Brave Browser hits 100 million monthly users, Search also surging
Brave Software, maker of the Chromium-based Brave Browser and Brave Search, announced new user records yesterday. The company's web browser hit 100 million monthly active users last month, which is an important milestone for the company.
Brave Software says that its browser has seen an average growth of about 2.5 million new users each month in the past two years. In 2022, we reported that Brave had crossed the 50 million monthly active users mark.
The browser has over 42 million daily active users according to Brave Software, which the company says demonstrates its high user engagement.
Brave Search, the company's independent search engine, has reached important milestones as well according to the company. It serves more than 1.6 billion queries each month and provides results for more than 50 million user queries every single day.
Closing Words
It is an interesting development, one that the higher ups at Mozilla are likely monitoring closely. Brave Search, for instance, started out as Tailcat. Owned by Cliqz, which Mozilla had an investment in.
One has to wonder where Mozilla could stand today if it would have created Firefox Search from the ashes of Tailcat. While Google's money is keeping Mozilla up and running, it seems at times as a major roadblock regarding innovation and business decisions.
Anyway, the milestone is a major one for Brave Software. Its browsers is one of the few that shows consistent growth next to dominant Google Chrome. Firefox usage, for example, has been dropping.
That is to say, Brave is not without controversy. The company laid of about nine percent of its employees in 2023, but the bigger issue for some is the browser's crypto-involvement.
However, Brave Browser, based on Chromium, ships with a privacy and ad-blocker by default. It works out of the box, making Brave a good choice for users who want to experience a web in peace.
Now You: have you tried Brave Browser or Brave Search? Did you like it? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
A few months ago, I started using the Brave browser. When using Linux, it works perfectly and VERY FAST. Now I don’t see any ads or pop-ups. In all the time I’ve been using the Brave browser, I haven’t encountered any issues. Thank you so much to the developers of the Brave browser!!
Firefox should have moved to Chromium. It’s bonkers that they though they would be able to take on Chromium, when Microsoft were not even able to do so – despite being in a much more advantageous position than Mozilla (I.E. they had Windows, Windows Phone and Edge for business to utilize). When Microsoft threw in the towel, this should have been a big warning sign to Mozilla.
I get the concept of wanting to be independent from Chromium and would have preferred this too, however Mozilla do not have the resources to do so. Creating and maintaining a browser is a herculean task. And even if they did have the resources, we are dealing with a platform – not a service – and web developers were largely only being paid to test against Chromium and Safari – which had a combined market share of >96%. The Google/Apple mobile duopoly had already sealed the browser engine fate a long time ago.
Hence why Brave became popular, because it’s a privacy-focused browser based on Chromium – meaning websites work as expected and you don’t encounter messages from webpages saying your browser is not supported. While Vivaldi is also a good option, it’s more tailored to teckie types (such as the vast settings) and when I was looking at it, the content blocker was not as advanced as Brave Shields.
While Brave is currently the best browser, it’s worth keeping in mind that at some point those venture capitalists are going to want to see a return on their money and will start turning the screws. It’s what American for-profit companies do every single time.
@ECJ
You said, [While Brave is currently the best browser, it’s worth keeping in mind that at some point those venture capitalists are going to want to see a return on their money and will start turning the screws. It’s what American for-profit companies do every single time.]
Sir, you nailed it, exactly
> Firefox should have moved to Chromium
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
I also think that it’s crucial for Firefox’ survival that it moves to Chromium. Eventually it will end up in the same situation as Presto Opera where they have to spend all their work fixing broken websites on their browser than delivering actually new content updates or anything like that.
From what I know is that Google funds Mozilla’s existence and they are only doing it to avoid being called out a monopoly on the web browser market. Maybe this is also why Firefox hasn’t made the move to Chromium just yet.
I also have a feeling that most of the people that work at Mozilla don’t give a jack squat about internet freedom or some such idealistic values, they’re there just for the money and background for future jobs. It’s only the Firefox fanboys who are vehemently zealous about things like freedom and privacy, so it’s possible that when it’s curtains for Firefox, Mozilla might not even care and just file for bankruptcy and cut its losses. Then the best case scenario is for what remains of Firefox to continue as an OSS project that with time will become even less and less relevant as without Google’s funding it will quickly become completely incompatible with the web. And will end up like the Otter or K-Meleon browsers.
That’s my personal prediction about the things to come and namely Firefox.
@Allwynd
According to the internet, when non-profits like Mozilla file for bankruptcy, the state AG has to approve of disposition of assets, which means its up to the government what happens to Firefox.
Firefox is already an OSS project, which is why most Linux distros include it by default.
You have been promoting Mozilla’s downfall for at least the last half decade. You may be right, but it is beginning to sound like the boy who cried wolf.
I get you don’t like them for political reasons, but don’t let that cloud your judgement. A Google Chromium monopoly is only good for Google.
I do not like Firefox as a company (usual disclaimer), but there should be at least two options in browser engine. Imagine the world where there is only one search engine, only one AI chatbot or only one program to edit photo and video (Adobe’s). And every company has to use them as base for their product. I do not think it is a good idea, even if the second option is not much better than first one.
>Firefox should have moved to Chromium
No, go back to Reddit.
I’ve been using Brave as my default browser for a few years now, and have been very happy with it. I’ll stick with it whilst uBlock Origin continues to work, but will switch to another browser (probably Firefox) if/when it doesn’t.
They took the ability to download torrent from within Brave…boooooo no good.
Because nobody was using it and most people hated it. I can’t count how many times I wanted to download a torrent and expect qBittorrent to open and then I see something happening in Brave instead. Then I with great annoyance have to find it and disable it. This is actually one of the few good things they’ve done.
In fairness, the folk behind Brave have done a sterling job. ??
Since Leo was incorporated into search a couple of years ago, I used it as my main search/ai engine. Don’t have to deal with more apps for AI queries. You can add the search widget on android and leo ai is essentially right there.
I think Leo is based on Meta’s AI, which is not very good. Main reason I ignore it.
Brave is great, but it has some bloat, including embedded crypto stuff/sidebar AI/rewards.
I agree, Brave has become more bloated in the last few years, first with Crypto and now AI. I think I can disable each to a certain extent, since I don’t need or use them, but when someone says that these things are issues, quoting the article here: “Brave is not without controversy … but the bigger issue for some is the browser’s crypto-involvement”.
How is Crypto controversial? Can the article author explain? I don’t use it or care about it, I think disabling a few things in Settings or about:flags is enough. I never see anything related to AI or Crypto as I browse so what is the controversy? Is Crypto bad or some kind of a detriment? I don’t understand.
I wish Brave would be more lightweight and they make it possible to change the colors of the Incognito mode, because that dark purple is so annoying, displeasing and just hard to look at and I can’t stand it. Also their whole theme for Purple + Orange is making me nauseous.
As for the main theme of this article, I remember how people were proclaiming for 1-2 years how when Google disables Manifest V2 in Chrome, people will move to Firefox, I just checked some web browser market share websites and all of them show that Firefox has in fact been steadily losing market share for the past 1-2 years and didn’t gain any as a matter of fact.
I’m starting to think that what I thought to myself will happen is that people who are tech-savvy enough to know ads aren’t necessarily a part of the website and can be removed and have the know-how to achieve it will also have a browser preference and it will not be Firefox. I know personally for myself that from the existing rendering engines and browsers, Blink/Chromium is what I prefer and if Chrome doesn’t support proper extensions (incidentally I haven’t used Chrome itself since 2018-2019), then I have to find another Chromium browser, such as Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Yandex, SlimJet or something else entirely. Maybe that’s what most people did.
At this point I’m expecting to see Brave start showing up in those browser market share charts as an entry. I’m also waiting for the Orion and Ladybird browsers to release on Linux so I can see them too, and I’m by no means a fan of Brave, just from what I’ve tried, it feels like the lesser evil that I am content with using while not being frustrated with it too much as with the rest, especially how I am with Firefox.
@Allwynd
How is Crypto controversial?
Brave was promoting FTX, and other questionable crypto schemes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/ytq5ab/desktop_ftx_card/
Forgot to tell. Brave installation takes more space on hard drive than Firefox based browsers, 2Gb to around 500Mb. I can not compare it to any Chromium based browser installation since I do not have Chrome/Edge and really do not want to install other Chromium browsers just to see how much space they take.
That’s interesting, I checked mine and it’s 1.7GB: https://i.ibb.co/bRCTk6SL/image.png
I’ve noticed that over the years the install size of Chromium browsers has increased a lot. I don’t have Firefox, but I remember it being something between 200 and 500MB.
Around 2010, I remember Chrome being around 100-200MB while Firefox was 50-100MB.
The Steam client used to be 400-600MB, now it’s also over 1GB, but this is inevitable really. People now have storage of 512GB-1TB on their phones, my phone is 512GB and I have only 59GB of it full and I don’t even know how to fill the rest even if I wanted to. My laptop has 1TB storage and only 103GB are used, I also don’t know how to fill the rest. So if a browser is 2GB is technically not a big deal, the reality is, you like me, are still accustomed to how things were 10 years ago, since that wasn’t too long ago, things have evolved too fast in recent years. I still remember my first PC in 2005 had 80GB disk and some people older than me will probably laugh and think I had it good when their PCs had 64MB storage and 256KB RAM or something like that.
I think in a few years we will see this balloon even more and the sizes of 2025 will look tiny in comparison.
The only notable difference is internet speed hasn’t increased substantially since then so downloading games between 30 and 100GB is a bit slower, unless the internet speed increases proportionally to file size, it will still be noticeable.
I have used Brave browser for many years now and it is still my mail browser, in both Windows and Linux. I cant say I have had any real issues over the years.
I have also used your website for a long tome too.