Does Brave Browser Load Faster Than Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge? (linuxiac.com) 61
The Brave web browser published a new round of benchmarks claiming its desktop browser uses less system resources than Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox — and also loads pages faster.
The blog Linuxiac reports:
According to Brave's testing, the browser used 44% less CPU, 28% less memory, and 10% less energy on average compared with the three competing browsers. It also completed page loads 20% faster while transferring 26% less inbound data and 39% less outbound data...
- Brave averaged about 33% CPU usage, while Chrome used 47%, Edge 53%, and Firefox 78%.
- For memory, Brave used about 1.2 GB, compared to 1.75 GB for Chrome, 1.62 GB for Edge, and 1.65 GB for Firefox.
By stopping ads, analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and other third-party requests from loading, the browser has less network traffic and less work to do. In page-loading tests, Brave took about 4.4 seconds to fully load a page. Chrome took 5.1 seconds, Firefox 5.3 seconds, and Edge 6 seconds. However, when measuring Largest Contentful Paint, which is when the main content appears, Brave and Chrome both averaged about 2.4 seconds, with Edge and Firefox just behind at 2.5 seconds. This means Brave's main advantage comes after the main content is visible, since there are fewer background ads, trackers, analytics requests, and delayed scripts to process.
- Brave averaged about 33% CPU usage, while Chrome used 47%, Edge 53%, and Firefox 78%.
- For memory, Brave used about 1.2 GB, compared to 1.75 GB for Chrome, 1.62 GB for Edge, and 1.65 GB for Firefox.
By stopping ads, analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and other third-party requests from loading, the browser has less network traffic and less work to do. In page-loading tests, Brave took about 4.4 seconds to fully load a page. Chrome took 5.1 seconds, Firefox 5.3 seconds, and Edge 6 seconds. However, when measuring Largest Contentful Paint, which is when the main content appears, Brave and Chrome both averaged about 2.4 seconds, with Edge and Firefox just behind at 2.5 seconds. This means Brave's main advantage comes after the main content is visible, since there are fewer background ads, trackers, analytics requests, and delayed scripts to process.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: bullshit (Score:2)
Would I pay for that feature? (Score:2)
Certainly not at the risk of fresh problems, and even as Firefox works to commit suicide by chronic instability.
(But mostly hoping to divert or discourage propagation of the vacuous Subject.)
Re:bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
You can opt out of all of it in settings + change the start page
Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
It is fast enough. The thing that counts is that Brave has very good ad-blocking and that is far more important.
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The two studies aren't very representative of what I consider mainstream users. Both studies appear to be run on a Mac Mini running Firefox 146 (current version is 155). CPU and memory usage appear to be more dependent on the OS than the individual browsers. Very little data is available for Brave Desktop on Windows, or Brave for Android on mobile devices.
Claiming a program needs a specific amount of memory for their tests also seems OS dependent. My running copy of Firefox with multiple tabs and privat
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
Speed is sort of irrelevant, but 10% less energy is significant when doing laptop workloads, and 25% less data transferred is significant when using a mobile connection.
Re: Who cares (Score:2)
How many licks does it take.. (Score:2)
..very good ad-blocking and that is far more important.
I wonder how many ads licked does it take, to get to the center of a smooth brain that fails to realize how much ad licking, affects speed?
(21st Century Desktop Support) ”You said ‘make it go faster’. All I heard was ‘marketeer firing squad’..”
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)
Brave is scummy though. They messed with affiliate links to steal revenue, and took tips for people who were not part of their tips programme. They can't be trusted.
They have also decided to remove Manifest V2 support, so no more uBlock Origin. In fact, Firefox is now the only major browser that still supports it. uBlock Lite isn't ideal.
I'd like to switch to a Chromium based browser because Firefox continues to have issues, none of them appear to have first rate ad blocking on both desktop and Android, along with sync for history/tabs and passwords.
Also note that in this test they used an old version of Firefox. Performance has improved lately, although not to Chrome levels.
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I have switched to Edge for one reason - the mobile version supports Chrome extensions.
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Unfortunately no uBlock Origin though. uBlock Lite is better than nothing, but nowhere near as good as uBO.
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False. You can install any Chrome extension including uBlock Origin. I have it installed right now.
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But Chrome has deprecated Manifest V2, which uBO requires. It's not on the Chrome Web Store anymore. Only Firefox is supported.
Are you sure you don't have uBO Lite?
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Got some references for that?
Incidentally, no commercial enterprise can be trusted. What matters is what they do and you need to keep an eye on that.
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>> "Brave ...messed with affiliate links to steal revenue, and took tips for people who were not part of their tips programme."
> Got some references for that?
That definitely happened, I recall reading about it a little while ago.
Put me off installing it.
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Your first problem, is caring about affiliate links.
In my experience, Brave is better than uBlock Origin, at blocking ads.
Brave plus... (Score:2)
Maybe Brave respects my choices more, but I still install Ghostery and UBlock Origin.
Re: I'm Not Brave Enough To Leave Firefox (Score:2)
I mainly use ff but lately - esp on phones - their memory use has been constructively huge, throwing errors and causing pages to hang while loading (slashdot, 9gag, others}.
So I have been toying with brave & Zen.
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It's not just phones. I recently switched back to FF from Vivaldi on my desktop with the death of Manifest V2, and in one day of use, It'll hit 3 GB of ram of more with 1 active tab. It's gotten very annoying
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I've been digging into the issue, and apparently FF (uniquely) allows extremely large cookies, compared to everyone else.
Not sure it's salient, not sure it's the cause, but it's an exceptional behavior.
Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
I opened my browser 3 months ago.
Re: (Score:2)
I opened my browser 3 months ago.
I know, by the way your tax accountant is complaining you haven't done your tax and Windows Update has been waiting to apply a zero day that was patched out back before Summer started, not that this matters to me anymore. By the way the picture of your kids is beautiful.
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Not running windows.
Re: Who cares? (Score:2)
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And yet, somehow you're here posting on Slashdot!
Seems suspect at best (Score:4, Interesting)
I just never trust benchmarks at this point. They always seem to be lies.
They are using an almost year old version of Firefox, and testing on a Mac. I wonder why that could be?
Conveniently, somehow, they chose a version just before Firefox enabled a bunch of GPU acceleration on the M series Macs . . .
If they'd just left it at "here's how much data you save when having an ad blocker on by default" they'd have a find point. But beyond that the comparison seems really, really deceptive.
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It never even loads those tracking scripts so yes it's obviously faster. That said, it's not apples to apples comparison between general purpose browsers and privacy browsers.
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Exactly. The idea that some meaningful number of users would install Brave, but not install uBlock in Firefox is just kind of silly.
But really, the GPU thing is just lying. I'd bet almost anything if they just used a one month newer version of Firefox on the same hardware, the numbers would look wildly different. They didn't pick that version by accident while comparing it to the newest Brave. I mean they spend all this time harping on CPU and power usage knowing full well what they're ignoring.
I'm so weird
Is this an ad for Brave Browser? (Score:2)
- Brave claims to block ads, but are they surreptitiously passing off ads as news items on slashdot?
- Is Brave guilty of spamming us with fantastic and unsubstantiated claims?
- Is Brave trying to fool people and trying to increase their puny browser market share?
- Are Brave's so-called “news” or sponsored recommendations actually advertising disguised as editorial content?
- Is Brave attempting to artificially inflate its visibility and market share through aggressive or misleading promotion?
Re: Is this an ad for Brave Browser? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If being Chromium-based wasn't enough of a dealbreaker, Brave's weird ad practices and crytpo scheme make it altogether icky.
So my takeaways here are (Score:2)
- All web browsers nowadays are bloated pigs
- Pages finish loading a lot faster if you block ads and third-party scripts. That can be via Brave browser; it could be something like Firefox + uBlock Origin; or it could be Safari with one of the ad-blockers available for that browser..
Does Brave let me define persistent rules for cookie handling on a per-site basis? That's one of the main reasons I use Firefox.
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> Does Brave let me define persistent rules for cookie handling on a per-site basis? That's one of the main reasons I use Firefox.
Cookie AutoDelete? What a great extension. So easy to use too.
What a waste (Score:3)
I want my CPU usage at 100% I paid full price for it.
and they tell us not to block ads (Score:4, Funny)
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I did that once. Never again.
Re: and they tell us not to block ads (Score:2)
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But more importantly... (Score:1)
... why would anyone care?
My browser has an uptime of 13 days right now, which is about 70x more than the average computer had in 2001.
It is only that low because I think I got a security update and I had to restart it, or perhaps it was a reboot for an OS upgrade.
In either case, it took less time to get back to the exact browser tab I was on than it took to get an already-brewed cup of coffee on the other side of the house.
Skewed (Score:1)
Brave + pi-hole + linux == Very speedy. (Score:3)
I fully migrated over to linux 20 years ago. I ran chrome until recently. I added pi-hole + a caching proxy to speed up my garbage internet speeds at the time. I was on a very bad ADSL service.
Now that I'm on fiber and have upgraded to a recent AMD based machine I find Brave really fast. Accidentally I launch chrome on occasion. I find chrome more sluggish with noticable hickups when loading. I have to assume this is ads or some marketing garbage that slips past pi-hole.
What's got me stuck mostly on Brave is the ad blocking. The tracking garbage that is now injected into chrome ( has been for years ) is getting so much worse.
And the sites that don't like simply aren't used anymore. I've actually blocked several news sites in pi-hole simply because of all the garbage they try to send into the browser. Not to mention news sites that host effectively mallware in it's add slots.
Re: Brave + pi-hole + linux == Very speedy. (Score:3)
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Firefox takes minutes to come up it makes alot of uncommanded requests. For the profiles with a whitelist privoxy config, things get held up until these requests timeout.
Firefox is also painfully slow because they switched to canvas
It works well for me (Score:2)
Didn't like the Brave interface... (Score:2)
Just use pihole (or something similar) (Score:2)
Blackhole most (all?) of the ads and trackers so the browser and your network doesn't spend any significant resources on those requests. I have pihole in front of everything on my home network and it makes a noticeable difference in the perceived performance of browsing and also allows me to easily have a throttle (or not) for content I don't want my young kids to consume.
https://pi-hole.net/ [pi-hole.net]
It's easy to setup and even a dated raspberry pi has more than enough oomph to do the work within a very small power
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For my laptop I run it locally in Docker, super handy when traveling, I think it sits at around 150 MB in memory.
CPU load (Score:2)
Could be true. (Score:2)
Since their whole shtick is blocking ads and trackers where they can it's likely that they get to first paint faster than other browsers. I use Brave as my daily driver and am reasonably happy with it. It has most of the blockage you need built right in.
The Web without a powerful stream buffer/blocker/anti track setup is basically unusable these days. I'm totally bedazzled whenever I see sorry ass normies using a regular browser without any of that. A nigh surreal experience.
Unfair comparison (Score:2)
>"By stopping ads, analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and other third-party requests from loading, the browser has less network traffic and less work to do."
Then why is the comparison not to Firefox with UBO loaded? Otherwise, it is completely unfair. I guess you could argue that it is fair because Firefox doesn't bundle UBO.... but I think having a choice as to IF you want to run something like that and WHAT ONE you want to run is even more important.
Besides, I don't want to use a Google-guts browser
Yes. (Score:2)
After not using Brave for months I just tried it on CNN.com and this story, and it's quicker than Chrome. It blocked 10 ads and trackers on this page.
The only thing that stops me using it regularly are my stored passwords in Chrome. I have not figured out how to transfer them and Chrome is generally OK