The web browser Brave is adding an enhancement to its ability in making web pages easier to read and navigate.
Announced by Brave Software, the project’s parent company, the feature called 'SpeedReader' is aimed at further enhancing the browser’s performance, resulting in web pages that are far easier to read and navigate. This should in turn improve user experience.
This functionality is meant to be released to the public in 2019, according to a tweet by the company.
"SpeedReader is our new approach to reader mode ... Beyond making pages more pleasant to read, it will have radical performance gains (speedups from 20× to 27×, bandwidth savings of 84×) plus significant privacy benefits," explained Brave.
SpeedReader also strips websites from their third party trackers to prevent any privacy infringement elements. This way, users can surf websites without having them track or monitor their online activities.
The key feature of SpeedReader, essentially include:
- Increased performance.
- Decent privacy benefits.
- Data optimization by operating before page rendering.
How it does this, is by pulling all the necessary information from a page, before it renders. This is in direct contrast to regular browsers which typically prefetch all the website’s content, and then render the lighter parts.
But as for the private reader mode feature, it works initially to only those websites that are fully readable, as it depends on its features to improve page performance. What this means, there are limits in what kind of websites it can pull data.
The AI system which has been trained on a selection of 2,833 websites, only worked on 22 percent of nearly 20,000 pages tested, including 31 percent of those linked from Twitter and 42 percent of those linked from Reddit. However, it did actually blocked a 100 percent of ads and ad trackers that were flagged by EasyList and EasyPrivacy, Brave said.
"SpeedReader is useful on 22% of pages in general, and with higher applicability for user-shared content, with 31% on Twitter and 42% on Reddit," Brave explained.. "Finally, 65% of content published through RSS feeds appears to be readable."
Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software Inc.. Based on the Chromium web browser and its Blink engine, the browser is known for its ability in blocking ads and website trackers.
Co-founded on May 28, 2015 by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, Brave Software initially launched the Brave browser with a partial ad blocking feature, before announcing its plans for an ad replacement feature and a revenue sharing program.
The idea is that Brave wants to lessen the impact of the internet’s growing reliance on ad-blocking software, which cuts off advertising revenue to creators. The goal is with the browser's integrated tipping solution, both revenue and quality user experience would increase.
This makes Brave as a "cash-grab" and a "double dip".
While the idea is considered genuine, it's rather frowned upon because Brave essentially put its own ads in from of someone else's. Some critics have even said that Brave's proposed replacement of advertising "should be viewed as illegal and deceptive by the courts, consumers, and those who value the creation of content."
Its business model has also other controversies, as the browser also doubles as an ecosystem for rewarding content creators with its native BAT cryptocurrency. Here, Brave users are able to send tokens to content creators "directly" from within the Brave browser.
The company drawn criticisms for the way it intends to combat fraudsters looking to exploit its platform for profit.