On 18th October Brave Software, announced the general availability of their latest browser- Brave 0.55. The ad-blocking Brave browser is redesigned to work on Chromium and is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Brave 0.55x was originally released to developers and early adopters on September 6th, and then as an initial beta for a larger base on September 27th.
This Chromium-based desktop version replaces the previous Muon-based browser which is no longer available for download on the Brave site. Users who browse with Muon (latest version is 0.25.2) will continue to receive necessary updates until they are fully upgraded to this new release in the near future.
The upgrade comes with significant performance boost as confirmed by a test conducted by Andrius Aucinas, a performance researcher at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist. The test measured how quickly the browser loads the pages and how much resources it uses- specifically focusing on CPU usage. The test proves that the Brave browser has a 22% faster load time, which means 8-second faster page loading times on major sites.
The other important upgrade was to the Bat Attention token (BAT) reward system, making it more intuitive. The team has introduced ‘Brave Rewards (beta)’ that will replace Brave Payments granting more usability, visibility, and new features.
The release also includes multiple updates from the September 27th beta version:
- Better Interface including Tab shape and color changes, URL bar centered changes
- Several Tor-related privacy enhancements which include disabling features that can leak information like the IP address
- A private search engine can now be set separately
- PDF files can now load file:// URLs
- Removing links to unused sign-ins to Google
- Localization updates
- Multiple web compatibility fixes
- Various crash fixes
To know more about this release, head over to Brave.com. You can find the entire release schedule on Github.
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