These obviously guesstimated statistics are a thinly veiled attempt to promote Brave, right?
I'm always surprised that Brave is so popular among the HN crowd. I guess that cryptocurrencies are the hot new thing, but Brave's alleged future business model is "hide ads from web pages, and then show our own". That's shockingly sketchy.
Using a built-in cryptocurrency to convince users to do their marketing for them under the promise that they might get rich in future when the value goes up is, admittedly, clever, if evil.
I was initially interested in Brave because of the crypto integration, but as soon as I installed it I all but forgot about it. The real killer features are speed, privacy, and ad blocking by default.
It's not perfect by any stretch. When I was on Android I used it as my default; now I'm on iOS and Safari is fine. I sold my personal MBP, and now I only use my work MBP for light browsing sometimes (Opera) and my home desktop/gaming rig very rarely indeed recently. Brave makes up maybe 5% of my browser usage right now, but I still recommend it to friends. It's good at what it does, and the crypto stuff feels very much like an afterthought.
My wild guess on Brave is that there are multiple and conditional plans. One, disclosed plan might work for bootstrapping. The actual/longer-term plan(s) might kick in once they have sufficient money&users, or when the bootstrap runs into regulatory or civil legal trouble. (Or maybe they Uber right through regulatory trouble, if they have enough users and money by then.)
I have a complementary wild guess that someone has worked out an ethical philosophy argument in which Brave's plans made sense. It could conceivably include "this is war" (e.g., crucial importance of liberty-ish principles and the Internet, dangerous powerful aggressors, failures of legislation and enforcement authorities), "the ends justify the means", and perhaps an assumption of "we won't be evil".
(My first pick would be a world in which US and non-US legislatures are willing to genuinely and utterly smash certain dotcom practices and thinking. My second pick would be to light a fire under Mozilla, to be more aggressive and fearless, at the same time Mozilla's funding model is redone, to remove conflicts of interest (and push out anyone who would actually rather be at a dotcom). But I'm kinda giving Brave some space, for the moment, as one of the possible third alternatives, since maybe they can do good things Mozilla can't/won't, or maybe their role is to provide additional shakeup pressure on Mozilla.)
I use Brave on my Android because it's fast and mobile-ready (unlike Firefox) and it blocks ads and trackers by default. I don't need the crypto stuff, and I with I could hide the icon from the URL bar, but I don't care that much.
I read too that they had plans to switch ads in all pages for their own ads or some crap like that. If they pull that off on me I will switch to something else.
Now that Chrome has become the new IE of the web, I sometimes have to switch to a Chromium-based browser for some sites to work. For this, I rely on Ungoogled-Chromium.
I feel like I'm the only person who's skipped chrome all together.
IE(because there wasn't much choice) -> Mozilla -> Firefox -> Palemoon
I keep firefox installed because some sites don't play nice with palemoon, but i've never used chrome for any extended period. I played with chromium a while ago but I didn't like it.
I've never really understood why chrome became so popular, when I tried it, it felt like a step back fromm firefox in every way. Sure it's better than IE, but that's not really a very difficult thing to accomplish. I'd rather use lynx than IE.
I tried to build a timeline, but couldn't. I've switch back and forth too much. At various times, pretty much every browser was ahead in some respect and worth my interest. After a while, some other implementation would pull ahead and I'd switch.
Right now, I'm almost using a different browser on every device:
Safari on my iPhone X and iPad Pro
Opera on my MBP for browsing, Firefox sometimes for development
Brave on my Windows-based gaming computer
I'm always surprised that Brave is so popular among the HN crowd. I guess that cryptocurrencies are the hot new thing, but Brave's alleged future business model is "hide ads from web pages, and then show our own". That's shockingly sketchy.
Using a built-in cryptocurrency to convince users to do their marketing for them under the promise that they might get rich in future when the value goes up is, admittedly, clever, if evil.