Annoying ads in Brave Browser

[fox]

I've been using Brave almost exclusively on my computer for about two months now. I like its speed, and compatibility is almost 100%, but lately I've gotten annoyed with its ads and the ad display format. They are in-your-face in a different way than those on other browsers, but the ads are repeats of the same ones, and after awhile I found them more annoying than the ones I get on Firefox. As a result, I changed back to Firefox as my default browser, and will be using it again almost exclusively. If by doing so I find other things more annoying in FF, I'll revert back to Brave.

[Jason]

This is part of the Brave Rewards program. The ads you see make contributions to the websites you visit (or you can get paid for viewing them instead). You can choose how many you see per hour (from 1 to 10) if that makes them more palatable. You can also just turn off the ads. Here's how:

Click on the triangle on the right side of the location bar. Then click on the gear icon to the right of 'Summary'. Then look at your settings under Ads. You can turn them off completely by clicking on the slider. I've attached a screenshot of what the Brave Rewards page looks like. Going to the homepage will also show the page for you unless you've set your homepage to something different.

After a while, I've gotten used to the ads. Since Brave shows fewer ads than other browsers, and the ads help content producers that are part of their ad network, I tolerate them. The websites make more money from them than Google ads and unlike those, the information about your preferences is stored locally. The ads will be more diverse over time as more content producers sign on.

Sometimes the problem isn't with the browser; it's with us not knowing how to fully use the browser. I suppose we can blame the browser developers for not making it easier to find how to use the various settings.

Have a good New Year, Fox!

[Jason]

Did my suggestion work, Fox?

You know what's funny is that I installed it for my wife. She didn't mind the idea of ads if she got something for them. But they never worked for her! I keep meaning to reinstall it. She's using Windows 10 Pro.

[willjp]

I'm punching above my weight a bit here, but I'm curious if something like pi-hole could work for brave.

The basic idea is that you replace your default network's nameserver with a dnsmasq install that is pre-configured to denylist several domains, or URL regex-matchers.
It's not perfect (I still get a lot of google ads), but it's noticeably better than nothing with a regular browser.

The tricky part is probably getting it running on your machine (it's intended for a raspberry-pi), but there's an AUR package for it on arch that lets you install it locally so it's definitely possible.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pi-hole-standalone

All bets are off if they're using ip addresses directly though .

[ssfc72]

Interesting, I had heard of Pi-hole but assumed it was just for the RPi. I went and looked it up, to see what it was/did and I see that the software will run on other OS's.
Looks like I will have to try it out sometime.

[Jason]

I'm not sure I undestand, William. Are you wondering if Brave can use a local Pi-Hole setup? It's just like any other browser in that it'll use whatever DNS you've set in your network configuration normally. But there is an option in its settings to use different DNS servers other than the one your network provides (cloudflare, google, opendns, etc). or one you choose (see screenshot attached). Brave has pretty amazing ad-blocking built-in, and where it can't block them appearing, it blocks them from tracking or fingerprinting.