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

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35Distinct people

44Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

7.9KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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, 6:01:32 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

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
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 GitHub

What Hacker News says

6 sources

pes10k·Dec 28, 2019

Hi, I do privacy research at Brave. Our fingerprinting protections are still being improved (our second round of FP defenses should hit nightly in Jan), but the comments here are wrong; our defenses are much better than Firefox and Chrome. We don't consider as part of our threat model preventing sites from knowing you're using Brave. I'm not aware of any browser or tool that considers this as part of their privacy threat model either (including the terrific Tor Browser Bundle). Our goal is to prevent sites from distinguishing between Brave users. My claim is that our fingerprinting protections are strictly stronger than Firefox and Chrome. A partial list of fingerprinting protections that are enabled by default in Brave are at [1]. Fingerprinting is tricky, and we're tacking the problem in on multiple dimensions. We need to go further,

Read the rest

and expect to have v2 of our defenses in nightly in the next month or two [2], but we're also leading efforts in W3C to address fingerprinting in standards (I'm snyderp, those are my / Brave issues identifying privacy harm in standards) [3], and we're pushing hard to prevent web standards and privacy efforts from being eaten up by vaporware [4]. So, all that is to say, Brave has the most aggressive fingerprinting protections of any general purpose browser, and is getting better. The naysayers are welcome to backup their claims ;) 1: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Fingerprinting-... 2: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5614 3: https://github.com/w3cping/tracking-issues/issues 4: https://brave.com/brave-fingerprinting-and-privacy-budgets/

In Brave Isn't Bad

cnst·Aug 27, 2019

Not only that, but he has another account, @BraveSampson, which links to this one, @jonathansampson, but not the other way around. They used to have a nearly-identical pictures, and, IIRC, linked to each other, but not anymore. Would I be the only one to find it fishy for someone to post such reviews for your competitors whilst pretending that you're an individual not on a payroll from Brave? Why should Mozilla proxy requests to Google through their own servers like Brave does? And the better question: Why IS Brave MITM proxying requests to Google and other services? BTW, having multiple Twitter accounts is not against the rules if each account is for a separate purpose, but for someone working in the browser industry to be having two separate accounts where they write about browsers on each one, all whilst hiding their affiliation an

Read the rest

d pretending to be an unaffiliated individual on one of them?! Seriously? --- Keep in mind that Brave and Chrome are the ultimate privacy violators, as it's not possible to disable autoupdates on either one; Brave developers repeatedly (see https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/1877) disregarded community's complaints about this issue (ironically, going against https://brendaneich.com/2014/01/trust-but-verify/); so, you're basically running a self-modifying binary, whether you like it or not. Any review anyone does is kinda meaningless, because there aren't any versions per se, and it can do whatever the hell it wants the next day, without any public record of what it did yesterday. With Mozilla, there's a public ftp directory with all the versions at `ftp.mozilla.org` — haven't seen anything like that for neither Brave nor Chrome. In fact, many folks used various official guides from Google to disable Chrome from autoupdating itself, e.g., because the newer versions broke font support or other system-level features, only to find such officially-sanctioned settings completely ignored down the line. How about doing a review of how much it costs in roaming fees to have Chrome/Brave download updates without your permission whilst you're travelling? Or how many hosts Brave does MITM to without any good reason?

In What happens when you launch Google Chrome for the first time?

futureastronaut·Feb 10, 2019

That line is three years old, so how is this news now? And what's this "i wonder," do we not know how to use git here? https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/c4cd7c1dc41a0... https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/6edf56775f256... https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/4c30cd08af9dd... https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/0652274db0aee...

In Brave Privacy Browser Is Whitelisting Trackers of Facebook and Twitter

regnerba·Feb 10, 2019

The related commits are years old. This isn't new. Last commit to that line was 3 years ago with the comment "unblocking embedding of twitter timelines". https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/c4cd7c1dc41a0... Also I just realized that is an archived repo that isn't used any more. I took a quick look through the newer repos and couldn't find any kind of hard coded whitelist like that. Am I missing something?

In Brave Privacy Browser Is Whitelisting Trackers of Facebook and Twitter

rvnx·Feb 10, 2019Submission

Brave Privacy Browser Is Whitelisting Trackers of Facebook and Twitter

36 points · Open discussion

rvnx·Feb 10, 2019

Just by reading source-code. Every day the browser downloads from "laptop-updates" server a list of hosts and list of headers to inject. This is supposed to help websites to identify that the user is running Brave (but there are other exceptions in the code, like at https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/js/data/... ) but in practice, the Brave developers can inject any header into any website remotely. Every single Brave installation is uniquely tracked by a "download-id" which makes the backdoor even more powerful.

In Brave browser can inject headers in HTTP requests