As Brave As You: What It Actually Does
As Brave As You is a modified version of the Brave browser that routes your traffic through Tor's network before it hits its final destination. Unlike normal Brave browsing, where the browser just does standard HTTPS connections, or even Brave's built-in Tor mode which opens a separate window, this version sends everything through multiple Tor relays. You're basically combining the convenience of a normal browser with the anonymity network Tor provides, without having to juggle two separate apps. I spent a few months running it as my daily driver after getting tired of Brave's own Tor tab being too limited for what I needed. The main sell is that it gives you the privacy benefits of Tor while keeping the browser features you'd actually miss if you switched to Tor Browser — things like hardware acceleration, YouTube playback, and not having JavaScript completely broken on half the sites you visit.
Why As Brave As You Exists
Tor Browser is heavy. It's built around the idea of fingerprinting resistance, which means it makes every instance look identical. That's great for privacy but terrible for compatibility. Sites break constantly. Login sessions get messy. The user experience is intentionally restrictive. As Brave As You takes a different approach. It keeps the Brave browser mostly intact and just adds a Tor routing layer on top. The tradeoff is that your fingerprint is less standardized, but you get a browser that actually works for normal tasks. For most people who just want their IP hidden and don't need to look exactly like everyone else on the Tor network, this is the better option.
How It Actually Works Under the Hood
The browser connects to the Tor network using a relay chain. When you open a page, Brave routes your request through a Tor circuit — usually three relays — before the request reaches the website. The exit relay sends the request out to the internet, which means the site sees the exit relay's IP address, not yours. Traffic between your machine and the entry relay is encrypted within the Tor network. One detail people miss: As Brave As You doesn't use the default Tor directory. It pulls from multiple sources including the onionoo directory service to find relay nodes. The default configuration uses the Tor network, but you can also configure it to use Tor bridges if you're in a region where Tor is blocked or monitored. That's useful if your ISP is actively looking for Tor connections. The downside is that every page load goes through multiple hops, so pages load noticeably slower than normal browsing. Expect about 2-4x the latency depending on how congested the Tor network is at the moment. This isn't a dealbreaker for casual browsing, but it's something to keep in mind if you're planning to do video streaming or heavy web browsing through it.
Get the Full Details
Download and Installation
You can get it directly from the official site at brave.com/as-brave-as-you/. It's a standalone download — there's no extension or plugin needed. You install it like any regular browser. On Windows it's a .exe installer, macOS has the .dmg, and there's a Linux package available too. Don't download it from third-party sites. There have been fork versions floating around on GitHub that aren't maintained and may include malicious modifications. Stick to the official Brave download page. The project is open source, so the code is auditable, but that only matters if you're getting it from the right place.
Configuration and Settings You Should Know About
After installing it, the first thing you'll notice is that it doesn't look dramatically different from regular Brave. The settings panel is mostly the same, with one additional section for Tor configuration. You'll find options for bridge selection, relay preferences, and whether to enforce Tor mode globally or only on specific sites. By default, it routes everything through Tor. If you want to whitelist certain sites to bypass Tor and go direct, you can do that in the settings. I found this necessary because some sites — particularly banking sites and corporate portals — either block Tor exit nodes outright or flag the traffic as suspicious. Having those load normally through your regular connection rather than getting stuck on a timeout was worth the minor privacy tradeoff. There's also a setting for whether to use the Tor network for DNS lookups. I recommend leaving this on. Otherwise, your ISP can still see what domains you're resolving even if they can't see the actual content of your requests. DNS leakage through Tor is a real issue and it's easy to overlook until you check your traffic and realize your ISP knows every domain you visited even though they can't see the pages themselves.
Common Problems and Workarounds
The biggest issue I ran into was with sites that do aggressive browser fingerprinting. As Brave As You doesn't randomize your fingerprint the way Tor Browser does, so sites like ArcGIS or certain government portals could still identify repeat visits based on your screen resolution, installed fonts, and other metadata. This matters more than you'd think if you're trying to avoid being tracked across sessions. The workaround I used was to run a separate instance of regular Brave for sites where fingerprinting was a concern, and keep As Brave As You for everything else. It's not ideal to juggle two browsers, but it solved the problem without requiring me to give up Tor routing entirely. Another edge case: video content often struggles. YouTube works but it's slow, and sites like Vimeo or news outlets with embedded players frequently time out because the exit node gets saturated or the bandwidth is throttled. If you need to watch video regularly, you're better off with a VPN or just accepting that this isn't the right tool for media consumption.
I also noticed that some authentication flows break, particularly anything using WebAuthn or hardware security keys. Tor's security model conflicts with how these systems work, and the modified Brave build doesn't fully resolve the conflict. Two-factor auth codes sent via SMS work fine, but biometric or hardware-key based logins are unreliable.
Performance and Real-World Use
On a typical home connection with decent latency to Tor relays, page loads average around 3-8 seconds depending on the site. Heavily rendered pages with lots of JavaScript take longer because each request still goes through the Tor circuit. Simple text-heavy pages are faster, maybe 1-2 seconds over normal browsing speed. Memory usage runs higher than regular Brave. The Tor integration adds overhead, and you'll typically see the browser using about 30-50% more RAM than the standard version. On a machine with 8GB or less, this can be noticeable when you have multiple tabs open. I stopped running more than about eight tabs in As Brave As You and kept the rest in a regular browser instance. CPU usage spikes during the initial connection to the Tor network, especially on first launch when it's building circuits. After that settles down, it's moderate. My experience is that it hovers around 15-25% CPU on a modern quad-core processor during normal browsing, spiking higher during page loads with heavy JavaScript.
When This Isn't the Right Tool
As Brave As You is not a replacement for Tor Browser if you're doing high-risk work. Journalists, activists, or anyone in a surveillance-heavy environment should stick with Tor Browser. The fingerprinting protections in the official Tor Browser are significantly stronger, and the security model is more conservative by design. As Brave As You trades some of that protection for usability, and that tradeoff doesn't make sense if your threat model requires maximum anonymity. It's also not suitable if you need consistent, high-bandwidth connections. If you're downloading large files or streaming regularly, the Tor network is going to be a bottleneck no matter how you slice it. A standard VPN is the better choice there — you get encryption and IP masking without the multi-hop latency. There's also the question of trust. You're running a modified browser with a custom build that routes through Tor. While the code is open source and the project is transparent about what it does, you're still placing trust in the build process. This is true of any modified software, but it's worth acknowledging explicitly. If you don't want to run a modified browser at all, your options are standard Tor Browser or a VPN. Neither has the same middle ground that As Brave As You offers.
