now how this is going to work.
00:21:02 I'm just going to open up the Ublock Origin menu and I'm going to click on these three
00:21:06 gears to open up the dashboard.
00:21:08 From there, I'm going to go to the My Filters page.
00:21:11 And here you can actually type in your own ad blocking filters to decide what this extension
00:21:15 is going to block.
00:21:16 These filters use a syntax called EasyList.
00:21:19 It's the same syntax that the original AdBlock Plus extension used.
00:21:22 So just to show you here, this is my current filter list that I use.
00:21:26 I've got a text file here called AdBlock Rules, and I actually keep this on a NextCloud instance
00:21:31 so I can sign into it from a new web browser and apply it very easily without having to
00:21:35 leave the browser at all.
00:21:37 But I can copy all of that text and I'm just going to paste it all in here.
00:21:40 Now I could make a different video about how to actually write these rules.
00:21:43 In fact, that's probably a good idea for me to do that one day.
00:21:46 But it's pretty easy to make these rules and there are even automated ways to do it.
00:21:50 If I go back to my own website, let's say that these thumbnails here are actually not
00:21:54 content.
00:21:55 Let's say hypothetically that those are images you don't want to see.
00:21:58 Here in Leroy Wolf, you can right click on an image and click Block Element.
00:22:01 And this is a feature of Ublock Origin.
00:22:03 It's going to pre-populate a rule that will block this specific element.
00:22:07 And it's also going to give you some suggestions for other ways you could do the same thing.
00:22:11 So I want to set up a cosmetic filter to block any elements with the class of Browse Thumb.
00:22:16 I'm going to click on that and I am going to make this a little bit less specific.
00:22:21 I think I might be able to do that just by sliding this slider backwards a little bit.
00:22:26 So we see highlighted in red all of the elements that are about to be blocked.
00:22:30 And then I can click Create and that's going to create a Ublock Origin rule that blocks
00:22:34 all of those images.
00:22:35 So those are not going to show anymore.
00:22:36 If we go back over here to our filters, you can see we now have a new item below where
00:22:40 I pasted before.
00:22:41 It's just time stamped with the website and this is a Ublock rule to block the thumbnails
00:22:46 on my website.
00:22:47 If you ever want to undo that, we can just take those away, apply changes.
00:22:51 And if I refresh over here, the images are back.
00:22:53 So you don't necessarily need to know how to program these yourself if you are able
00:22:57 to use those GUI tools that I just showed you.
00:22:59 So I've got a collection here and it is growing.
00:23:02 And the first thing in the list here is hiding the What's Happening sidebar on Twitter.com.
00:23:06 The syntax for this one is a little bit more involved just because of how this is coded
00:23:10 on Twitter's website.
00:23:11 But I can go ahead and refresh this page now and you'll see after it loads, there is no
00:23:16 more What's Happening box.
00:23:17 This is the bottom of the sidebar here.
00:23:19 So this is really a huge game changer.
00:23:21 You can see other things that I'm also blocking, you know, auto-playing videos on Fandom Wikis,
00:23:26 recommended posts underneath Imgur albums, the doodles and the recommended headlines
00:23:31 that Google puts on their homepage all the time.
00:23:33 You know, you might think that in order to use some of these websites like Google, you
00:23:36 need to accept taking all of the propaganda that they put in front of your eyes or else
00:23:41 you need to just not use it and find alternatives like DuckDuckGo or Startpage.
00:23:45 But it is possible to block a lot of the stuff that websites kind of promote, even when it's
00:23:49 coming from the website itself, even when it's something first party like the What's
00:23:52 Happening box on Twitter.
00:23:54 So if those things bother you, I would encourage you to take just a few minutes to set something
00:23:57 like this up and it can really make you feel a lot more comfortable and less stressed out
00:24:02 when you sit down to go onto the internet.
00:24:04 So yeah, that's just about the last thing I wanted to show you here in LibreWolf.
00:24:08 If we go up to the top right here, there is a drop-down box where we can search through
00:24:11 our tabs and see a list of the open tabs and all of your different windows there.
00:24:15 But aside from that, LibreWolf is really just Firefox with all of the stuff you don't care
00:24:20 about ripped out.
00:24:21 You know, somebody looking at this new tab page is not going to say, "Oh, something's
00:24:25 missing.
00:24:26 There are no recommended news articles from Mozilla."
00:24:28 This is just a web browser and it's a really good one.
00:24:31 So if you want to grab LibreWolf, you can go to LibreWolf.net.
00:24:34 They have a very clean homepage here, cleaner than the Firefox homepage.
00:24:37 If we go and look up Firefox's homepage here, let's take a look at what that looks like
00:24:42 on Mozilla's website real quick.
00:24:44 So we've got an ad at the top right that just animated in for Mozilla's VPN that they're
00:24:48 selling.
00:24:49 These are items that are blocked by default by the ad blocker on Firefox's homepage.
00:24:53 As we scroll down, we get a pop-up that's talking about unrelated products in their
00:24:57 quote-unquote "family" aside from the browser that you were actually trying to download
00:25:02 here.
00:25:03 And you've got a whole lot of copy, a whole lot of sort of advertisement for Firefox.
00:25:06 It's not all bad, but it is quite a lot.
00:25:08 And then at the bottom, we've got some ideological stuff, you know, challenging the status quo,
00:25:13 some pretty bold statements that Mozilla likes to throw out just to try and stand out in
00:25:18 a world where they're getting smoked by Google.
00:25:20 But yeah, the Librewolf website is really much more straight and to the point.
00:25:23 It tells you exactly what they have on top of regular old Firefox, and it is a little
00:25:27 bit less corporate and more community-oriented.
00:25:29 They've got a list of some of their core contributors here right on the homepage.
00:25:33 So the blue installation button will take you to this documentation page.
00:25:36 They've got downloads for Windows.
00:25:38 You can install it or you can run it portably.
00:25:40 They've got info about macOS here.
00:25:42 It's just a regular old DMG.
00:25:44 And on Linux, they have excellent support for a range of distributions.
00:25:48 I'm showing you this demo on Fedora right now, and they actually have a Fedora repository
00:25:52 that serves native RPMs.
00:25:54 They also show you information about an unofficial copper repository, just in case you want an
00:25:58 alternative source.
00:26:00 They have first-class support for Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint.
00:26:03 Over on Arch, they are in the AUR.
00:26:05 And if we go to other Linux, this is just great.
00:26:08 They have an app image and they're on Flathub, so you can install that as a flatpack or an
00:26:12 app image.
00:26:13 These are both universal package formats, so most projects can get away with just picking
00:26:17 one of these or the other, but they provide both here.
00:26:20 So it is very, very easy to run LibreWolf on any OS that you want to.
00:26:24 And finally, since this is a fork of Firefox, it is open source.
00:26:27 You can click on this source code button right here on their homepage to get to their GitLab
00:26:31 organization.
00:26:32 And if you've ever browsed the Mozilla Firefox source code online, or if you've contributed
00:26:36 to their bug tracker, Mozilla uses sort of a custom interface.
00:26:39 It is open source.
00:26:40 Vanilla Firefox is completely open source, but their website is a little antiquated and
00:26:44 a little difficult to use.
00:26:46 LibreWolf being on GitLab here is very easy to look at and very easy to contribute to.
00:26:51 If we click on the browser section here, we have basically all of the tools they use to
00:26:54 build LibreWolf.
00:26:56 And once again, this is more like a patch set than a full-on fork.
00:26:59 If we take a look at the Linux repository here, you can see we don't have the entire
00:27:03 Firefox source code.
00:27:05 It's more like we just have a set of patches.
00:27:07 And once again, if we come down here to source, this is where you can find all of the patches
00:27:11 and changes that LibreWolf makes to the upstream Mozilla Firefox source code.
00:27:15 So you can keep up with development there.
00:27:16 There's sort of a chart of how they work here in the readme file of this repo.
00:27:20 And if we go up to the top and we select the releases, we can actually look and see that
00:27:24 we are currently based on Firefox 114.0.1.
00:27:28 If I go here and check out the package that I currently have from the Fedora repository
00:27:32 underneath help and about LibreWolf, that is 114.0.1.
00:27:37 And the dash two just means this is the second release they've made based off of the 114.0.1
00:27:42 Firefox release.
00:27:43 But that's the version of LibreWolf we're currently on.
00:27:45 And if I go to getfirefox.com and I take a look at that homepage again, I'll click download
00:27:50 here to download Firefox.
00:27:52 They give you a pop-up when you try to download.
00:27:54 The highlighted suggested button goes to some accounts page.
00:27:57 And to actually download Firefox, you have to click on the non-recommended button.
00:28:02 It's like Mozilla doesn't even want you to use Firefox.
00:28:04 But if we do go there and we start downloading here, we see that the current version that
00:28:07 Mozilla has released is 114.0.1.
00:28:11 So LibreWolf is on the latest patch set of Firefox.
00:28:14 Firefox forks kind of have a bad reputation of getting out of date with older Firefox
00:28:18 spin-offs such as Pale Moon.
00:28:20 You sometimes had versions of the downstream app that were based on much older versions
00:28:24 of Firefox, which is bad for security and usability.
00:28:27 I just wanted to show you that so that you know you're not really compromising on Firefox
00:28:31 updates when you're using LibreWolf.
00:28:33 The 114.0.1 release, they got that released two days ago on June 9th, UTC.
00:28:38 And if we take a look at the Firefox release notes here, 114.0.1 was released on June 9th.
00:28:43 This was not a one-off coincidence.
00:28:45 LibreWolf typically has an update out within the same day that Mozilla puts it out.
00:28:49 They just apply their patch set on top.
00:28:51 If needed, they go back later and make a second release if there's any improvements they can
00:28:54 add.
00:28:55 But once again, it is very, very up-to-date.
00:28:57 So that is absolutely great as well.
00:28:59 Next I'm going to switch to another virtual desktop.
00:29:01 And the rest of the video is going to be talking about the Brave browser.
00:29:05 Now I'm going to open this up, and you're immediately going to see some differences
00:29:07 between Brave and LibreWolf.
00:29:09 As you can see, the first thing we get is a big old welcome screen asking if we want
00:29:13 to set this as the default browser.
00:29:15 I'm going to skip that.
00:29:16 It asks if we want to import settings.
00:29:18 I'll skip that.
00:29:19 And then we have some diagnostic options that you can either turn on or uncheck here.
00:29:24 Firefox has some of that enabled by default, and it just pops up a web page or a toolbar
00:29:27 letting you know you can change from the settings menu.
00:29:30 So it's nice that Brave at least gives you the option right here off the bat to disable
00:29:33 them as part of the first-time setup wizard.
00:29:35 However, unlike LibreWolf, there is a first-time setup wizard.
00:29:39 I'm going to click finish just to get through that.
00:29:41 Now the Brave web browser is much more like mainstream browsers in how it behaves.
00:29:46 My whole thing with LibreWolf, the reason I like it so much is because it really cuts
00:29:50 out all of the cruft, and it leaves only what you actually want in a web browser by default.
00:29:54 The Brave browser admittedly has a lot of similarities with Google Chrome and Mozilla
00:29:59 Firefox and Microsoft Edge, in that it's got a lot of extra features that are kind of enabled
00:30:04 by default.
00:30:05 And yes, just like Firefox or Chrome or Edge, you can go and turn off all of those settings
00:30:11 one by one, and I'm about to go and do that now.
00:30:14 But I did want to acknowledge that Brave is not perfect when it comes to UI and UX.
00:30:18 They absolutely do have a lot of little extras that you might or might not get any use out
00:30:22 of.
00:30:23 Now the reason I'm talking about Brave today, even though it's got a lot of those extra
00:30:27 things that I was kind of complaining about earlier, is that it's still a niche web browser
00:30:31 compared to Firefox and Chrome.
00:30:33 You know, there are still many people out there who have not heard of the Brave browser.
00:30:36 And Brave is philosophically different, under the hood.
00:30:39 If you take a look at the organization that runs it, it's a little bit more controversial
00:30:42 than the mainstream options in some ways, but it is very unique.
00:30:46 Brave is kind of built to present an alternative to "big tech."
00:30:50 And the company behind Brave is a competitor to Google.
00:30:53 They're a competitor to the big advertising companies on the internet.
00:30:57 So while there are options out there like un-Googled Chromium that just take Google
00:31:00 Chrome and strip out a bunch of the Google stuff, with Brave you can be very confident
00:31:04 that anything that Google would care about in terms of data harvesting has been removed
00:31:08 from this browser because the Brave company's entire business model relies on getting that
00:31:13 right and stripping those things out.
00:31:15 I actually recall an issue where some of Brave's changes caused Google Recapture to start prompting
00:31:19 users more often than usual because Google wasn't able to fingerprint and keep track
00:31:23 of their machines.
00:31:25 So while inconveniences like that obviously aren't desirable, and Brave did fix that issue,
00:31:29 I think it's a good sign if their privacy work accidentally starts breaking Google's
00:31:33 services that rely on tracking.
00:31:35 I also wanted to talk about Brave because I wanted to draw attention to the fact that
00:31:38 even if you don't like any of these extra features that they add, you can turn a lot
00:31:42 of it off and you can still use it as a really great Chromium-based web browser if you need
00:31:47 a Chromium-based web browser.
00:31:48 You know, some websites out there are just built for Chrome.
00:31:51 They might not work very well in Firefox, which is a problem with the website, but you
00:31:55 as a user might still need to deal with that website.
00:31:57 So Brave is a valid option for doing that.
00:31:59 So to kick things off here, this is a pretty cluttered new tab page we get by default.
00:32:03 I'm going to go down here and click "Customize."
00:32:05 This is going to open up a dialog box here where we can customize the Brave dashboard.
00:32:09 Personally, I like to turn off the background images.
00:32:12 If you're coming from a web browser like Microsoft Edge that gives you Bing images in the background,
00:32:17 you know, sort of a new landscape image every day, it can be nice to have depending on what
00:32:21 you use the computer for and things like that.
00:32:23 Personally, I just like to leave it at the default gradient.
00:32:26 And turning those background images off also turn off the sponsored images, which would
00:32:30 otherwise be on by default.
00:32:31 The Brave stats, I leave those on.
00:32:33 That has to do with Brave's ad blocker, and I'll show you that in a little bit.
00:32:36 Top sites here, this is going to be either favorite sites that you put in manually, so
00:32:41 you can click on those and just basically add some bookmarks to your new tab page here,
00:32:45 or you can have them automatically generated from your frequently visited sites.
00:32:49 Very similar to Firefox.
00:32:50 Brave News, that is way too similar to Firefox Pocket to me, so I am not going to turn that
00:32:55 on.
00:32:56 There's a clock here on the dashboard by default.
00:32:58 I'm going to go ahead and turn that off.
00:33:00 Most computers already have a clock on them, so having that on your new tab page isn't
00:33:04 necessarily super useful.
00:33:05 And finally here we've got cards.
00:33:07 I like to turn all of the cards off.
00:33:09 We can do that by scrolling to the bottom and just turning that option off.
00:33:12 Of course, if you want to use some cards and not others, you can hide them individually
00:33:16 as well.
00:33:17 If we X out of the customized dashboard dialog, we still have a thing here that says scroll
00:33:21 for Brave News.
00:33:22 If we scroll down here, you can click on no thanks to get rid of that.
00:33:25 So now we have a very clean and nice new tab page.
00:33:28 Some of the other things I like to do by default, I don't use Brave Rewards.
00:33:32 I'll talk about that in a little bit, but I do like to right click on that and just
00:33:35 hide that icon.
00:33:36 I also do not use Brave's wallet.
00:33:39 This is a cryptocurrency wallet that you can use if you're into crypto.
00:33:42 I'm going to right click on that and hide that as well, even if I did use cryptocurrency,
00:33:46 which I don't very much.
00:33:47 I wouldn't really want it in my web browser just for security reasons.
00:33:51 I'm going to hit control shift B just to get rid of the bookmarks toolbar, just like in
00:33:55 Firefox.
00:33:56 The first press there enabled it for all tabs, and then the second press disables it for
00:34:00 both the new tab page and all other tabs.
00:34:02 And finally, there are a few more preferences I want to tweak here.
00:34:05 I'm going to go down to this gear icon in the bottom right of the new tab page and click
00:34:09 on that.
00:34:10 It's going to open up our Brave settings.
00:34:11 Down here under appearance, there are a number I like to change.
00:34:14 We're going to switch this over to the dark theme.
00:34:16 If you're on Linux, you can also use a theme to write from your GTK theme.
00:34:20 That works pretty well, but I also like Brave's branded dark theme here.
00:34:24 The show Brave news and address bar button here, that doesn't do anything by default.
00:34:28 That only affects certain web pages, but I'm going to turn that off.
00:34:31 I'm going to turn the use wide address bar on once again to not have that wasted space
00:34:35 on either side.
00:34:36 And I'm going to turn on always show full URLs.
00:34:39 By default, the address bar shows a simplified URL.
00:34:42 It doesn't include things like the protocol at the beginning if it's HTTPS.
00:34:46 I like to see the entire web page that I'm on all the time, so I'm going to turn that
00:34:49 on for more of a classic behavior.
00:34:52 And that is just about it in terms of what I see as necessary adjustments.
00:34:56 Things like Brave rewards, I already turned that off.
00:34:58 You can also turn the tip buttons off here.
00:35:00 Brave is going to inject Brave rewards tip buttons into certain websites, really only
00:35:04 the ones listed here by default, but you can turn that off and then relaunch the browser
00:35:08 to make that go into effect.
00:35:10 And then the web three section down here, that's where your wallet is.
00:35:13 Once again, I already turned that icon off, so there's nothing I really need to do there.
00:35:17 So coming back over to the new tab page, we can go ahead and do the same thing I did in
00:35:21 LibreWolf.
00:35:22 We can go to nerdinthestreet.com to show you an example of a website.
00:35:25 And by default, you can see once again, the advertisement box and my sidebar is not working
00:35:29 very well because the ad is blocked.
00:35:31 Brave actually comes with a custom ad blocker built in and they call it Brave Shields.
00:35:35 So you can turn your shields down to allow advertisements on a website, as you can see
00:35:40 there.
00:35:41 And for most websites that you don't want to see ads on, you can bring your shields up.
00:35:44 The Brave Shields are written in Rust and this is written into the browser.
00:35:48 If you go and take a look at the source code, this is not implemented as an extension.
00:35:51 That's kind of important because like I said, Google toys with the idea of not allowing
00:35:55 ad blockers in the Chromium source code from time to time.
00:35:58 The Brave developers have come out and said, even if Google were to make a change like
00:36:02 that and makes it so extensions can't modify the website appearance, breaking things like
00:36:06 uBlock origin for Chrome, since Brave Shields is implemented as part of their fork, this
00:36:11 would continue to work regardless of what Google does because Brave maintains it at
00:36:14 a lower level in the browser engine.
00:36:16 We can do similar tricks when it comes to hiding content.
00:36:19 I can right click on a thumbnail here.
00:36:20 I can go to Brave, block element if I want to make this image go away.
00:36:24 And once again, I can just drag this slider to the left until it's vague enough to cover
00:36:28 all of these thumbnails.
00:36:29 Then I can click create and that's going to create a rule that blocks all of those.
00:36:33 If I want to undo that, I can come up to my Brave Shields, go to advanced controls and
00:36:36 click on filter lists.
00:36:38 That's going to open up the Brave Shield settings and down here under my custom filters are
00:36:42 going to be the ones that were added through that right click menu.
00:36:44 I'll take that out and click save changes.
00:36:46 And if we refresh, we're back to normal over here.
00:36:48 The Brave Shield is also compatible with easy list filters, that same standardized ad blocking
00:36:54 syntax.
00:36:55 So once again, if I go to twitter.com/knots_network, as you can see, Brave does have working light
00:37:00 and dark mode detection by default.
00:37:02 We do have a what's happening box on our sidebar here by default.
00:37:06 And I'm just going to come down here, copy my ad block rules and I can paste them right
00:37:09 in here to that custom filter section.
00:37:12 If we come over here and refresh, now we no longer have that box there.
00:37:19 So that's pretty much everything I showed you for LibreWolf just within a few minutes
00:37:22 for Brave here.
00:37:23 Once again, it's a web browser.
00:37:24 You know what web browsers do.
00:37:26 You know what you want to do on the internet.
00:37:28 So you should pick out a program that lets you do it easily and with minimal distractions.
00:37:32 Like I said, Brave is based on Chromium and ideologically that may be a downside, but
00:37:36 in practice, it does mean that some websites are going to work a little bit better.
00:37:40 And the other big thing that would make you choose Brave over something like LibreWolf
00:37:43 would be the ecosystem around it.
00:37:45 Since Brave is a company and they've got some quote unquote products of their own.
00:37:49 I'm going to do a web search for Nerd on the Street over here.
00:37:52 And by default, Brave is going to search in Brave Search.
00:37:55 The first time you use it, we get a little box here asking if you want to help improve
00:37:58 it by sending anonymous usage data.
00:38:00 I'm going to click on no thanks over there.
00:38:02 And then we also get a notification down here about another metrics option that's turned
00:38:06 on by default.
00:38:08 You can turn that right off if you want to.
00:38:09 Now I've actually been using Brave Search for quite a while since it was released.
00:38:14 It's a relatively new search engine.
00:38:16 And what makes Brave Search unique is that a lot of other search engines really just
00:38:20 search other search engines.
00:38:21 A famous example being when Microsoft Bing was caught copying Google search engine years
00:38:26 ago, but also things like DuckDuckGo.
00:38:28 DuckDuckGo is a private search engine, but it really just pulls results from Bing, maybe
00:38:32 reorders them a little bit, and then displays them to you.
00:38:35 I mentioned Startpage earlier, which is a proxy website for Google.
00:38:38 So when you search Startpage, it just goes out and searches Google without telling Google
00:38:42 who you are.
00:38:43 And then it turns around and returns the results to you.
00:38:45 What Brave is doing with Brave Search is they've actually got their own web crawlers and their
00:38:49 own database.
00:38:50 So they are really building the search engine from the ground up.
00:38:53 They're trying to compete with Google, not just by reordering Google search results,
00:38:57 but by actually presenting an alternative source for the information, which is an absolutely
00:39:01 huge undertaking.
00:39:02 And I was not expecting it to work very well.
00:39:04 I have found that Brave Search works pretty well for a lot of searches.
00:39:08 Now as you can see here, searching for Nerd in the Street, some of the results were not
00:39:11 quite as relevant.
00:39:12 We've got Nerd Street here at the top, which I think is a financial website or just eSports,
00:39:17 I guess, judging by that tagline there.
00:39:19 And we also get their Twitter page instead of mine showing up.
00:39:22 However, we do get some of my Nerd in the Street videos here.
00:39:24 So they got those right.
00:39:25 Scrolling down here, we've still got a lot more Nerd Street stuff.
00:39:28 So I think they went a little too far with discarding articles and short words like the
00:39:33 on and the in my search query.
00:39:34 But if we go down towards the bottom of the page, we do have Nerd in the Street.com here.
00:39:39 And then they start getting more actual relevant results.
00:39:42 Towards the bottom of the page, but hey, at least I'm on page one.
00:39:45 I have found myself using Brave Search on my phone.
00:39:48 I've got it set as default on Brave there.
00:39:50 And I've also found myself using it even in other web browsers like Firefox on my work
00:39:54 machine sometimes.
00:39:55 In search engines and their algorithms are a little weird.
00:39:58 You really just have to experiment and see for yourself what types of searches are going
00:40:02 to work best in different search engines.
00:40:04 You know, for things like error messages, I do a lot of computer stuff.
00:40:07 So sometimes I need to do web searches for error messages.
00:40:10 Personally, I found that sometimes error messages don't get as many results on Brave as they
00:40:14 do on other search engines or as many relevant results.
00:40:18 Once again, largely because Brave is building this database from the ground up, they might
00:40:21 not have all of GitHub and GitLab and all of developers' independent websites indexed
00:40:26 yet.
00:40:27 And like I said, I adopted Brave Search pretty early on.
00:40:29 So that might have changed since I had those experiences.
00:40:32 But when I search Brave Search and I don't get good results, I just pop over to DuckDuckGo.
00:40:36 Or likewise, when I'm using LibreWolf, if DuckDuckGo doesn't give me any good results,
00:40:40 I can pop over to Brave Search.
00:40:41 It's just good to have another option.
00:40:43 And it's actually really easy to switch back and forth when you need to.
00:40:46 You don't even need to go to a different website.
00:40:49 Over in the Brave Search box, if we type in an exclamation point and then DDG, or you
00:40:54 can also just type D, but I like the full acronym, DDG for DuckDuckGo.
00:40:58 If you type that into your search, then it will actually redirect you over to the same
00:41:02 search on DuckDuckGo.
00:41:04 And over there, they've actually implemented the same thing in reverse.
00:41:06 If you type in exclamation point Brave and hit Enter on DuckDuckGo, it sends you over
00:41:10 to Brave Search.
00:41:11 So these more privacy-focused search engines might not have as good of results all the
00:41:15 time, but they are working together to enable you to find what you're looking for.
00:41:19 Aside from normal search results, we also have image and video search.
00:41:23 And until very recently, Brave was actually sending people over to Bing Images and Google
00:41:27 Images for image search, and the same thing for videos.
00:41:31 When you clicked on one of these items in the menu, it would actually give you a pop-up,
00:41:35 allowing you to select which external website you want to go to, rather than just reskinning
00:41:39 external results, which might give the impression that they're independent.
00:41:43 I assume the delay was because it takes a lot more processing power and storage and
00:41:47 just time and effort to build image and video databases compared to just text web databases.
00:41:53 But they did get their own image and video search online very recently.
00:41:57 It was August 3rd, 2023, when they rolled out their own image and video search.
00:42:01 They've got a blog post on their website talking about that.
00:42:04 I do think that's pretty important because a lot of times, if you don't know what something
00:42:07 is, the quickest way to find out is to do an image search.
00:42:10 It's a lot faster to look at a picture than to have to read a bunch of words just to learn
00:42:13 what a new object or item or name is.
00:42:16 Of course, in this case, it doesn't seem to be working very well because none of these
00:42:19 images are related to Nern of the Street, which once again is just indicative of this
00:42:23 being a relatively new search engine and Nern of the Street being fairly small, even though
00:42:27 Nern of the Street has been around for over a decade.
00:42:29 So there should be some images that Brave can index eventually.
00:42:33 In between those items in the menu, we also have a news page, and then we have something
00:42:37 called Brave Goggles.
00:42:40 This is an interesting feature.
00:42:41 It attempts to sort of make you aware of online bubbles and create your own to suit yourself,
00:42:46 but also switch over to other ones sometimes to get different perspectives.
00:42:50 So you can perform web searches and then change the ranking based on the type of profile that
00:42:56 you would like to search with.
00:42:57 Google would normally be building your profile, and they're going to just give you the profile
00:43:01 and the search result rankings that are going to give you what they think you're going to
00:43:05 click on towards the top.
00:43:06 By default, Brave is not going to have any sort of profile, which is good for avoiding
00:43:10 getting into that bubble.
00:43:12 On the other hand, if you do a lot of specific searches and the default profile doesn't really
00:43:16 suit what you're trying to do with your work very well, it might be kind of annoying to
00:43:19 have to go through and dig for things every single time.
00:43:21 So yeah, Goggles is kind of a feature that addresses that, and once again, it also lets
00:43:25 you see, for instance, news sources on different sides of the political spectrum, so you can
00:43:29 see what the other side is saying about a news story that you're reading about.
00:43:33 If you click on Show More here, there are eight Goggles currently pre-populated by Brave.
00:43:38 This is a really interesting one here, 1K Short, Rerank Results to Remove Pages Found
00:43:42 on the Top 1,000 Most Viewed Websites.
00:43:45 So if you sort of miss the older days of the internet where everything wasn't consolidated
00:43:49 on 10 or 15 really popular websites, you can go here and turn this on, and it'll just show
00:43:53 you obscure websites, for whatever your search term is, of course.
00:43:57 I have not personally used Goggles a whole lot myself.
00:44:00 I tend to stick to the No Profile option, but that is a feature that's in development,
00:44:04 and that's the kind of thing that you see with Brave.
00:44:06 You see these sort of almost radical features that they're developing that make you think,
00:44:11 you know, wow, if this works how they're saying it's going to work, it would be pretty cool
00:44:15 and pretty useful.
00:44:16 It might work out, it might not work out, and they might scrap it eventually.
00:44:19 But like I said, if you're excited about using web browsers, if you want sort of those new
00:44:23 features introduced from time to time, Brave is going to be an ecosystem that will give
00:44:26 you that while still respecting your privacy.
00:44:29 If we go to brave.com here, we can see what their homepage looks like.
00:44:32 As you can see, their huge headline here, the best privacy online, and right here in
00:44:37 their tagline, ditch big tech.
00:44:39 So they are not shy about that at all.
00:44:41 Like I said, I want to temper that with, you can choose not to use any of those new features
00:44:46 if you don't want to.
00:44:47 But for instance, one of the other things that most people have probably heard of, if
00:44:51 you've heard of Brave, is Brave Rewards.
00:44:53 Going to do a Control F here and search for Rewards, since it's not shown in the top bar
00:44:58 there.
00:44:59 All right, so down here towards the bottom of the page, underneath comparisons with other
00:45:02 web browsers, we've got a link to some of their unique features that are slightly controversial,
00:45:07 depending on who you ask.
00:45:08 They've got the built-in crypto wallet I already mentioned.
00:45:10 They've got some security stuff.
00:45:11 I'm going to show you one of those in a minute.
00:45:13 And then we've got Brave Rewards here.
00:45:15 And I just want to mention what this is really quickly.
00:45:18 Brave Rewards allows you to optionally view ads within the Brave browser Chrome to earn
00:45:23 cryptocurrency.
00:45:24 And the cryptocurrency in Brave, it's BAT, Basic Attention Token.
00:45:28 You can then use that cryptocurrency to tip creators if you want to.
00:45:32 You can either send tips to websites manually, or you can have Brave browsers set up to actually
00:45:38 automatically distribute your tips between all the different websites that you went to
00:45:42 based on how much time you spent on each one.
00:45:44 So if you spent 30% of your time on the web on one particular website, 30% of your monthly
00:45:49 tip allocation that you set up will automatically go to that website.
00:45:53 Now just for the sake of transparency, I do want to say I have the NERD on the Street
00:45:56 website and all of the NERD on the Street YouTube channels added to a Brave creator's
00:46:00 account, which means that Brave users can send tips to the website to me via the Brave
00:46:06 Rewards system.
00:46:08 And I can also get those automated tips from the users who had that set up.
00:46:11 Now with that said, the average amount that I make from that, I actually have made a little
00:46:15 bit of money from it, but it typically works out to about a dollar or two per month.
00:46:19 So it's not paying any bills or anything like that.
00:46:22 I did want to mention I have it set up since I was talking about this.
00:46:25 But when Brave was first launched, they actually announced a feature where they were going
00:46:29 to inject their own ads into websites that enabled it.
00:46:33 And one of the reasons I initially went and signed up for Brave Creators was to disable
00:46:37 that feature for NERDonTheStreet.com.
00:46:39 For the people who have not been following Brave, but have just heard of that headline
00:46:42 earlier on when it was first created, that feature is no longer in existence.
00:46:47 Brave does not inject ads into websites.
00:46:49 As you can see here, there's a list of ad formats in Brave.
00:46:52 Basically, you're looking at ads in your search for that search engine.
00:46:55 You can have ads on the new tab page, ads in Brave News if you have that enabled at
00:46:59 all.
00:47:00 And you can also get push notifications if you're using Brave on your mobile device.
00:47:03 So for an example of a new tab page here, you can see there's just a little ad stuck
00:47:07 at the bottom left, and it looks like this image has been replaced for one for a car
00:47:11 ad.
00:47:12 So it's a really easy way you can make a dollar per month or something, depending on how much
00:47:15 these advertisers are paying.
00:47:17 And you can either withdraw that using a crypto exchange system and get real money for viewing
00:47:23 their ads, or you can turn around and tip that to creators using the Brave Rewards program.
00:47:27 So the rewards icon that I almost immediately disabled, that is a thing that exists in Brave.
00:47:32 And if it sounds cool, if you like the idea of making websites no longer depend on third
00:47:37 party ads such as Google, but still helping them exist by sending tips to them, then you
00:47:42 can go and turn that on.
00:47:43 I actually know some people personally who have that feature enabled and who deposit
00:47:47 a few bucks a month in it for tipping.
00:47:49 That's the kind of feature that I think it would be really awesome if everybody used
00:47:52 it.
00:47:53 At such a low volume of users actually choosing to use it, it's not upsetting big tech anytime
00:47:59 soon.
00:48:00 But like a lot of the Brave ecosystem, once again, it's a cool idea.
00:48:03 Now I mentioned before that you can get push notifications on your mobile device, and that
00:48:07 is because Brave also has options for iOS and Android in addition to the desktop stuff.
00:48:13 LibreWolf is only available for desktop as of right now.
00:48:16 You know, LibreWolf is based on Firefox.
00:48:18 And if you turn on Firefox sync in LibreWolf, you can sync your bookmarks and tabs with
00:48:23 Firefox on mobile.
00:48:24 So there is an ecosystem story there, but LibreWolf themselves are only really managing
00:48:28 the desktop.
00:48:29 Brave does have an option, like I said, for mobile.
00:48:31 And it is nice because they have their Brave Shields on mobile.
00:48:34 By default, you get an ad blocker on your mobile phone, which is even more useful on
00:48:38 a mobile device than it is on desktops.
00:48:40 You know, ads are annoying on desktops.
00:48:42 But if I come here to the new tab page, I really like this statistics block.
00:48:45 It shows how many trackers and ads have been blocked so far, how much bandwidth you've
00:48:49 saved by blocking those.
00:48:51 And then it also estimates, based on your internet speed, how much time you've saved
00:48:55 by not downloading those ads and trackers and things.
00:48:58 These things are sort of estimates.
00:49:00 Brave put out a blog post a while ago about how they estimate these, since you obviously
00:49:04 can't know for sure how big a file would have been without downloading it.
00:49:07 But it is cool to see this add up.
00:49:09 You know, on my main computer, this has gotten up to over a day, over 24 hours that I've
00:49:14 quote unquote "saved" by using the ad blocker that's built into Brave.
00:49:17 Now on your mobile device, this doesn't just save you time, it also saves you bandwidth,
00:49:22 which is more important on mobile because data connections are typically limited.
00:49:25 So if you're browsing out and about without a Wi-Fi connection, let's say you only have
00:49:29 a gigabyte per month of either data total or fast data on your mobile carrier plan.
00:49:34 This can help you stretch that farther when you're browsing, once again, by blocking all
00:49:38 those ads.
00:49:39 A lot of ads on the internet are pictures and things that take up a lot of bandwidth,
00:49:42 relatively speaking, compared to text.
00:49:45 So having the shield on mobile is helpful.
00:49:47 And if you go and grab Firefox for mobile, it's not going to have uBlock Origin built
00:49:51 in.
00:49:52 You know, the plugin ecosystem for mobile devices is not the same as it is on desktops.
00:49:56 There are ways that you can get third-party ad blocking plugins working on mobile.
00:50:00 Brave is providing a big convenience by having that built right in by default.
00:50:04 On iOS, that is going to be using the Safari WebKit engine because that's what Apple mandates.
00:50:09 But the ad blocker is still there, and then on Android, of course, it's going to be using
00:50:13 the Chromium engine underneath.
00:50:14 Complementing that mobile version, we also do have Sync here in Brave.
00:50:17 If you go to the menu, you can click on Sync.
00:50:19 It'll open up the Sync setup page.
00:50:21 The Sync feature built into Brave is an interesting implementation.
00:50:24 It's actually the same protocol that Chromium uses.
00:50:27 It stores your data on Brave-administered servers, not Google-owned servers.
00:50:31 Brave uses Amazon Web Services, AWS, for their hosting in general.
00:50:34 And the Sync here actually doesn't create an account of any sort.
00:50:38 It basically generates a very secure password and displays it as a QR code, or as an alternative
00:50:44 to using a QR code, it also turns it into one of those 24/25 word passphrases, similar
00:50:50 to a crypto wallet, which is very on-brand for Brave.
00:50:53 And then you go and scan the QR code with another device or enter that passphrase into
00:50:57 another device, and then it authenticates with the Brave servers so that Sync can work.
00:51:02 Now, Google Chrome and Chromium allow syncing, and they do have a client-side encryption
00:51:07 option that is optional.
00:51:09 If you want to, when you're using Google Chrome or Chromium, when you're syncing with the
00:51:13 Google servers so that things like your browser history and your open tabs can be accessed
00:51:18 between different devices, you can choose to go and enable an extra setting in Chromium,
00:51:22 and you can enter in a separate password that is just used to encrypt all of that stuff
00:51:27 so that theoretically Google will not have access to any of it, even if you're using
00:51:31 Google Chrome.
00:51:32 Brave has that on by default.
00:51:33 It's the same type of encryption that Google offers optionally, but Brave has it enabled
00:51:38 for everybody, and it's going to use that super secure password/passphrase/QR code so
00:51:44 that, once again, Brave won't be able to see anything that you're syncing.
00:51:47 If you used Brave Sync a while ago, you might want to give it another try.
00:51:51 I know the first generation of Brave Sync that I personally tried out back when it was
00:51:56 new, it was more of a peer-to-peer solution, and it was not the most reliable thing.
00:52:00 The current iteration of Brave Sync, which is v2, they specifically rebased it to use
00:52:05 a lot of the features and technologies built into Google Chromium intentionally so that
00:52:09 the syncing is more reliable.
00:52:11 So there's that.
00:52:12 And one other little cool feature I want to show you about Brave, right here on brave.com,
00:52:17 you can see we've got a strange button in the address bar that says Tor.
00:52:21 So this is really pretty neat.
00:52:23 Most web browsers these days have a feature that is something like private windows.
00:52:27 Google Chrome sort of invented this feature.
00:52:30 They call it incognito windows.
00:52:32 And when you open up a private or an incognito window in any other web browser, it's going
00:52:36 to not save anything that you're doing to your local device.
00:52:40 It's going to not save the pages you browse to in your browsing history.
00:52:44 It's going to clear all of the cookies, which logs out of any websites that you logged into
00:52:49 when you close your last tab from that private window or from all private windows.
00:52:54 Now as you can see in LibreWolf here, there's a message that the private window feature
00:52:58 does not make you anonymous.
00:53:00 The reason that is, is because there is a lot of infrastructure on the internet.
00:53:04 And basically when you go to a website, you're going to have to get the traffic to your computer,
00:53:08 your internet service provider is going to see the traffic if you're on a corporate network
00:53:11 or a network with parental controls, whoever's administering your network can view the traffic.
00:53:16 So if I go here to a website in LibreWolf, I'm going to go to ipchicken.com.
00:53:21 There are a lot of websites out there that can tell you what your current IP address
00:53:24 is.
00:53:25 Now I'm going to block out most of this IP address just because I don't live alone right
00:53:28 now and I don't want to screw over the other person who I'm using their internet connection
00:53:32 by accidentally inviting a DDoS attack or something.
00:53:35 But you can see part of my IP address here.
00:53:37 And if I go and open a private window and I go to ipchicken.com, you can see that IP
00:53:43 address is the same.
00:53:44 By the way, that also does mean the website can see who you are based on that public IP
00:53:48 address.
00:53:49 So I'm going to close those.
00:53:50 I'm going to come on over to Brave again, and I'm going to go to ipchicken.com.
00:53:55 We're going to see the same IP address here and I can go and I can open up a new private
00:53:59 window, which is going to be like a Google Chrome incognito window.
00:54:02 I can go to ipchicken.com.
00:54:04 We've got the same IP.
00:54:05 However, I also have another option in the menu here that is new private window with
00:54:10 Tor.
00:54:11 Brave has actually implemented an entire Tor client in their web browser.
00:54:16 And this is a feature that is almost a little too heavy to where it makes me raise my eyebrow
00:54:21 and say, "Do I really need all that in a web browser?"
00:54:23 But it's cool enough that I give it a pass because you can click on new private window
00:54:27 with Tor.
00:54:28 We're going to connect to the Tor network here.
00:54:32 Took a second to start loading there.
00:54:35 And normally when you connect to Tor, if you've never done this before manually, you normally
00:54:39 would download the Tor web browser, which is actually a build of Firefox with the Tor
00:54:43 plugin built in.
00:54:44 And it connects you to the Tor network.
00:54:46 If you're not familiar at all with Tor, it stands for the Onion Router.
00:54:49 And it's basically a decentralized distributed VPN network.
00:54:54 Rather than sending your traffic through one company's server before it gets to your website,
00:54:58 like with a normal VPN connection, Tor is going to send your traffic through multiple
00:55:02 internal relays run by volunteers.
00:55:05 And then finally to somebody who has volunteered to be a Tor exit node, then it will go from
00:55:09 them to the website and then back into the exit node and through the entire network back
00:55:14 to you.
00:55:15 Now, simply connecting to Tor does not make you a relay on the network.
00:55:18 And the whole point of the multi-hop design is that no one party knows both the source
00:55:22 and the destination of the traffic.
00:55:24 So just connecting to Tor by default, theoretically should not pose any legal or safety risk.
00:55:29 But now that we're connected to Tor, I can go to ipchicken.com and it's going to load
00:55:33 just a little bit slower, but you can see the IP address is now different.
00:55:37 So ipchicken saw that data come from a Tor exit node and my ISP, for me, it happens to
00:55:42 be Comcast Xfinity right now.
00:55:44 They're not able to see that I just went to this website.
00:55:46 They saw all the other times I just went to it, but they couldn't see me go to it this
00:55:49 time and they won't see anything that I'm doing in any of these Tor tabs.
00:55:53 So this is a really interesting feature to me because a lot of different companies and
00:55:57 web browsers out there are making their own VPNs.
00:56:00 They're trying to sell you their own VPNs.
00:56:02 We see this with Mozilla Firefox.
00:56:04 Like I showed you earlier, if we go back to getfirefox.com, up here in the top right,
00:56:09 well now we've got a download Firefox button, but if we're already on Firefox or LibreWolf,
00:56:13 we've got a getmozillavpn button.
00:56:16 And if you're using Mozilla's VPN, there is still a party who can see all of the traffic
00:56:20 that you're sending and receiving, and that's Mozilla.
00:56:22 You're paying them to care about your privacy, but that is a paid service.
00:56:26 And I find it really interesting.
00:56:28 You know, I would see a VPN service as being something that Brave would have no trouble
00:56:32 adding to their anti-big tech agenda here.
00:56:35 I'm kind of surprised that Brave is not offering a paid VPN service, but instead they're offering
00:56:40 something better and more private and free.
00:56:43 They have basically bundled a free and open source VPN into their browser here.
00:56:47 That's sort of how you can think about that feature.
00:56:49 So if you don't want to use it, if you don't do anything on the internet that you feel
00:56:53 like you need to hide from your ISP, you never need to open that option.
00:56:57 You know, I don't think I've ever actually used that option personally on my own computers
00:57:01 when I'm using Brave.
00:57:02 I've never clicked on that button intentionally until this video when I was demoing it for
00:57:07 you, but it is absolutely an option.
00:57:09 And once again, it's kind of the more exciting part of web browsers.
00:57:13 It's a new and exciting feature.
00:57:14 No other web browser that I know of is doing that.
00:57:17 So instead of buying a VPN from Mozilla or Opera or whoever, Tor has its downsides and
00:57:21 you do want to be a good steward of the Tor network if you're going to use it.
00:57:25 You don't want to abuse it because that just hurts everybody.
00:57:27 And just like Brave, Tor has its sort of darker potential uses and you may have heard about
00:57:32 it in controversial areas of the news.
00:57:35 But yeah, I wanted to demo that feature because it is something very unique to Brave right
00:57:38 now.
00:57:39 And that's just about everything there is to show you in Brave.
00:57:42 Once again, it's a web browser.
00:57:43 It loads web pages.
00:57:45 Just like LibreWolf, we have an arrow up in the top right you can click on to see your
00:57:49 open tabs.
00:57:50 You can search through them.
00:57:51 And we also have a list of our recently closed tabs that we can collapse there if we want
00:57:55 to.
00:57:56 But yeah, it really just does everything you would expect from a web browser.
00:57:59 Here if I click download, they're going to detect I'm on Linux and send me to their Linux
00:58:03 download page.
00:58:04 Brave also has first class support for Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint.
00:58:07 They also have first class support for Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat.
00:58:11 Brave has an openSUSE package.
00:58:13 LibreWolf does not even have a native openSUSE package.
00:58:15 So that's cool that they have that here.
00:58:17 And then Brave has an official snap package.
00:58:19 If you're on Ubuntu and you want to install it with auto updates, you can do it through
00:58:24 snap.
00:58:25 You can see here it is official.
00:58:26 It's maintained by Brave.
00:58:27 They actually say it's not working as well as the deb package yet.
00:58:30 So they recommend using the regular one up here.
00:58:33 They've got all the same stuff for their beta channel if you want to hop on that or their
00:58:36 nightly channel.
00:58:37 Down here they've got unofficial packages.
00:58:39 It's nice that they have these on their homepage.
00:58:41 They're not so corporate as to exclude those.
00:58:44 On Arch it's in the AUR.
00:58:45 They've also got an unofficial flat pack that's community maintained.
00:58:49 So that is your universal package format option you can use to install on many different Linux
00:58:53 distributions in a semi-sandboxed fashion.
00:58:56 And Brave also has a solus package that's maintained by one of the solus package maintainers.
00:59:00 So that's pretty cool.
00:59:01 If I scroll up just a little bit here, they did have a link to their GitHub profile as
00:59:05 well.
00:59:06 So they've got the whole GitHub organization here and you can look through all their different
00:59:09 projects.
00:59:10 They've got the Brave core repository here and that's going to include among other things
00:59:14 the Chromium source code since Brave is based on Chromium.
00:59:18 And they've also got the Brave browser repository here.
00:59:21 Once again, if you've looked at Google Chromium source code online, Google is using a sort
00:59:25 of custom or at least antiquated interface.
00:59:28 It's not quite as easy to submit bug reports and it doesn't look quite as pretty when you're
00:59:32 viewing the code.
00:59:33 I think it's pretty neat that Brave actually puts themselves out here, not even on GitLab,
00:59:36 but just GitHub.
00:59:37 I actually, I really like GitLab.
00:59:39 GitLab is not owned by Microsoft.
00:59:41 So LibreWolf being in GitLab, I can certainly get behind that.
00:59:44 I understand why they're on it.
00:59:45 But Brave over here is on GitHub, which has a lot more users.
00:59:49 And you can see here, they've got 5,000 issues open right now.
00:59:52 I certainly sympathize with them.
00:59:54 They've got 22,000 issues closed.
00:59:56 So they are going through these.
00:59:57 They do use this bug tracker.
00:59:59 And if you have an issue with Brave browser, it's very, very easy to just go.
01:00:02 If you've got a GitHub account, you can just create a new issue very quickly.
01:00:06 Obviously, you want to read their issue templates and submit it properly.
01:00:09 But anyone who has concerns about the company behind Brave or anything like that, you know,
01:00:14 you can really be pretty assured because they are completely open source.
01:00:17 They're not just publishing the source code, but they're operating in a very open source
01:00:21 way.
01:00:22 And you can actually watch the pull requests come in.
01:00:24 You can see when they're merging them.
01:00:25 You can see all the commits that are being made.
01:00:27 And you can go and you can read the release notes right here on GitHub for every single
01:00:31 platform that's supported.
01:00:32 And those are going to show you notable bugs that have been fixed.
01:00:35 And it's also going to show you what version of Chromium each release is based off of.
01:00:39 The current version of Brave is based on Chromium 114.0.5735.110.
01:00:45 You can thank Google for that very long version number.
01:00:48 And if we go over to the Chromium source, we can see the latest tag here is 116.0.5827.1.
01:00:56 So Brave is a little bit more involved of a developed product, unlike Librewolf that's
01:01:00 going to be very quick to update same day for Firefox updates.
01:01:04 Brave is not always going to be on the latest released Chromium 116.0.547.0.114 if we go
01:01:10 back here.
01:01:11 But they are still generally pretty up to date.
01:01:13 This is a release that was made in the last week.
01:01:15 You can see they have nightly releases every single day.
01:01:18 So yeah, that's just about everything there is to talk about in terms of Brave source
01:01:21 code.
01:01:22 And that is just about everything there is to talk about in terms of these web browsers.
01:01:26 This video took a lot of time and effort to plan.
01:01:28 I know it seems like a really simple video, just showing you some web browsers.
01:01:32 But you know, the reasons that you would look for alternative web browsers are kind of nuanced.
01:01:36 Some of these features in both of these browsers are kind of niche.
01:01:39 And you might or might not feel the need to check either of these out.
01:01:42 I hope that I have alerted you to one or more web browsers you weren't previously aware
01:01:47 of.
01:01:48 Librewolf is a much newer project than Brave is.
01:01:50 I wanted to do a video about Librewolf since I heard about it, just because it's such a
01:01:54 community effort and I really, really like what they're doing.
01:01:58 And they've really gotten better and better at the polish on their end when it comes to
01:02:01 properly doing the rebrand without leaving broken features in place.
01:02:05 Brave, on the other hand, has been covered by at least tech media for quite a while.
01:02:09 And I do think there are some misconceptions out there when it comes to, you know, what
01:02:13 kind of user you have to be to enjoy Brave.
01:02:16 On my main machine, I'm currently using both of these browsers.
01:02:19 I've got them both open.
01:02:20 I have more tabs open in each of them than I should probably have open at all.
01:02:23 But these are my go-to's, both of these.
01:02:26 So I think either of these are a solid option.
01:02:28 You can check the links out in the description of this video for how to get either of them.
01:02:32 Let me know down in the comments section if you enjoyed this or, you know, if there are
01:02:35 other web browsers that you use or you prefer over these, tell me why.
01:02:39 You know, I know there are web browsers out there like Vivaldi, which isn't quite open
01:02:43 source, but it's sort of source available-ish and is very customizable to its credit.
01:02:48 And then there's more oldies like Opera.
01:02:50 You've got your platform-specific ones like GNOME Web or Falcon.
01:02:54 But my intent with this video was to show you some browsers that are very much usable
01:02:57 for mainstream regular old users.
01:03:00 So next time your web browser annoys you or next time you think, you know, maybe I should
01:03:04 try something else, check out one of these.
01:03:07 They both have built-in ad blockers and they are both very great for privacy.
01:03:11 Another place you can discuss this stuff is the forums at nerdonthestreet.com.
01:03:14 You can go here into the general chat or the tech talk.
01:03:18 And once again, talk about your favorite web browsers there.
01:03:20 I've been doing a lot of little quality of life tweaks and improvements to the nerdonthestreet.com
01:03:24 website, the styling.
01:03:26 I'm going to continue doing more.
01:03:28 So definitely check out nerdonthestreet.com to see those updates as well as more content
01:03:32 that I'll post.
01:03:33 But for now, I'm Jacob Kaufman.
01:03:34 I'm the Nerd on the Street and I'll see you guys in the next one.
01:03:36 Bye.
01:03:37 [MUSIC PLAYING]

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