Brave Gets Major Privacy Updates on Desktop and Mobile

Brave announced two big updates to its privacy-focused web browser this week: Brave for the iPhone and iPad now supports HTTPS by default, while the Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) functionality it announced back in June is now live in Brave for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

“Starting with version 1.68, Brave will become the first iOS Web browser to try to upgrade all sites to HTTPS by default,” the announcement post notes. “When you click or enter an insecure [HTTP] link, Brave will automatically redirect to its secure [HTTPS] version. Using HTTPS is crucial to prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) and attackers from snooping on your browsing activity.”

Previously, Brave for iOS only pushed you to an HTTPS version of a website if it was on a list of sites, as with other iOS-based browsers. So this change means it will now do the opposite: All sites will be upgraded to be secure by default, while only those sites on a much smaller exception list will not be. Brave users can also enable a Strict mode that will warn if there isn’t an HTTPS version of a site before navigating to the potentially unsafe version.

Separately, Brave announced that the Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) on-device AI functionality it previously announced is now available in the latest version of its desktop web browser.

“AI in Brave is now more private and customizable with BYOM (Bring Your Own Model),” Brave tweeted today. “Starting today with v1.69, Brave users on desktop can use their own AI models through the browser’s built-in assistant Leo.”

You can learn more about this feature in the original June blog post, but the short version is that users can now connect Leo to on-device AI models like LLama, Gemma, Mistral, Phi 3, and many others through its built-in support for the Ollama framework. Then, they can access those models through a drop-down in the Leo AI sidebar. Brave also supports remote (cloud-hosted) AI models like ChatGPT.