Hot Take Brave for Desktop Outperforms Other Browsers in Speed and Performance

[lokamoka820]

Did anyone really expected Brave to do an independent and objective test? This test wasn't being done to show us all which browser is the best; it was done for marketing reasons. Otherwise they'd pay independent company to do it.

Vivaldi's CEO agrees with you.

 

[Marko :)]

Vivaldi's CEO agrees with you.

Of course he agrees. It's pure logic. In order for test to be valid, you need to test all products equally, with exactly the same set of settings. Otherwise the test doesn't have any value whatsoever and will only deceive people like this one. They even straight up lie in the article itself, saying

The following browser versions, which were the latest available at the time of testing

which clearly wasn't the case.

Brave is a shady company with history full of controversies. I only use it on Android because I don't have a choice. As soon as equal or better alternative lands for Android, I'm uninstalling it.

Why I recommend against Brave

If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access.

thelibre.news

 

[Sunshine-boy]

I completely agree with @Marko and others who pointed out that Brave’s benchmark was basically a marketing stunt. Testing Brave with Shields enabled against an outdated, non adblocked firefox is pure deception, and as @TairikuOkami mentioned, their history with Brave Rewards and opaque policies definitely makes them a shady company.

However, while the marketing is shady, the underlying performance isn't entirely fake. The reason Brave still manages to be faster and more efficient in real world usage for many of us comes down to the engineering talent. The core team is heavily staffed by ex-Googlers and veteran Chromium devs. They know the Chromium engine inside and out, which is why their fork is so heavily optimized compared to upstream Chromium.

I use Brave daily, but it's strictly a compromise. I actually prefer Edge’s feature set, UI, and PDF reader, but Edge has become a slow, privacy horror show. Chrome is just as bad for telemetry.

For me, Brave is currently the lesser evil: top-tier speed and baseline privacy out of the box, even if I keep my guard up regarding the company's shady track record.

i know there are better, more trustworthy forks out there like Thorium and Helium that strip out the corporate baggage entirely. I’m seriously considering making the switch and may drop Brave soon, but I haven’t fully decided yet

 

[monkeylove]

western hypocrisy

If your question is about Brave Browser, yes, it is fixed now. The issue likely stemmed from the previous Shields implementation, but since the team rebuilt it in Rust, everything has improved.

Thanks. I found this but could not figure out what's going on:

Constant disk writes while idle · Issue #51489 · brave/brave-browser

Description Brave constantly writes to disk every couple seconds, even when idle. Disk write rates seem to vary from a minium of 2MB/minute up to several MB per minute, which is terrible both for p...

github.com

 

[LinuxFan58]

Having worked in commerce all my life, a test put out by a company is always marketing & advertising. So when Brave puts out a test it is not awkward that Brave comes out best. What really strikes me as awkward is that all the browsers fighting for "residu market share" (the piece of the cake left for others not eaten by Google) did not strike back with their own test.

For Vivaldi and Firefox and other browsers fighting for market share, it would have been much stronger (more communication value with higher outreach) to set up their own test and shown that under "other" test conditions their product is stronger/faster/safer. Factual data always beats pouty looking talking heads. When they don't strike back with a short video proofing their point, it looks like it is hard or impossible to proof their point.

So when Firefox and/or Vivaldi don´t publish a test on video soon, I am afraid that the only conclusion of this rearguard fight is that Brave indeed is the best of the rest!

 

[Sorrento]

@LinuxFan58 Don't be afraid, as long as Firefox/Forks such as Wolf are available, personally I will use them as my primary browser, as I do not find alternatives here from my chair to be an improvement in speed or anything else, I understand others feel different browsers are faster, I if I don't see, or feel any difference then it don't exist, at least here, I personally have tried them all & I have no loyalty bar I will use the one that fits my needs & does the job, thats my MO in most things.

 

[LinuxFan58]

The Gecko engine has it roots from Netscape which dates back to 1994

The Blink engine has its roots from Webkit which was based on KDE's KHTML which dates back to 1997

The opensource history of both dates back to 1998 (KHTML ready and Netscape throwing the towel in the boxing ring after Internet Explorer KO-ed Netscape).

So I challenged Gemini, Chat and Co-pilot and they sort of agreed on this conclusion (after feeding back contradicting results of one LLM into the other)

Based on available resources (manpower) and actual commits in the repo's it would be a miracle when Firefox would be as fast as Chromium based browsers.