Brave 1.18 Stable launches with Brave Today, Global Privacy Control support, and more

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Brave has released Brave 1.18, a new stable version of the company's web browser for desktop operating systems and Android. The new version of Brave introduces the recently reviewed Brave Today news system, support for the up-and-coming standard Global Privacy Control, and other features.

Brave installations should get updated automatically thanks to the browser's built-in updating functionality. Desktop users can select Menu > About Brave to check the version and run a check for updates. Loading brave://settings/help directly does the same thing.

One of the first thing that users may notice, or not, is the new Brave Today addition to the browser's new tab page. It is enabled by default and all you have to do is scroll down to see a first selection of news displayed to you.

Brave Today collects news from news sources, the majority from the United States, pushes it on to its own content distribution network, to display titles and images to users. A click on customize displays options to enable or disable certain news sources in categories such as sports, finance, technology, or science.

The selection of news sources is quite good if you are from the United States, but if you are from anywhere else, you may find it lacking especially if you prefer non-English news sources. Users who don't plan on using it can turn it off easily though.

Brave 1.18 adds new controls to set what is displayed on the new tab page. Just load brave://settings/newTab (or select Settings > New Tab Page) to set the "New tab page shows" option from Dashboard to either Homepage or Blank.

Another new feature of Brave 1.18 is support for Global Privacy Control. It is a relatively new initiative to improve user privacy and rights on the Internet. Basically, what it does is inform sites that an Internet user denies sites the right to sell or share personal information to third-parties.

You can check out our Global Privacy Control summary for additional details. Global Privacy Control is enabled in Brave.

Brave 1.18 features a number of smaller additions and changes. The following ones are noteworthy:

• Protection against private browsing mode detections added to the browser.
  
• Contrast among tabs improved.
  
• Option to remove devices from Brave Sync, e.g. to remove unused devices or devices that were stolen/lost.
  
• Yandex is the default search engine in select regions for new installations (including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Russian Federation). Full list is here.
  
• Upgraded the core to Chromium 87.0.4280.101
  
• Lots of changes related to Brave Ads and Rewards.
  

You can check out the full release notes here.

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