You're the product,' Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2014, because advertisers are buying your personal details.īrave's browser, left, strips out ads shown in Google's Chrome browser, right. 'When an online service is free, you're not the customer. But publishers have an incentive to intrude on your personal life because ads sell for a premium when publishers know personal details about you. Right now, online ads support countless free services, from Google search to Facebook social networking to Yahoo email. If it does succeed, Brave could enable better privacy for consumers and end their use of ad blockers that threaten to replace free online services with those charging for subscriptions. 'I talk about putting chlorine in the pool.'īeyond privacy protection, Eich promises Brave's browser will come with a big speed boost: It loads pages two to four times faster than other smartphone browsers and 1.4 times faster than other browsers for personal computers.Įich faces big challenges like convincing people to switch browsers and publishers to support his startup. 'We have to disconnect the bad system,' he said. With his 10-person, San Francisco-based company, Eich hopes to rid the world of the harmful aspects of online advertising. He invented the JavaScript language that's the foundation of Web programming and co-founded the Mozilla project that builds the influential Firefox browser, but left Mozilla amid a firestorm of controversy in 2014. It's a comeback of sorts for Eich, a seminal figure in the Web world. The browser works on personal computers using Microsoft's Windows operating system or Apple's OS X, as well as on smartphones running Google's Android or Apple's iOS software. His startup, Brave Software, released a test version of the Brave browser on Wednesday. Brendan Eich, a Web pioneer and one of the key figures behind Firefox, is at it again with a new browser that promises to run faster than its rivals and shield you from annoying ads.

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