Brave on the desktop has been renamed as Brave Core, announced by the Brave team via a Reddit post.
From the post.
This version is known as 0.55.x. This version will eventually be the first version of Brave Core to replace the Brave builds which are available on brave.com.
You will see 0.55.x get updated at least weekly and progress through its 3 week life on Dev channel, spends 3 weeks on Beta channel, then migrates to release channel within a week after Oct 16th.
Some big items from the top of my head that you can look out for in this release:
- All extensions are now installable by default. We maintain 3 levels of support: Allowed and vetted, Allowed and unvetted (we give an extra warning), and blocked. Currently the blocked list is empty but we plan to add unsafe things there.
- You can import both from the current version of Brave, Chrome, and other browsers.
- Beautiful welcome page.
- Multi channel support, initially with the release of Dev channel. Beta channel and Release channel coming in 3 and 6 weeks respectively. Channels will always be updated, where Dev channel will always contain the newest code.
- Ad-blocking which is more efficient than the current version of Brave since all blocking is done on the network thread now.
- Regional ad-blocking, but with auto selection of region instead of opt-in like in the current product.
- Tracking protection support.
- HTTPS everywhere support.
- Cookie blocking support.
- Fingerprinting protection support.
- Referrer blocking support.
- NoScript support.
- Permission based autoplay support.
- WebTorrent support.
- Default built-in light and dark theme support, dark theme by default only for Dev channel, but can be used in any channel in preferences.
- Persistent "Block this element" support by right clicking on anything in any page.
- Chrome specific privacy invasive things are all removed.
- Search terms fed to Google suggest off by default, instead use Alexa top sites as a data source.
- An early form of Brave Rewards, formerly called Brave payments is in, but currently disabled on Windows.
- Brave's new tab page.
- Restores last session by default.
- Distinct search engine selection for private new tab page.
- Localization.
- Safe browsing proxied to be more private.
- Flash disabled by default, but can be turned on.
- Using PDF.js by default instead of PDFium which has frequent security problems in Chrome.
- Widevine on macOS.
