I'd bet it's a PR stunt. They're getting all kinds of publicity from this.

...that said, I installed Brave this weekend and am posting this comment from it, and I gotta say that it's really nice viewing a web without ads. I'd forgotten how pleasant browsing the web can be when you're not downloading the 100 or so ads & trackers on a typical news article and playing cat-and-mouse with their anti-AdBlock code. So from my selfish user's POV, this is a win.

Or you can just install uBlock Origin. I don't see what Brave brings to the table.

Brave is mostly used as a mobile browser.

It is far more practical to download an already adblock-included brower than having to mess with extensions on mobile.

I installed it soon after switching to Android from iOS and I have no complaints, it is fast and it just works.

> It is far more practical to download an already adblock-included brower than having to mess with extensions on mobile

You don't need to "opt in to receiving ads sold by Brave Software in place of the blocked ads" for that.

https://www.bromite.org/fdroid

It's less seamless and user-friendly to have to install F-droid and deal with whatever OS permissions are needed before installing Bromite.

The earlier concern about data sharing and privacy by advertising companies is not an identical problem to users being served ads.

I suggest reading this comment from one of the dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972072

> We're not simply replacing ads. We're rescuing an industry.

That's nice, but as a user I have no interest in rescuing the ad industry. The sooner it dies, the better.

I had AdBlock rather than uBlock Origin for Chrome, but my experience with it was that it had odd stability issues (eg. certain PDFs would crash the tab, so would a certain window.open call on a niche site I frequent, or accessing a TurboTax download took me to TurboTax's internal login page for their Box account) and many news sites have counter-AdBlock pages where they put up an annoying popup if they detect you're using AdBlock. Not sure if you get those with uBlock Origin, but they don't show up on Brave.

Saves more than half your phone's battery life too. And content creators get paid.

The real world is hardly binary. Both the complaint may be valid, and part of a PR strategy.