If a couple of days ago Google launched Chrome 113, the first derivative -as is obvious- to publish its version after the launch of Chromium 113, now it is the turn of Brave 1.51which as can be seen does not follow the original numbering of the project, as Microsoft Edge does, for example, but it doesn’t matter much either.
Thus, Brave is presented with many of the background innovations of Chromium 113, the same ones that Chrome 113 brought and that are summarized in security patches, stability fixes and performance optimizationsin addition to some changes in the support of CSS elements, the improvement of the performance of encoding with CPU with AV1… but not the default implementation, at least for the moment, of WebGPU.
In any case, what is interesting about Chromium derivatives is not usually the coincidences that they maintain with their base, usually quite a few, since after all they all collaborate to a greater or lesser extent with the development of Chromium, but rather their own additions, a source of -contrary to the opinion of many critics- one of the most interesting browser wars in years.
What’s new in Brave 1.51, then? A bit of everything, although in keeping with the essence of the browser, the bulk of the news is divided between the two most common focuses: crypto and privacy.
In the first block, what Brave calls Web3, which is highly debatable, the news revolves around improving support with certain content and providers, although something to highlight would be the new option for set NFT automaticallymaking it easy for the local node to share cached data and pinned NFTs to the IPFS network that are added to the Brave wallet.
More interesting, however, is what Brave 1.51 brings in terms of privacy, such as the option to permanently allow or block execution of individual scripts (unless manually changed), the main reason why this feature, implemented by the browser since its inception, later removed and reintroduced again, but disabled by default, is still there.
If you’re interested, you can enable the feature in “Settings > Brave Shields > Block Scripts” and if any page fails once you’ve done that, look to disable blocking via the page menu in the address bar (where there is the lock icon).
Other new features in Brave 1.51 include a new login dialog for Google services on third-party sites of an individual and non-global nature, thus improving the privacy of the user; the option of «copy clean link«, that is, only the URL necessary to go to the site, without the rubbish of references that are usually included; and minor improvements to features such as reading view, new browser version information, and other elements.
