The Brave blog explains this, but it’s still a bit too techy for me. Can someone explain in more layman’s terms, and is this something I should enable?
Thanks. Brave has become my default browser on all devices.
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Thanks! I will patiently await his wisdom.
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Speaking of Brave, I tried to try it out months ago… BUT it did NOT sync anything between the desktop & mbile versions, making it pretty much unusable for me. There was some beta/alpha version that supposedly had preliminary support but it too didn’t work for me. Have they gotten over this hill (not to mention WHY, in this day and age, they have created a browser that lacks one of the bedrick features of any browser these days?)?
I think syncing is one of those technologies that’s easy to promise and very hard to get right, given security, consistency, and reliability issues, particularly in a situation like Brave’s where you don’t necessarily have a centralized account.
The feature has been available for a few months, though I haven’t looked at it.
Sync works fine for me – tabs, bookmarks, history, etc. on 3 iOS devices and 1 Mac
Ugh, just launched the last Brave beta so I could try to see about maybe a newer beta/release version might sync (the beta I ran was supposed to have syncing, but it didn’t work), but I couldn’t get anywhere because I started getting a crapton of Little Snitch warnings as it seems it was trying to contact EVERY website I’ve ever gone to (I HAD imported my whole Chrome bookmarks list into it previously). Sounds like some kind of ploy to tell all those sites I was running their browser (yeah, a tad cynical). I’ll give it one more shot, but if it starts some hour long process of trying to answer for it wanting to contact hundreds of sites, that’s going to be it.
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Forget it, I got the latest release version, at least no constant warnings from Little Snitch, spent half an hour trying to follow their convoluted instructions to set up sync, it did not work because when they say …go there and do this…what it was simply was not there. Not worth it.
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Did you notice any pattern in the URLs to try and figure out what it’s actually doing?
For instance, if it’s trying to download a “favicon” image from each site, then it’s almost certainly trying to pre-populate a database of icons to display alongside the bookmark names/URLs.
it started out with the usual suspects, apple & the goo, but as soon as it started with some of my merchants (like swanson vitamins) I knew it was up to no good. And in general, it seems like favicons only happen when you actually visit the site… and they don’t last forever. BUT you make an interesting point… however if THAT was really what was happening, some bad thinking in the design stage clearly happened… especially when you are trying to take a lot of market share from others! Like I said, when I got the latest release version, all that went away.
Can I add my vote? 
I came across IPFS yesterday, and understand the general concept they are going for (a decentralised internet), but got completely lost trying to understand how it would actually work, who is promoting it, and who’s managing the standard. Which parts of the existing system is it replacing (DNS, more?), how would one ‘use’ IPFS, is it parallel to existing http, or under it, or replacing it, etc. It’s the kind of thing @glennf always does an excellent job of explaining so that it all makes sense, and I’d love to read a TidBITS article on IPFS. 
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