Part III: Brave and Sidekick
Welcome to the last article of the series! I hope you had a look at the first article, which had a look at the Big Three browsers: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. The second article had a look at some growing browsers: Opera, Opera GX, and Vivaldi. In this article, we will be having a look at Brave, arguably the most private browser, and Sidekick, a brilliant growing web browser. Let’s go!
Brave
Brave is one of the newer browsers in the list, but it is one of the most private browsers ever, if not the most. The whole idea of Brave revolves around the idea of privacy, and it has gotten lots of support from its users. Brave has this feature known as Brave Shields which it uses to block trackers and ads on the web. Built to be like Chrome, except more private, Brave has performed wonderfully to achieve this.
The Brave home screen shows stats on how many trackers and ads it has blocked, and bandwidth and time it has saved. Brave also has this feature called Brave Rewards where it pays its customers in cryptocurrency if they choose to allow their data to be tracked. These Brave Rewards can be used by users to support their favorite content makers online. This is a very nice initiative started by Brave.
Brave also features 2 separate private windows in addition to the normal window with the tracker and ad blocker. The first one called ‘Private Window’ is quite private, although it does reveal your IP address online. This means that you will not be completely anonymous online. You can access this by right clicking the Brave icon on the taskbar and selecting ‘New Private Window’.
Brave has a solution to revealing your IP address as well. Brave introduced something called ‘Private Window with Tor Connectivity’. This window doesn’t even reveal your IP address. This is a brilliant solution by Brave — integrating Tor with its Private Window to make it completely private.
As you can see, Brave is one of the most private browsers you can find. Unfortunately, the only thing that stains this clean browser is that it has been involved in multiple controversies. Out of these, two were the most prominent. Apparently, Brave was collecting Brave Rewards that were being sent to other content creators. Following some backlash, Brave apologized and made some changes. The next one was much more dangerous. Despite its insistence on privacy, Brave apparently was sending DNS requests to the ISPs of the users without sending it through the Tor window, despite the sessions happening on the Private Windows with Tor. Brave has corrected all these mistakes but these controversies still leave users skeptical about how private Brave truly is.
Download Brave here.
Sidekick
Homestretch guys, last browser! Sidekick is one browser I got to know about quite recently. Sidekick looks more or less like Chrome but with a very special sidebar. The sidebar of Sidekick actually gave it its name! Sidekick believes in the importance of web apps so it has a wide range of apps that you can add to the sidebar. These apps will open without opening a new tab, which is actually more similar to the Vivaldi web panels. You can add apps to the sidebar by clicking on the ‘+’ button that you see on the sidebar:
You will then be able to see a small window where you can choose an app to add. If the app is not there, you can add the app yourself by either creating an app from an existing tab or from a URL:
Sidekick is not one of the biggest browsers, but it has some nice features of its own. It has a built in ad and tracker blocker to remove all the ads that Chrome cannot. You can enable or disable the ad blocker by clicking the arrow above the ’N’ on the sidebar and selecting the gear icon. Go to ‘Ad blocker’ and toggle it on or off.
Sidekick also has this feature known as ‘Sessions’. Sessions basically work the same way as tab groups but with a better UI. Click on that ’N’ button on the sidebar and you will be able to view your sessions. Sidekick also tries to save your RAM usage. They use this unique feature known as ‘Tab Suspender’. All tabs that are not used for a set period of time are suspended to save some space on your RAM and speed up your experience. Click on gear icon and go to ‘Tab suspender’ where you can choose whether to suspend tabs or not, and after how much time the tabs should be suspended.
Sidekick also allows you to suspend inactive tabs with high CPU usage. You can toggle this on or off by going to ‘CPU monitor’ and toggling the correct switch on or off.
Like Vivaldi, Sidekick also has a split view option which you can use by clicking on the book icon next to the address bar. They also feature an incognito window just like Chrome’s which you can access by right clicking the icon on the taskbar and selecting ‘New incognito window’.
Although Sidekick does not have all the features of Chrome or any of the other browsers, Sidekick was never intended to be a standalone browser. It was intended to complement other browsers while creating the perfect work environment for getting jobs done. It places huge importance on web apps and even allows you to add apps that are not even there in their menu. Sidekick is a new browser and continues to grow daily. As a way to bring more users, they have asked their first users, including me, to send an invite link to people for them to download Sidekick. They are going to give Sidekick Pro for free if we can get enough users. I have put in the invite link below so please download Sidekick from there! Download Sidekick here.
Wow, that was a lot of browsers. While I definitely did not show every single feature of the browsers, I hope I managed to bring out the most important ones. The download links that were I had pasted in each of the individual browsers are there below. Thanks for bearing with me through these two articles and I hope you have understood what browser suits your needs the best!
Downloads:
Google Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome/ Microsoft Edge: https://www.microsoft.com/edge Mozilla Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ Opera: https://www.opera.com/download#opera-browser Opera GX: https://www.opera.com/download#opera-gx Brave: https://brave.com/ Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/ Sidekick: https://join.meetsidekick.com/mmgcz
Links:
First article: https://srivishnuvusirikal.wixsite.com/arsenalofarticles/post/which-web-browser-is-best-for-you
Second article: https://srivishnuvusirikal.wixsite.com/arsenalofarticles/post/which-web-browser-is-best-for-you-1
Comments