Brave's browser, still at version 0.7, speeds up the Web by stripping out not just ads but also other page elements that track online behavior and Web elements used to deliver ads. He hopes to strike a balance between preserving your privacy and eventually delivering ads that are actually useful to you.
How does Brave walk that fine line? The browser infers from your browsing history what you're interested in, such as gourmet coffee or European cars, and shares industry-standard categories with publishers who can then place appropriate ads without knowing anything else about you. Brave, the company, says it doesn't know or want to know any of this information.
For now, there are no ads. There are only empty patches that show where ads used to be. Once Brave has enough people using the browser, Eich hopes publishers will supply ads based on the limited information the browser shares. That will also be Brave's revenue source.
"We're going to have to prove ourselves to get that payment," he said.
If it can draw enough users, perhaps 10 million or so, Brave plans to offer another reason besides performance and privacy to use its browser: money. A little advertising revenue, maybe enough for a cup of coffee each month, could be returned to users in the form of credit that would function like a subscription to pay publishers to remove some ads.
Eich and his team built Brave out of Chromium, which is the foundation for Google's Chrome browser, which leaves most of the actual development and security support to Google. Why not use Firefox, into which Eich poured so much effort? Because Chrome is more widely used and therefore better tested by developers who want to make sure their websites work properly, he said.
"Chromium is the safe bet for us," he said.