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Over the last twelvemonth, advertizement blockers, advertizing blocking, and malvertising — malicious advertising served past ad networks — have all been major news. Mozilla's former CEO, Brandon Eich, has launched a new browser, dubbed Dauntless, he claims volition solve the problem. Unlike Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, Brave is configured by default to block harmful ads, limit cookie-based tracking, and eliminate tracking pixels.

Bravabilities

Mandatory HTTPS and less tracking? Expert.

Dauntless is designed to block so-called "programmatic advertising," or ads purchased by digital networks, as opposed to deals and content negotiated by humans. In theory, programmatic ad ownership increases efficiency and improves results, since the ads are at present purchased and bid on by machines with incredibly sophisticated algorithms rather than by fragile meatbags. In practise, as we covered recently, these systems are easily exploited and are sometimes used to distribute malicious code.

Brave: Less a cake and more a substitution

Here's the take hold of with Brave, though. While Dauntless's marketing makes much of blocking malicious advertising, it doesn't prevent ads from being shown — it only changes what y'all see. Hither'due south how Eich describes the system:

Brave browsers cake everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that get-go the programmatic advertising "dirty piping", impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals. By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot (so users don't accept to endure, fifty-fifty a few canaries per screen size-profile, with advertizement delays and battery draining). We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie.

Instead of seeing whatever ads a publisher has placed on their site, you'll see Dauntless's targeted ads. Brave yet uses programmatic advertising, but will partner with specific advertisement networks that theoretically have better security practices. Brave will return 55% of ad acquirement to publishers and requite 15% of it to the browsers' users. Another 15% of the advertising revenue goes to the ad network, and Dauntless presumably keeps the final fifteen% for itself.

It's an interesting concept, particularly the role where users receive a cut of the proceeds — just it's not articulate how meaningfully unlike this approach would be. As nosotros discussed earlier this month, the very nature of programmatic advertising makes it difficult to perform security checks and guarantees. Brave undercuts the power of websites to control their own digital experiences. While I understand that many users might view that as a proficient thing, it's yet another example of a company trying to siphon control and revenue away from the visitor actually producing the content. There'south a saying: "If all your traffic comes from Facebook, it's not your traffic." The same concept applies to Brave and the idea of monetizing the browser in this fashion.

Eich has raised roughly $two.5 million in angel investor funding thus far, and the CEO claims he needs a stable user base of roughly seven meg users to prove the system actually works. Correct now, at that place'south no Brave binary executable you can download — the program but hit version 0.seven, and you'll need to be able to compile it if you want to test-bulldoze it. The program is accepting applications for beta testing, but in that location'due south currently a waiting list.

As an experiment, I'd exist curious to run into how Brave plays out. But I'm not thrilled about the thought of a browser that substitutes its own ads for what'southward supposed to exist on a page. We've seen tertiary-party utilities practice this for years — almost ever with terrible results. Advert injections similar this often impairment page formatting or cause rendering bug, and while Eich has pledged to be a good citizen with minimal ads, there's no guarantee that Brave'due south "ane-size fits all" advertising system would be sufficient to really maintain a site.

Ad networks also have little reason to cooperate with the Web browser. From the ad visitor's perspective, they're ownership infinite on a website, and so paying Brave once more to display the content that should've been shown in the get-go identify.