Brave Today is a news reader integrated on Brave's New Tab Page
Brave Software, the company that is behind the web browser of the same name, announced the release of Brave Today on the official company website.
Brave Today is a news reader that is integrated into the web browser. While that is not that special, considering that other browsers may also display news or content from around the Web on the new tab page, it is privacy-preserving according to the company.
Brave Today is available in the latest version of the Brave Browser already. All you need to do is open a new tab page in the browser and scroll down. Brave visualizes this with a new Brave Today - Scroll Down text at the bottom. It is easy to overlook though, especially if all other new tab page content is displayed.
Brave Software designed the news feed to be privacy preserving. The content is delivered "anonymously to the user's browser via Brave's new private content delivery network" according to the announcement. The company notes that the implementation ensures that there is no data to collect or track for third-parties.
Brave Today collects news stories from hundreds of RSS feeds in different categories such as world news, technology, or sport. The integrated algorithm determines articles of interest based on a user's selection of categories, the browsing history, and publishing dates among other variables.
Users of Brave may customize news sources by activating the customize button when Brave Today is displayed on the screen. The browser lists all news categories and sources.
There is no option to disable an entire category with a single action; you need to open the category with a click or tap, and disable all its news sources to do so.
The selection has a strong focus on the United States as you won't many find non-English non-US-based news sources listed. As far as technology sites are concerned, you get the usual assortment of the most popular sites such as Lifehacker, Gizmodo, The Verge or Techcrunch, but not more geekier sources such as ours (which happen to publish more articles about Brave than the majority of these larger sites).
It takes a while to go through the source listings to enable or disable sources. Brave displays offers and news as well using Brave Today, but you can disable these when you open the Brave category in customize.
Brave Today is not a full-fledged news reader as it delivers article titles and images only. Users cannot read the entire article on Brave's new tab page as clicks on articles open the article on the publisher's website instead.
Closing Words
Brave Today adds news to the browser's new tab page. The content is delivered via Brave's own content delivery network so that the user's IP address is hidden when the feeds are retrieved.
It remains to be seen how well the algorithm works considering that it attempts to use the browsing history to deliver news to the user that are "most likely" of interest.
The privacy-preserving nature of Brave Today is the one thing that sets it apart. I miss the option to add custom news feeds to Brave Today and the lack of non-English sources. An option to suggest new sources would be useful in this regard.
Lastly, one has to ask whether reading news on the new tab page is that comfortable, especially when you compare it with reading the news in a feed reader.
Vivaldi released a news feed reader in its browser recently, and there are plenty of third-party feed readers such as QuiteRSS available that offer a better experience, especially since you can read the entire article if provided by the feed directly in the program.
Now You: What is your take on Brave Today?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.