Rick Findlay, writing for Reclaim the Net:

Brave shipped Containers this week. Version 1.92 of the browser lets you wall off tabs from one another so that cookies and site data stay locked inside whichever container you opened them in, even when two tabs point at the same website.

You can now hold several identities at once without the browser blending them together.

Firefox has had this feature available for years through its first-party Multi-Account Containers extension. But I stopped using Firefox a while back because it lacked an ad blocker on iOS.

One of the features I missed from Firefox was containers, though. And now they’re available on Brave.

And this is convenient timing for me — I just started a project at work where containers make things significantly easier. I can log in to a work-specific account within a container and remain logged in to my personal account in normal browser tabs, ensuring I don’t accidentally do anything on the work account because I forgot to log out.

➝ Source: reclaimthenet.org

Brave:

Brave Origin is a paid version of the browser for users who don’t need all the features that support Brave as a business, but still want the privacy that only Brave offers. Origin users will continue to benefit from our industry-leading privacy, adblock, and speed (via Shields), as well as regular software updates, Chromium patches, and security and privacy improvements. Origin will remove most other features from the browser.

It’s worth noting, Brave Origin is available for free on Linux.

I don’t think I’ll ever use Brave Origin, but I appreciate that the company is always looking for unique and interesting ways to earn revenue without having to rely on default search deals like Mozilla did.

➝ Source: brave.com

I canceled my YouTube Premium subscription recently. We were paying $23 a month for the family plan and I thought it would be worthwhile, as an experiment, to see how things would be without it.

The extra $23 in my pocket each month will be a welcome change. Not that it’s a particularly expensive subscription, but it does add up over time. That $23 each month is $276 a year, which is nothing to scoff at — just ask your favorite compound interest advocate.

Having ads on YouTube is not a great experience, though. Obviously. But I have a plan for how I’m going to eliminate ads without a YouTube Premium subscription.

On iOS, the solution is actually quite simple. Rather than using the native YouTube app, just open the YouTube website in Brave. Brave’s built-in ad blocker will prevent ads from loading on the platform. The same method works in Brave on desktop as well.

Lucky for me, Brave is already my default browser on both platforms. So I don’t need to do anything differently on desktop and it’s just a matter of using Brave for YouTube on my iPhone instead of the YouTube app.

The much trickier platform is Apple TV. Unlike iOS and desktop, there’s no web browser to fall back on. Instead, I’m using a nifty little VPN trick. You see, YouTube doesn’t display ads in some countries — you can connect to a VPN and route your traffic through Albania to prevent ads from loading on YouTube.

I have the ProtonVPN app installed on all of our Apple TVs and we just connect to Albania before using YouTube and then disconnect the VPN when we’re done.

In addition to my primary methods for watching YouTube on each platform, I also have a handful of other options at my disposal.

I have an Invidious instance setup on my Umbrel. It’s a front end for YouTube that strips a lot of the annoying features and eliminates ads. This is what I use for tracking newly published videos on my favorite YouTube channels.

The reason Invidious isn’t my primary method for watching YouTube, though, is that YouTube often makes changes that breaks Invidious’ functionality. So there are occasional times where it just doesn’t work at all.

I can also use Parabolic on my Framework, which I use for downloading one-off videos for playback later.

On our Mac Mini home server, I’m running MediaHuman YouTube Downloader. The app is setup to automatically download new videos from a small set of channels. The videos are added to folders that Plex is indexing, so shortly after they are uploaded to YouTube, the videos are visible in our Plex library.

Lastly I have iSH Shell on my iPhone with yt-dlp installed through pip. It’s painfully slow to use compared to other options and makes my iPhone a bit toasty during use, but it’s useful in a pinch when I want to download a video.

As an additional benefit to making this change, I’m hoping the extra work required to watch YouTube without ads will introduce just a little bit of friction, ultimately reducing the amount of time I spend on the platform. I’m not obsessed with YouTube or anything, but it has become a bit of a crutch for me whenever I’m looking for a cure to boredom. It would be better if I spent that time doing, at least slightly, more productive tasks.

From Brave’s Twitter account:

Click the music note icon in the top right of the browser to open the media controls. Find the picture-in-picture icon on the right and click it.

I didn’t know this feature was available and was even using a browser extension to add the functionality.

I’ve since removed the extension and am just using Brave’s built-in implementation. It’s been great so far.

➝ Source: x.com

From Brave’s weblog:

The new Rerank feature introduces a panel on the search results page to give individual users more control over the presence and ranking order of the websites they see in Brave Search. The panel lists domains, each with the option to thumbs up (raise) or thumbs down (discard) the domains from the results. From that point forward, raised domains will be boosted higher up in the rankings a user sees, while discarded domains will no longer be included among the results. A domain’s up-rank or down-rank can be adjusted or undone at any time.

I’m a little late to this news, but this seems like such a neat feature. I wish it wasn’t hidden behind a menu, though. I wonder if they’ll eventually put the thumbs up and down buttons right in line with search results.

➝ Source: brave.com

From the Zorin OS 17.3 announcement:

In light of Mozilla’s recent policy changes, we no longer feel assured that Firefox aligns with our commitment to protect your privacy. This prompted us to revisit the choice of default web browser in Zorin OS 17.3. […]

In consultation with our user community, we narrowed the selection down to one option. The new default web browser in Zorin OS is Brave.

I wonder if other Linux distributions are considering whether to ditch Firefox as well.

➝ Source: blog.zorin.com

From a thread in Brave’s community forums:

To bring back the Open as window option, go to brave://flags and set Shortcuts not Apps to Disabled . Once you do this, the option will appear again

I didn’t realize that this option was disabled by default in Brave and other Chromium-based browsers until I started setting up my Framework laptop. I found this thread, which had the solution.

➝ Source: community.brave.com

We have a couple of projects at work that utilize AI and I will occasionally get useful information from Brave Search’s AI-powered answers tool. But aside from that, I don’t use any AI products at all. I think the tech is barely functional for the vast majority of proposed use cases.

➝ Source: m.slashdot.org