 In the last two years or so, the Brave browser has been my web browser of choice. I run Brave on all of my desktop computers as well as my mobile phone. And here recently, the last couple of updates that were pushed out for the Brave browser has really seen some really nice improvements to it that I wanted to highlight today on camera. So let me switch over to my desktop and I'm going to launch the Brave browser. And if you recently updated Brave, you're going to get this tab, this welcome tab to tell you what's new in this latest version of Brave. One of the biggest features for this latest version is the addition of vertical tabbing. So instead of having your traditional tab menus up here, right? So if I wanted to, let me navigate to a few different places on the world. I'm just going to open some tabs. So I've got, you know, these three tabs that are horizontal here at the top of the browser. This is typical for pretty much every web browser. But now if you want to, you can have vertical tabbing. You can go into settings. So open the menu, go to settings and then go to appearance and then scroll down. Now you have this tab section, use vertical tabs. If you click that on, you now have this vertical tab sidebar. Also at the top, you have the ability to toggle that. So it's just the icon or you can expand it. So you can see the icon and the title of the page. You also have a search where you can actually search through tabs and history. Now, other than the ability just to turn on the vertical tabs or turn them off to go back to horizontal tabs. Another interesting feature here is the hover mode here. So by default it's set to card. So if you hover over one of your vertical tabs, you get basically just the title of the page and the URL, but you can change that from card to card with preview. And now when you hover over it, you will get the same card. So the title, the URL, but you'll get a preview of what the web page looks like. Or you can change that to tool tip. And now you just get the title. Now honestly, I probably wouldn't go to settings to turn on and off the vertical tabbing because you don't need to play with settings, right? You can get rid of that. All you need to do anytime you want to switch between horizontal tabbing or vertical tabbing is just go to one of your tabs and right click on it and choose use vertical tabs. And now you've got the vertical tab look over here. And if you wanted to go back to horizontal tabs, just hover over one of the tabs and right click on it. And instead of use vertical tabs, which is checked, check it back off and you go back to your horizontal tabbing. One other feature I do want to mention is the Brave Search Engine because I'm a big fan of the Brave Search Engine. If I navigate to a new tab and let me just search dot brave dot com. One of the things I love about the Brave Search Engine, it's designed to be more private, right? Brave is all about privacy. There's a company behind Brave and if I search for something, I don't know. Let's search for DistroTube and see if it actually gives you relevant search results. You would expect searching my YouTube channel named DistroTube. It would give you the YouTube channel as the first result. You would hope, and it does. It also gives you my personal website. It gives you some subreddits on my r slash DistroTube subreddit, my GitLab, an interview that I did with ZSA, the makers of the keyboards for the Moonlander and the ErgoDocs, yada, yada, yada. You get a lot of really relevant information here and they keep improving this Brave Search Engine. If you go back to what's new in Brave, one of the big things here is the Brave Search Engine has now completely removed all third party data calls to the Bing Search Engine before they were using Bing for some of their search results. But now the Brave Search is a hundred percent an independent search engine. So that's a big deal, right? Because before the Brave Search, it did have its own search results, but they weren't as good as what the Brave team wanted. So they did integrate, you know, things from, for example, the Bing Search Engine. But eventually they were they were working on having their own database so that they didn't have to rely on third party search engines like Bing or Google. And I got to say the Brave Search results are great. I love Brave Search. Brave Search is so much better than DuckDuckGo. I know a lot of you guys probably use DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is terrible as far as relevant search results. I'm going to give you an example. Let's search for Ubuntu. What do you expect are the big Ubuntu web properties that should come up immediately when you search for Ubuntu? You would expect everything from Ubuntu.com to be here. And they do. They have Ubuntu.com as well as some major pages within the Ubuntu.com site. We also get the Ubuntu Wikipedia page, which makes sense, right? You get some news, recent news about Ubuntu. You get the Ubuntu Twitter feed, which you would expect more recent news articles about Ubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Monte, some part of the Ubuntu family. You get a lot of the search results, relevant search results. You would expect when you do a search for Ubuntu. Let me open up a new tab. Let's go to DuckDuckGo and let's search for Ubuntu. Well, if I can type correctly, Ubuntu. Now, the first thing I get is I can buy books on Ubuntu. This is obviously an ad. It has the word ad out to the side of it. But once we get to the search results, we do have Ubuntu.com, which you would expect and relevant things from Ubuntu.com. But then it continues to give us more stuff from Ubuntu.com, right? It's we do get some news results. But here we get like news articles from two years ago from how to geek. Why is that important enough to be like on the first page of Ubuntu search results? I don't know another how to geek article. Then we get something in Russian here, Ubuntu.ru. I don't even know if that's an official canonical site or not. And Ubuntu.en.softtonic. I don't know what soft tonic is. Like these search results, when you compare the DuckDuckGo search results for anything and you could, you know, Ubuntu, this was just something off the top of my head. I could have searched for practically anything. The brave search results are just better. Now, another thing I want to just briefly touch on. This is not from the latest release of Brave. Let me go back to the vertical tabs because that's a major feature. But one thing they used to do when you downloaded anything with the Brave browser, it used to open up like a lower third split here at the bottom, like a horizontal split that took up like 25% of the bottom of the browser. And it showed you the file you were downloading and how much time, you know, was left on that download. If you clicked on another file download, it would add that to the horizontal split at the bottom of the page. Now you could close that split, but by default, it always opened that split every time you downloaded something. And it was annoying because most people, when you're downloading something in a web browser, do you really want to see the progress, especially the progress taking up so much of your web browser? No. Most web browsers, when you're downloading something, it just starts downloading in the background. Maybe they'll have something up here at the top of the browser to give you some kind of progress bar. But Brave finally heard the negative feedback from a lot of us that hated that lower third feature for the downloads, and they just got rid of it. Now, any time you download something, you'll actually get a little progress bar for the downloads, and it no longer takes up that bottom part of your browser. And one final new feature that you will notice, if you guys use the standard home page, new tab page, which I don't, you guys know, I use tab bliss. So if I open a new tab, this is a plugin called tab bliss. It works on all Chromium based browsers and all Firefox based browsers. So you see tab bliss on pretty much all the browsers I have installed any time I use things like Firefox or LibreWolf or in this case, Brave, which is Chromium based. I use this tab bliss plugin because I don't care for the default Brave homepage. But if you use it, you will now notice that you have a news feed on that page. You're going to get served news articles, and they claim that it can be personalized in some way. I haven't tried it out. Me personally, I don't care about having a news feed on my new tab page in my browser, but this is out there. And I have seen it, even though I don't use it on the desktop version of Brave, I've seen it on my mobile phone, of the mobile phone version that got pushed out. I would want to say about two weeks ago or so, I started seeing it on Brave on mobile, this new news feed feature on it as well. So that's just a little bit of what's new here recently in the Brave browser. Those of you that maybe tried Brave two, three years ago when it was still kind of new, kind of raw. If you haven't tried Brave in say the last year or so, I would definitely recommend giving it another look because I think you'd be surprised at how much better this browser has become in recent releases. And before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Gabe James Maxim, Homies To Ball, Matt Mimic, Mitchell Paul, Royal West, Armored Dragon, Bash Potato, Chuck, Commander Henry, George Lee, Marstrum, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Pete Sarchi, McGor, Politec Realities, Ferless, Red Prophet, Roland, Tulsa, Devler, Willie, and Zinnabit. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the Brave browser would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. You like my work and wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, like the Brave browser. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. Brave is so much better than proprietary garbage like Edge or Vivaldi.