The Brave developers have also completed some other optimization work that contributed to the performance gains. However, the change detailed above is the biggest one. Some improvements have been back-ported to Brave version 31 (current beta), but others are only available in version 32 (nightly previews).
I’ve run 24 performance tests of Brave versions 1.29.81 and 1.32.17 using the built-in browser performance testing tools (48 test runs in total). I used an empty HTML document, and subtracted the network load times from the results. Here are the median results of the two test runs:
- Total blocking/unresponsive time improved from 1460 ms to 70 ms (a 95,21 % reduction).
- Script evaluation time improved from 399,13 ms to 38,27 ms (a 90,41 % reduction). The test page doesn’t contain any scripts, so this is solely from Brave injecting its own.
- The page load event firing time improved from 962,7 ms to 181,2 ms (a 81,18 % reduction). The page load event is the time from the page began loading until the browser considered it done.
- Peak JavaScript heap (RAM) consumption improved from 13,9 MB to 3,8 MB (a 72,66 % reduction).
- HTML parsing time improved from 165,28 ms to 49,49 ms (a 70,06 % reduction).