Cybersecurity

Billions Of Google Chrome Users Now Have Another Surprising Option

Google Chrome has dominated the internet browser market for the last decade with a staggering near-60% market share and users stretching into the billions.

Rivals to Google Chrome, including Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Edge (formerly known as Internet Explorer), and Mozilla's Firefox have largely failed to convince users to switch—but browser choices are becoming more complex.

Users' desire for greater security, better privacy, and an ill-defined need to "take back control" from the likes of Google and Microsoft has opened the door for alternatives—including blockchain-based privacy browser Brave, whose chief executive thinks Google "is going to be taken apart over coming years."

...In contrast, Brave claims to aggressively block advertisers and trackers everywhere it can.

The Brave Shields feature, on by default, blocks third-party ads, trackers, autoplaying videos, and device fingerprinting.

As a result, Brave claims its browser loads websites between three and six times faster than then likes of Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Edge, and Mozilla's Firefox. It also reckons it drains less battery life and uses less memory.

"We’re not in the personal data business," Brave's website boasts.

Meanwhile, competition enforcers in the U.S. and Europe are investigating how the world's biggest tech companies, most of them from the U.S., use and monetise data, with European Union antitrust regulators opening an investigation into Google’s collection of data late last year.