Tag Archives: ad blocker

In general, I don’t overly recommend products that aren’t books I’ve written. Unless I ever get a legitimate sponsor, I will not just rave about certain products on this site in hopes of getting a share of the sales. That’s just not my style.

However, if I ever encounter a product that offers a genuinely useful service, I will single it out. I will give it my full recommendation. And I won’t ask for any money or commissions. That way, you can be certain that I’m not recommending it for selfish reasons.

This brings me directly to the Brave browser. Unless you’re tech savvy or work in IT, you probably haven’t heard of it. It’s a web browser in the same mold as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. It wasn’t made by some existing tech company and it’s not one of those products that you see advertised in the mold of AI or car insurance. It’s entirely open source, which in technical terms means it’s basically the opposite of Apple. It was made from the ground up using code that’s available and not subject to lawsuits by overpaid lawyers. That also means it’s completely free. You download it right now and it costs you nothing.

And you should download it.

You should use Brave.

That’s because Brave is coded to emphasize two important features, privacy and ad-blocking. Privacy, in general, should be important to you. Even if you’re not big on conspiracy theories about the government spying on you, you should still be concerned about tech companies using your data to sell you dumb shit. Your data is valuable. To give it away for free is akin to giving a burglar a spare key to your back door. Brave was created specifically for those who take privacy seriously. You can still permit companies to gather your data, but Brave helps make sure it’s not taken without your concent.

But it’s the ad-blocking feature that really makes Brave valuable. I’ve always found the ads on numerous sites annoying. A lot of the sites I go to for comic book news have become enshitified to oblivion. Use most browsers and you’ll get this annoying window that demands you disable the pop-up blocker. And in some cases, you can’t close that window. So, the site becomes useless. Brave blocks that. It makes some of my favorite sites usable again.

But it’s YouTube where Brave shines the brightest.

I get that YouTube needs to run ads to make money. But the enshitification process has been accelerating a lot more in recent years. It’s at a point where even simple, benign videos are hit with unskippable ads for toilet cleaner and car insurance every 10 minutes. It’s so annoying that it ruins the experience. It was bad enough when I could skip the ads. Now, that’s happening less and less. I can easily foresee a future where YouTube just removes the skip feature altogether.

But Brave utilizes a powerful adblocker that, as of the time of this post, stops those ads. I’ve tested it out. I can confirm that it does indeed eliminate ads. Sometimes, it means videos take a big longer to load or stall at certain points. But at no point is it interrupted with shitty Liberty Mutual ads. That ensures the YouTube experience remains consistent. I know there’s the option of buying YouTube Premium. However, the price for that service just went up. And I expect it to keep going up, especially as the option to skip ads is limited.

So, if you can’t afford another subscription service like that, give Brave a try. I can’t guarantee that it’ll always block every ad. Tech companies are very motivated to circumvent browsers like Brave. At least for now, it’s a solid solution to an escalating problem and it has my full recommendation and endorsement.