Growser — what the settings do
Short answers for the switches people ask about most.
Shields
Shields block advertising and trackers on the pages you open. The icon in the address bar shows how much was blocked on the site in front of you and lets you turn the protection off for that one site — which leaves every other site as it was.
The filter lists come straight from the people who maintain them (EasyList and the other publishers) rather than through Brave's infrastructure: a fork has no service key of theirs, and subscriptions pointed at the original sources work without one.
Blocking-only mode
A narrowed version of Shields: the advertising and tracker blocking stays, the more aggressive protections switch off. It exists for sites that break under the full set — instead of turning Shields off altogether, you give up less.
Your own filter lists
You can add rules of your own — the syntax is the one Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin use — and subscribe to somebody else's list by its address. Subscriptions update straight from the address you gave, and from nowhere else.
De-AMP
"Prefer the publisher's own page address over AMP and similar versions." An AMP page is served by an intermediary rather than by the site you meant to visit; with De-AMP on, the browser goes to the publisher's page directly wherever it can.
Skipping tracking redirects
Plenty of links do not lead where they say they do: they go to an in-between address that records the click and only then sends you on. This setting skips those intermediate steps and opens the destination itself.
Containers
Containers are tabs marked with a colour that keep their own cookies, cache and site storage. The same site opened in two containers cannot tell that it is the same person. Deleting a container deletes everything it held.
Manifest V2 extensions
Chromium is winding down support for the second manifest version, and in the third one what a blocker may do is cut back considerably. This setting keeps the MV2 extensions you have installed working.
Warnings about dangerous sites and broken connections
A red page in place of a site means one of two things. Either the address is on Google's list of phishing or malware sites, or the site's secure connection cannot be trusted (an expired or forged certificate, a wrong clock on your computer). The list is checked on your device: only a short prefix of the address's hash leaves it, through our server, and Google does not see who asked. "Back to safety" returns you where you were.
If you are sure a site is safe, the details on the page let you continue. "Report an error" on a dangerous-site warning opens Google's form with the site's address, so that Google can take it off the list; it is sent only if you click it.
Crash reports
If the browser crashes it can send a dump — the call stack at the moment it failed, not the contents of your tabs. Reports go to a server of ours and nowhere else. The switch is offered on the first run and lives in the settings afterwards.
What we collect
Nothing, apart from crash reports if you have not turned them off. Telemetry, the advertising system and Brave's daily ping are removed from this build rather than switched off with a toggle. You do not have to take that on trust: the sources are open, and the build carries checks that fail if a new foreign address appears in the binary.
Separately: how updates work.
Growser is MPL-2.0. Brave and Brave Shields are trademarks of Brave Software, Inc.