Brave doesn't have a unique User-Agent.
"Removed Brave from the User Agent HTTP header to reduce fingerprinting"
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/CHANGELO...
In Has Chrome fully taken over yet?brave
browser-laptop
JavaScript2016–2022
brave / browser-laptop · Archived
browser-laptop
[DEPRECATED] Please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser for the current version of Brave
35Distinct people
44Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
[DEPRECATED] Please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser for the current version of Brave
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- brave/muon · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- brave/brave-browser · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:03:30 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year44 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-01-20 16:01:34 UTC to 2022-03-18 11:02:54 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 1 | 11 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 0 | 13 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Brave Browser
Desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Deprecation notice: this repository is for the older Muon (our fork of Electron) version of Brave.
The newer version of the browser (brave-core) can be found here.
Development is being wound down on this version as issues are migrated to the new code-base
If you're experiencing issues with Brave or would like to contribute, please check out the new code-base instead
For other versions of our browser, please see:
iPhone - brave/browser-ios
Android - brave/browser-android-tabs
Downloads
To download the latest release, see our releases page.
You can also visit our website to get the latest stable release (along with a more user-friendly download page).
The Muon version of Brave has only one active release channel: Release. This will be deprecated as we move to brave-core. Both the Beta channel and Developer channel are already using the brave-core code-base.
Community
Join the Q&A community if you'd like to get more involved with Brave. You can ask for help,
discuss features you'd like to see, and a lot more. We'd love to have your help so that we can continue improving Brave.
Useful documentation
See CONTRIBUTING.md for tips and guidelines about contributing.
See docs/style.md for information on styling.
See docs/tests.md for information on testing, including how to run a subset of the tests.
See docs/debugging.md for information on debugging.
See docs/translations.md to learn how you can help us with translations (localization).
See docs/linuxInstall.md for information on installing the browser on Linux distributions.
Running from source
If you're setting up using Windows, please see the Building on Windows wiki entry for a full walkthrough.
For other platforms (macOS, Linux) You'll need certain packages installed before you can build and run Brave locally.
Prerequisites
the current LTS version of nodejs
Install from your package manager, nvm, or download from https://nodejs.org
npm version 5 or greater (to make use of the package-lock.json)
On Debian / Ubuntu /Mint
apt-get install build-essential rpm ninja-build
On Fedora
dnf install rpm-build
dnf group install "Development Tools" "C Development Tools and Libraries"
Installation
After installing the prerequisites:
Clone the git repository from GitHub:
# For beta testers:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
# For devs over HTTPS:
git clone https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
# For devs over SSH:
git clone git@github.com:brave/browser-laptop.git
Open the working directory:
cd browser-laptop
Install the Node dependencies:
npm install
Instead of npm install you may also install with yarn running yarn install.
Troubleshooting
Additional notes on troubleshooting installation issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.
Preconfigured VMs
Some platforms are available as pre-configured VMs. See the readme for details.
Running Brave
To run a development version of the browser requires a few steps. The easiest way is just to use two
terminals. One terminal can be used just to watch for changes to the code
npm run watch
Now actually run Brave in another terminal
npm start
Some errors related to brave/electron update can be fixed by doing a clean install:
rm -rf node_modules/
npm install
If this does not work, please clear out your ~/.electron first and try again.
Running webdriver tests
To run the webdriver tests
npm run watch-test or npm run watch-all
Now run tests in another terminal
npm test
See docs/tests.md for more information.
Port
Brave uses port 8080 to communicate between its client and server sides by default. If you are using port 8080 for something else (e.g. a web proxy) then you can set the node config to make it use a different one.
e.g.
npm config set brave:port 9001
Additional notes on troubleshooting development issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.
Running inside of a development version of Muon
By default, we provide pre-built binaries when you npm install with our own fork of electron-prebuilt.
If you want to modify the code to Muon (Brave's Electron fork), then you'll need to build it. An example of why you might do that would be exposing a new event to the webview (from Muon).
To start this process, you'll want to check out our browser-laptop-bootstrap repo. From there, you can follow the steps in our wiki to get up and running.
Packaging for bundles, installers, and updates
Please see our wiki entry for more information about packaging.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
13 sourcesThe level of irony is even deeper.
Brave is supposed to protect the privacy but in reality, their business model is about ads.
It's like pedophiles giving advices on how to protect your kids from danger.
Of course they know about it, and I wouldn't give my kids to them.
Brave is essentially trying to become a mix between a pay-to-surf and an rogue ad replacement software.
They have dozens of millions of dollars raised (= in debt), this is very big money to pay back at least 5 times.
By definition, since they are an ad company, they are ok to block the trackers, just not the ones that affects them.
For example, Brave doesn't block Yahoo & Bing ads and trackers, why ?
Advertiser pays Microsoft Bing, who pays Yahoo, who pays DuckDuckGo, who pays Brave.
To verify it, you can make a search on DuckDuckGo using Brave and check where the ads link
Read the rest
point to by copy-pasting it ;)
Of course technically they could block these trackers but they are never going to do it.
The is the main revenue source of Brave, and this is one of the big reasons why DuckDuckGo is growing fast.
Monetize your search history like the old school toolbars.
Looks like they forgot to disclose this little conflict of interest.
If you check the commit history, there are really funny discoveries (woops adobe.com is whitelisted)
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10020
Almost all their commits in some other repos:
https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/commits/master
are around analytics and tracking installs.
Good marketing speech, shady business.
Code links:
JS implementation in Muon-based https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop product:
1. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
2. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
3. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
From Marshall Rose: "the first deals with the delay in before asking for ballots (after a contribution) and the second deals with each delay between submitting each ballot."
New "brave-core" (chromium refork to get front end but w/o Google accounts/sync), the new implementation; narration by Serg Zhukovsky:
"""
here we make a first call https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
which calls that function https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
after the random wait it calls that function https://github.com
Read the rest
/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
and in it’s callback it goes all over again if there are still votes to send
if you are interested in the function that does the randomization, it’s here: https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
"""
The C++ is all new code, not yet released -- bug reports welcome! Thanks.
To be frank, I think the ship has already sailed.
* Where were all these cryptography engineering folk when Google decided that it didn't have to ask any permissions to install autoupdates to Chrome?
* Subsequently, instructions were published on how to disable the autoupdate — published by Google itself, mind you — yet somehow after some time has passed, the same versions of Chrome that were supposed to have stopped looking for updates were somehow able to magically automatically update themselves in the end after a number of releases anyways — so much for the browser being secure against remote execution attacks by a powerful-enough party!
BTW, if you think Brave is any better, they refused to disable the autoupdate. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/1877 TBH, between the lines, I got the impression that it's part of the
Read the rest
business plan, where an outdated browser is basically worthless to them as an investment anyways, so, spending any engineering resources on such causes is fundamentally not worth it. Who cares about the good-will of the user if there are so few alternatives anyways?! So, I basically stopped using Brave at that point, as I didn't feel like being the product.
Mozilla may have gone away with asking for your permission to download and install the update as well, but at least there's still a clear setting in the interface which lets you be the boss, and, compared to the quirks that Brave may offer, at least once configured, you do know they won't go behind your back to do the dirty work anyways.
Brave doesn't promise to block all third-party scripting; that isn't necessarily a bad thing. If we were to block all third-party scripts, the web as a whole would largely crumble. Instead, we are judicious about which scripts we block, and which ones are harmless.
As for transparency, we couldn't be more open. Take it from me, an ex-Microsoft engineer, Brave is an open book. We talk about features before they're shipped, our source is open to all (github.com/brave/browser-laptop, github.com/brave/brave-browser, github.com/brave/browser-core, etc.), and we regularly host AMAs. The openness of this company still, to this day, gives me wonderful culture shock.
With regards to your conversation with one of the Brave team members, do you have a link? I'd love to gather context and establish a frame of reference. The only white lists we have i
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n brave are for ua-strings and siteHacks.
For some websites, we'll identify ourselves as "Brave". To all others, we identify as Chrome. This is for many reasons (which I'm happen to discuss if you're interested), but this is the first white list. The second "white list" would be our siteHacks.js file. This file contains special logic to repair sites which are broken as a result of ad/tracker blocking. But again, this isn't letting flagged scripting through to the user, this is laying our own custom logic on top of an otherwise broken experience.
I hope this explanation helps shed some light on the matter. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please do not hesitate to reach out. Again, we're open and eager to share.
Brave is already working on Tor private tabs though it won't have the same fingerprinting/first-party isolation guarantees as with a Tor Browser, https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/labels/feature/tor Should be shipping soon https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/984231250104733696
In Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into FirefoxOh, the issue has devolved into threats against Brave now by FineHub.
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041
In Is it worth supporting Firefox?They also opened an interesting issue on Brave browser: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041
Looks like their feature detection is based on user agent, and they are angry at Brave for using an user agent that resemble the one Chrome is using.
In Is it worth supporting Firefox?That has already been done [0].
[0] https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
In Hyper 2, Electron based terminalOne must start somewhere. You can use DatHTTPD [0] to mirror your site on HTTPS. There's also additional tools available on the project website [1].
They're also writing specs and working on adding support to Brave [2], or so says the third footnote on that article. Brave also has ongoing work to support IPFS [3].
Long-term, I'm hoping browsers will improve support for registering new protocols through extensions.
[0] https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/announcing-dathttpd
[1] https://datproject.org
[2] https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/universal-publishing-and-th...
[3] https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/9556
In Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace ItGreat article.
However, the days when we could install some plugins and tweak a few settings to restore our privacy are, unfortunately, pretty much over. There’s only so much a plugin can do when it doesn’t have access to the core APIs of the rendering engine or the network stack.
As long as Google and Firefox are incentivized to make money by ads, user tracking and all of the rest, they won’t stop.
Long story short: the business model of the web has to change from one where the default state is to monetize the invasion of our privacy to one where we can control who gets to advertise to us and that our attention is valuable; we should be paid for it.
In short, that’s what the Brave browser is all about: https://brave.com/com465. By default, it blocks ads, tracking scripts, fingerprinting and 3rd party cookies in such a way that most pages
Read the rest
don’t break. It even blocks those cryptocurrency mining scripts that some sites like Salon are using: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/14/salon-disable-ad-blocker-or-....
Brave allows you to pay content creators with a cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Token (BAT) based on the amount of time spent on their sites or as a percentage of a monthly contribution. BAT is based on the Ethereum token standard.
Later this year, Brave users will be able to opt-in to getting paid to watch high quality, relevant ads if they wish. How? By using zero knowledge proofs, Brave can show you these ads without leaking your personal information, based on your browsing history, that never leaves your machine.
Be aware: Brave is in beta; it’s not done yet. It’s based on Chromium but the rest of the tech is under heavy development. It has come a long way in the 3-4 months I’ve been using it regularly. And there are lots of good things in store, including Tor on a per-tab basis, which I’m looking forward to: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Brave-Tor-Suppo...
Brave runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android; even if Brendan Eich of Javascript and Mozilla fame weren’t involved, I’d feel this is the spiritual successor to Firefox: https://brave.com/com465.
Allowing users to control how their browsing history is used for monetization is the future and Brave is way ahead here.
I use Brave everyday as a secondary browser, particularly when I need to access sites that run anti-ad blocking scripts which Brave handles better than any other solution I’m aware of. And of course I use Brave to get familiar with the Brave payments system.
Keep in mind this is a fairly early beta; version 0.20.29 just came out today; dozens of issues and bugs were fixed: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/releases
In Ask HN: Are you using Brave for daily browsing?They run on a fork of Electron:
https://github.com/brave/muon
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
In The browser “Brave” loads major news sites 2x – 8x faster