Blockchain browser that was formerly known as ‘Braver’ rebranded itself to ‘Bold Browser’ on July 9. The rebranding came as the firm cited legal threats from a ‘certain party’. ‘Braver’ is designed as an adware-free fork of the Brave Browser.
Braver Browser was launched in June after reports of Brave auto-filling the firm’s affiliate link into searches for various crypto exchanges like Binance and Coinbase.
Announcing this project in a now-deleted tweet on June 6, the Braver developers’ team stated that it had eliminated Brave’s referral link injection. The team also said that the full release was designed to delete all adware which includes the Basic Attention Token (BAT). BAT is an in-house ERC-20 utility token that is awarded to the Brave content makers for the promotion of the platform.
Brave co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich tweeted around the same time that the forked project:
“will have to rename, also run a bunch of services and updates on their own. No free-riding on our servers.”
Legal Threats
Notably, Braver rebranded as “Bold Browser” on July 9 on all social media platforms including Github, Twitter, and Discord. The team tweeted:
“Due to legal threats sent to one of our community members by a certain party, specifically looking to harm them financially because of what this browser is forked from, we are immediately changing the name and removing all association to ‘the browser that shall not be named’.”
Bold Browser also mentioned that it was removing all references to a browser that they previously mentioned from some of their tweets. They referred to it as:
“a gesture of goodwill to those who send legal threats to open source contributors.”
When reporters asked whether Bold Browser expects the legal threats to stop after the rebranding, a spokesperson said:
“The threat letter demanded the coders change the project’s name and remove all references to them. Everyone did the best they could to comply. You’ll have to ask them to see if they find it’s enough to go back to their privacy and anonymity respecting standards that they advertise themselves by.”
Possibility Of Another Fork
Furthermore, a developer told reporters that they are planning to create a new browser by forking Ungoogled Chromium; rather than Brave. He explained:
“Not because of legal issues, but because the original code is a bit messy and difficult to maintain/update. We plan to make Bold a Chromium-based browser that contains the features that people expect from privacy-respecting ad-blocking browsers; with next generation integrations (such as web3 and ipfs), without any advertising programs or token reward schemes.”
