I can't help but feel that a lot of Brave's userbase are pushing it because they have a financial investment in BAT from the ICO. Brave certainly doesn't help with the monoculture threat either, its just Chrome.

In the initial sale, <100 people bought BAT, and perhaps 186K people own it now (ignoring Uphold members) per https://etherscan.io/token/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb62..., but we have ~7M users. Check your math.

Is 186,000 not a lot? It doesn't need to be a large percentage of the overall, just influencers with a financial investment in it.

(Yes, in theory people can also own say, Google stock, but BAT is directly tied to the browser's success.)

Is 186,000 a large or small fraction of 7M? Also note the largest few accounts are liquidity pools owned by exchanges, and custodial accounts we use for cold BAT.

How does a browser grow from zero share? Hint: it's not by "influence" alone, with zero benefit to the prospect being pitched by the influencer.

Having Google as your default search engine or include Google's safe browsing inside your browser doesn't help with the monoculture threat either, but i guess mozilla thinks otherwise.

They rely for most of their revenue on that Google search deal.

Safe Browsing in "update" mode, with an IP hiding proxy as Brave uses, is ok.

i duno. the other day i used a friend's computer without an adblocker and searched google for "AWS". i could not see a link to amazon AWS on the results page. it was under 5 ads for azure, gcp, and some other crap. i mean, i use an adblocker on my own devices and had no idea it had gotten that crazy. it was horrifying. the non tech-savvy people are clicking god knows what and fueling a massive industry of identity theft, not to mention the psychological pollution and interference to genuine knowledge and information that so many ads represent. sure brave is sketchy in its own way, but it's a paradigm shift in the right direction. something has got to change. so i can totally see why users and not just investors would want to give brave a try.

But that adblocking there is not uBlock is it? It is not controllable by me and can be turned to "acceptable ads" any day. If it only let mobile to use extensions like FF does.

of course, but what makes brave unique is that its blocking is native. only 10% of users have an adblocker (us techies live in a bubble) -- 90% of people have no idea what uBlock is. also ublock could be turned to "acceptable ads" too -- it already happened (i'm assuming you're talking about uBlock "origin")

Finding a niche is one thing. If you change a product used by a portion (albeit small) of the mainstream into a product that would appeal only to a niche audience, that may well end up going against you.

The causal arrow points the other way. Today Firefox finally started blocking third party cookies (some, not all as Brave does; they use Disconnect.me's 3rd party cookie blocking list) by default. This does not limit mainstream appeal, it follows Safari and Brave, who have been leading the privacy by default movement among browsers.