Brave

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Brave is a web browser focused on privacy, blocking trackers, and advertisements.

Brave is not present in the Gentoo ebuild repository, but can be installed from the brave-overlay ebuild repository. Brave is distributed as a binary package, which should not impact usage performance.

Installation

Prerequisites

The following must be installed in order for the rest of this article to work properly: app-eselect/eselect-repository and dev-vcs/git.

Skip the rest of this section if they are already installed.

Install required software:

root #emerge --ask app-eselect/eselect-repository dev-vcs/git

Set Portage to use the Brave ebuild repository

Issue the command to configure the brave-overlay ebuild repository for Portage. Then, synchronize that repository:

root #eselect repository enable brave-overlay

root #emaint sync -r brave-overlay

Emerge

Install Brave:

root #emerge --ask brave-bin

Configuration

Because Brave is based on the open source chromium browser, a lot of configurations can be done according to the chromium configuration: Chromium#Configuration.

Policies

It is possible to set specific policies for chromium based browsers like Brave. This can be useful especially if the browser should be accessible by users, but the content should be restricted to trusted sites. It can also be configured to restrict the access to specified URIs, like the file:// protocol, to prevent users from surfing the file system.

To set custom policies a JSON file must be created in /etc/brave/policies/managed/<filename>.json

The JSON file must meet the following structure:

CODE

{
    "[policy name]": [value]
}

An example JSON file could look like this:

CODE

{
"IncognitoModeAvailability": 1,
"URLBlocklist": [
    "https://facebook.com",
    "file://*",
    "javascript://*",
    "ftp://*",
    "mailto:*"
],
"DefaultGeolocationSetting": 2,
"DefaultNotificationsSetting": 2,
}

This prevents the user from surfing on the file system using the file protocol, incognito mode, blocks the listed URIs and URLs, and the location and notifications. More settings, can be found in the policy list: https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3/. If configured for other users as a service, it is recommended to block all sites at first and then define the allowed sites, to avoid abuse of the service.

If the policy was configured properly can be proofed on the special page: brave://policy

Please note that this only blocks the user from visiting specified locations. It does not disable the protocols on the system, so other applications must be configured separately.

See also

• Eselect/Repository — an eselect module for configuring ebuild repositories for Portage.