Brave
Chromium fork pushing privacy and optional rewards—fewer trackers by default, but still a product with its own wallet, ads narrative, and ecosystem bets.
Lock-in Stage 2
Users are retained through switching costs, data, network effects, or ecosystem dependency.
Brave optimizes for user-facing privacy features and ad-tech disruption with BAT and rewards experiments. The surplus side is credible for blocklists and defaults. Lock-in is lighter than Chrome but real around wallet, sync, and vertical integrations. Stage 2: more aligned than megacorp defaults, still commercial.
More in Browser
-
Firefox
1 User surplusOpen-source browser with privacy-forward defaults and no ad-tech parent; Mozilla’s funding model is fragile but the user-facing product still skews toward surplus over extraction.
-
Google Chrome
3 ExtractionDominant Chromium default—fast and compatible, tightly coupled to Google accounts, sync, and the ads ecosystem that funds the web’s biggest funnel.
