Updates / Brave

Brave 1.99: Chromium 157 underneath, Protected Audience gone, same TLS fingerprint

Stable Brave on the fleet is now 1.99.55, on Chromium 157: four new web features, Protected Audience gone, plain HTTP loads, TLS and HTTP/2 unchanged.

Brave stable · 1.98.63 → 1.99.55 · 2026-11-08

Brave released 1.99.55 on 2026-11-04, and new brave sessions on the fleet now run it instead of 1.98.63. Its Chromium base moves from 156.0.8078.80 to 157.0.8103.39 (Brave release notes, measured), so web platform changes follow Chrome 157 (Chrome 157 post).

New

Chromium 157.0.8103.39 (Brave release notes, "Release v1.99.55 (Chromium 157.0.8103.39)"; the browser reports the same version).
New web APIs that pages can feature-test, all found by our probe on 1.99 and not on 1.98, the same four as on Chrome 157: CSS text-decoration-inset and Element.prototype.streamAppendHTML (both in the Chrome 157 release notes), plus WebTransport.reliability and the canvas srgb-linear colour space. Chrome Platform Status lists those last two for 158 and 155.
Brave's own changes are in Leo and the UI: Leo offers a list of choices when it needs you to clarify a task, has better follow-up prompts and updated AI Chat models, and no longer lets a compromised Leo conversation frame approve AI Chat tool use without a direct user action. The split-view drag-and-drop setting is back in brave://settings/braveContent, and the Brave Search icon in the address bar is now a magnifying glass (Brave 1.99.55 changelog). None of these changes what a page or an automation client sees.

Removed or changed

Protected Audience is gone: navigator.joinAdInterestGroup exists on 1.98 and not on 1.99, as in Chrome 157. Chrome announced it would deprecate and remove the Protected Audience API (Chrome Platform Status). The Topics API, fenced frames and Shared Storage were already missing on 1.98 and are still missing on 1.99.
Plain HTTP still loads on cdpfleet: Chrome 157 turns on HTTPS-First balanced mode, which upgrades or blocks http:// URLs (Chrome 157 post). Brave's 1.99 notes don't mention it. Since 2026-11-06 (09:34 UTC) every node turns it off by enterprise policy for Chrome, Chromium, Brave and Edge. On 1.99.55 our check loaded http://ip-api.com/json/?fields=status over HTTP (status 200, {"status":"success"}), the same as on 1.98.63. We didn't measure Brave 1.99 without the policy.

What sites see / detection

User agent and client hints: Chrome/157.0.0.0 in the user agent (Brave doesn't add its own token). The Sec-CH-UA brands change from Not:A-Brand 8, Chromium 156, Brave 156 to Not-A.Brand 99, Brave 157, Chromium 157: a new placeholder brand, and Brave now comes before Chromium. Brave keeps reporting reduced full versions (157.0.0.0).
TLS and HTTP/2 unchanged: the JA4 hash, the peetprint hash, the HTTP/2 fingerprint, the header order and the cipher and extension counts are identical to 1.98.
Canvas and screen differ per session, not per version: the canvas hash and the screen size (1280×800 on 1.98.63, 1366×768 on 1.99.55) in the table below changed because Brave farbles them. Case 83 measured a 1366×768 screen on 55 of 60 visits and 1280×800 on 5, and every other Brave snapshot on the fleet (including 1.99.55) reported 1366×768. WebGL, plugins, the PDF viewer, languages, navigator.webdriver and window.chrome read the same as on 1.98.
Bot checks unchanged: bot.sannysoft.com flagged one check (WebGL Renderer) before and after.

For scraping

Launch options, the Playwright 1.60 client and wsUrl are the same, and every Playwright feature we test still works.
Plain-HTTP URLs need no change on cdpfleet. Brave 1.99 on your own machine may behave differently, because the HTTPS-First mode Chromium 157 turns on is only switched off on our nodes.
If you match Sec-CH-UA brand strings or the full user agent somewhere (an allowlist, a test), update them to 157. The brand order changed too.

Measured on the fleet

The same probe ran against 1.98.63 (on 2026-11-01) and 1.99.55 (on 2026-11-08) on the fleet: identity, TLS and HTTP/2 fingerprint, web platform features, Playwright features and bot checks. Host-dependent values (cores, memory, timings) are left out. Brave farbles canvas and screen values per session, so changes to those between any two sessions are expected.

What the site sees: identity

	Before	After
User agent	Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/156.0.0.0 Safari/537.36	Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/157.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Client hint brands	Not:A-Brand 8, Chromium 156, Brave 156	Not-A.Brand 99, Brave 157, Chromium 157
Client hint full versions	Not:A-Brand 8.0.0.0, Chromium 156.0.0.0, Brave 156.0.0.0	Not-A.Brand 99.0.0.0, Brave 157.0.0.0, Chromium 157.0.0.0

Web platform features added

CSS text-decoration-inset (Chrome 157)
Element.streamAppendHTML (Chrome 157)
WebTransport.reliability (on stable from Chrome 157; listed for 158)
Canvas srgb-linear colour space (on stable from Chrome 157)

Web platform features removed

Protected Audience (navigator.joinAdInterestGroup)

Fingerprint values

	Before	After
Canvas hash	30ef7304	64ae7aca
Screen	1280x800x1280x800x24	1366x768x1366x768x24

Raw diff

{
  "engine": "brave",
  "label": "stable",
  "from": "1.98.63",
  "to": "1.99.55",
  "browser_version": {
    "before": "156.0.8078.80",
    "after": "157.0.8103.39"
  },
  "changes": {
    "identity": [
      {
        "field": "user_agent",
        "before": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/156.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
        "after": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/157.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
      },
      {
        "field": "client_hint_brands",
        "before": "Not:A-Brand 8, Chromium 156, Brave 156",
        "after": "Not-A.Brand 99, Brave 157, Chromium 157"
      },
      {
        "field": "client_hint_full_versions",
        "before": "Not:A-Brand 8.0.0.0, Chromium 156.0.0.0, Brave 156.0.0.0",
        "after": "Not-A.Brand 99.0.0.0, Brave 157.0.0.0, Chromium 157.0.0.0"
      }
    ],
    "network": [],
    "features": {
      "added": [
        {
          "key": "css_text_decoration_inset",
          "label": "CSS `text-decoration-inset` (Chrome 157)"
        },
        {
          "key": "stream_append_html",
          "label": "`Element.streamAppendHTML` (Chrome 157)"
        },
        {
          "key": "webtransport_reliability",
          "label": "`WebTransport.reliability` (on stable from Chrome 157; listed for 158)"
        },
        {
          "key": "canvas_srgb_linear",
          "label": "Canvas `srgb-linear` colour space (on stable from Chrome 157)"
        }
      ],
      "removed": [
        {
          "key": "protected_audience",
          "label": "Protected Audience (`navigator.joinAdInterestGroup`)"
        }
      ]
    },
    "playwright": {
      "broke": [],
      "fixed": []
    },
    "fingerprint": [
      {
        "field": "canvas_hash",
        "before": "30ef7304",
        "after": "64ae7aca"
      },
      {
        "field": "screen",
        "before": "1280x800x1280x800x24",
        "after": "1366x768x1366x768x24"
      }
    ],
    "bot_checks": {
      "newly_failed": [],
      "newly_passed": [],
      "failed_before": 1,
      "failed_after": 1
    },
    "plain_http": [],
    "launch": {
      "before_ms": 5020,
      "after_ms": 696
    }
  },
  "host_dependent_ignored": [
    "hardware_concurrency",
    "device_memory",
    "launch/connect/page timings"
  ]
}