BraveBrowser, founded by Brendan Edge, the father of JavaScript, recently announced that the company has decided to abandon the strict mode provided by the privacy protection mode in the Brave browser and will continue to provide standard fingerprint protection in the future. The fingerprint protection here does not mean actually collecting the user's fingerprint, but a unique special string generated by browser version, system version, screen resolution, language, region, etc.
This string is used to replace traditional cookies, that is, websites are not allowed to track users through cookies, but users can be tracked through fingerprints. Of course, the accuracy of fingerprint patterns is much lower than that of cookies. This is a good thing for users, but the opposite is true for websites.
So why did Brave give up this feature? The reason is that after a long period of testing, only 0.5% of users actively turned on strict mode, about 33 users, and other users used the default standard protection.
After turning on strict mode, a considerable number of websites will experience abnormalities, and even many websites will be completely unusable because cookies are blocked, and most websites still rely on traditional cookie functions.
In the end, Brave decided to abandon strict mode and no longer test it. Currently, Brave has deleted strict mode in the nightly build version.
The Brave team believes that investing resources in continuing to maintain strict mode for a relatively small user base is not the best use of the limited resources of the entire project. Looking to the future, the team will continue to work on functional enhancements and optimizations of the standard protection mode, continue to improve the fingerprint protection function, while maintaining compatibility with the website as much as possible.