A public beta of a privacy-preserving search engine from Brave debuted Tuesday. It doesn’t track users, their searches or their clicks.

It is, of course, entering into a David vs. Goliath fight with Google, which dominates the search business with a more than 90% share.

We’ve got a mix of “new” new and “old” new in this week’s roundup of the best apps for iOS devices and Macs.

A new scoring app frees board game players from pesky pens and pencils, and a new avatar app gives users a futuristic way to establish and secure their online identities. Meanwhile, upgrades to well-known apps Brave (a fast web browser for privacy freaks) and Carrot Weather (a sarcastic weather app for masochists) gain interesting new features. Image-editing app Photo Sense and Luna Display also got big upgrades.

Brave, a privacy-oriented, Chromium-based web browser, has been updated to add native Apple Silicon support for first-gen M1 Macs.

Brave’s big claim to fame is that it blocks ads and website trackers by default. It also lets users compensate creators by sending them cryptocurrency contributions, called Basic Attention Tokens.

Got an old Mac that’s crawling to a halt every time you browse the web? It might not be your hardware that’s in need of a change. Before splashing out on new components, try switching browsers instead.