Brave has official packages for Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE, optimized for releases that are a couple of years old, but which should still work.On an Asus PC running Windows 8.1, I cannot download Brave for the first time because 'The download failed' and keeps failing (see two screencaps). Snap packages are also available, although the download page warns that they are less polished. Community built packages are also available for Arch, Manjaro, Solus, and Flatpak. Regardless of how you install, Brave opens on a dashboard that has to be bypassed by clicking on the Home button before you can begin to browse. However, before you browse, you will probably want to click the Settings tab to customize the browser (Figure 2). The tab includes the usual appearance choices, as well as settings for a cryptocurrency wallet, a secure search engine, Chrome extensions, and peer-to-peer networking. At the bottom is a grab bag of settings that includes autofill for passwords, payment methods and addresses, download directories, and hardware interaction. Overall, the Settings tab is a mixture of the ordinary and trendy that is convenient but not outstanding. You could get most of these settings from extensions, although installing them would take more time. The same is true of other features, such as the built-in QR code reader.įigure 6: Security settings can be set separately for each web page. Unfortunately, Brave’s privacy and security settings are only half the story. If I sound hesitant about Brave, that is because Brave’s attempt to combine profit with privacy and security often appears to be a contradiction. To start with, the home page claims that it lets users browse “up to 6x faster,” and the browser even keeps track of the time that it has supposedly saved you. Yet even allowing for the ambiguity of “up to,” this statement is wide off the mark.

On my system, Brave opens and refreshes pages sluggishly, which is only to be expected when the Tor Browser is rerouting through onion sites. Similarly, although Brave is faster to begin downloads than Chromium or Firefox, if anything, its download speed seems fractionally slower than either. True, the speed is increased if Tor Browser is turned off, but it seems the marketing claim of greater speed is hard to reconcile with the claim of “a safer Internet.” After a day of use in preparation for this review, even Brave itself only claimed to have saved me five seconds.

Installing brave