I'm using the Brave browser but your site says I've got Chrome. Why?
Updated at: Aug 18, 2023
The Brave browser positions itself as a privacy conscious web browser, designed to help you not be tracked online. Under the hood, it's based on Google's Chrome browser and basically uses the same underlying technology to display web pages and so on.
Brave impersonates Chrome
The short answer as to why Brave gets detected as Chrome is because the Brave browser announces itself as being Chrome. Our detection largely relies on what your browser tells us about itself, and so since Brave tells us that it's actually Chrome, we have little choice but to display the homepage detection as if you were running Chrome.
Version checking is affected too
Because Brave is pretending to be Chrome, it means that when we check if your web browser is up to date, we compare the version of Chrome that Brave is pretending to be with the latest version of Chrome. Unfortunately, sometimes the version of Chrome that Brave is impersonating isn't the latest one, so as a result we check that older version of Chrome against what the actual latest version of Chrome is, and as a result we warn you that your browser is out of date!
If Brave announced that it was actually Brave, instead of impersonating Chrome, we'd be able to correctly tell you if your copy of Brave was up to date or now. Unfortunately it's not possible to do this.
Why does Brave do this?
The reason Brave impersonates Chrome is to help reduce your "trackability" and "uniqueness" online. One of the ways it makes it easy to track someone is by looking for things which are different about them - things that stand out.
For example, if there's a group of 100 cars - made up of different brands and and models but they're all blue, then at a glance it's very hard to track each individual car's movements. But if one of those cars was instead painted red, then in that sea of blue cars the one red car would stand out and be much easier to track.
In a similar way, Brave "fits in with the Chrome crowd" by impersonating it. If Brave went around announcing that it was the Brave browser, it would give another data-point for Ad companies to track you with. By blending in with all the other Chrome users, it makes it a bit harder to track you.
The Brave development team has no intention of changing this behaviour of their browser, so unfortunately for now we can't detect it or if it's up to date, but if this ever changes, we'll be sure to support it then.
