Anything above baseline blocking, protection against fingerprinting, etc., is optional and must remain so or our core users would bolt. So please feel welcome to use in default mode.

BTW, chromium bloat rep in part comes from Chrome not blocking ads and tracking well. Extensions must use JS and so use more memory. Brave uses C++ in the network threads of the browser process.

Hmm, perhaps I've been a bit unfair. Looks like I will have to give Brave another shot soon! Thank you!

Are these C++-based browser improvements being made public? Is this a library?

All client source is open under https://github.com/brave/.

What is “the crypto stuff”?

Brave has introduced BAT (Basic Attention Token), a token for a decentralized ad exchange. Give their interesting white paper [0] a read.

[0] https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePape...

Thanks for the info, I’ll check it out!