I’ve just released Brave Utilities Extension, an extension that contains utilities useful when using Brave. You can find it at this link however at the time of posting this topic it’s under review so it may be a few days before the extension is available.
Currently it only has a single utility which is a blocker for those annoying scripts on sites that open a new tab or window when you click. This utility simply allows you to turn on or off new tab creation in your browser with the click of a button. Turn it on when you enter a site that’s known for creating unwanted tabs when you click somewhere and watch as they’re all instantly closed before they even finish loading. Then once you’re done on that site, simply turn off the blocker and the browser goes back to functioning normally.
While the extension may only have one utility right now, it does have a second feature. This feature is a proof of concept for the feature suggestion I’ve made here and here. The current auto donations is not exactly what I want and ends up rewarding my favorite content creators disproportionately. Tipping is a nice feature overall, but requires me to choose the tip and whether it’s monthly or not which isn’t what I originally liked about the experience Brave was supposed to have.
Any feedback on my demo would be much appreciated, as I believe it mirrors the current Brave experience quite closely except for the newly added category feature. You should be able to simply browse normally like you do with Brave, and after a few days you can check the “Rewards” tab in the extension popup to see how X amount of coins would be distributed with this system. You should see that the amount distributed is the same as standard brave payments unless you used the categories. There may be some small differences, such as the fact that my extension only tracks sites and individual youtube channels instead of twitch and twitter profiles as well like Brave currently does. But the category feature would apply to those content creators as well, so I felt it wasn’t worth figuring out how to track them in the demo.
You can create new categories (Categories > Add New Category), edit categories (Categories > Edit Categories), and change which category the current site is on (Categories > Change Current Category). The miscellaneous category can’t be altered and is locked at a percentage determined by 1 - the sum of all other categories.
Do keep in mind that this POC was a bit rushed so there are certain things lacking polish, for example categories can be set to have a percentage greater than 100% (greater than 1 is divided by 100 to allow for decimals or percents, but greater than 100 will cause the issue I’m referring to) which will cause all sorts of havoc in the demo. I don’t really care too much about bugs in the programming as I know there are some (and I’d push out updates to fix them if google wasn’t slowing everything down by reviewing my extension), and instead care a lot more about any changes you think are necessary to the suggestion I’m making.
The goal would not be for the team to use my exact code in Brave, but instead to implement the feature I’m showing off. I hope that having a concrete POC for the idea may help get the point across, as I think it’s a much needed feature that most likely wouldn’t be too difficult to add in Brave.
