New fully rebuilt Brave for Android boosts performance across the board compared to prior versions: 5% battery savings along with 3% of both data and CPU savings
Keeping the web open to everyone with built-in privacy protections and significant efficiency gains. This blog was written by Dr. Andrius Aucinas, Dr. Matteo Varvello, performance researchers at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist. In 2019, Brave reached a major milestone with the release of the 1.0 version. As ever, web browsing performance is a key priority for Brave, so we set out to evaluate in detail how it stacks up against the competition and devised a methodology for doing so. In our “1.0 reviewer guide”, we summarized the significant savings Brave users can expect. In the spirit of transparency, we here present our methodology and detailed results.
We have written before on Brave’s performance, energy and bandwidth benefits for the user. Brave Shields is our primary mechanism for protecting user privacy, but many users know by now that ad and tracker blocking (or just ad blocking for short) makes the web faster and generally better for them. So far Brave’s estimates of the users’ time saved have been very conservative and somewhat naive: we take the total number of ads and trackers blocked, and multiply that by 50 milliseconds.
In this post we demonstrate that Brave’s privacy benefits from ad-blocking go hand-in-hand with performance improvements. Specifically, a well-implemented ad blocker can deliver 33% to 66% memory savings or 500 MB to as much as 1.9 GB across just 10 pages open in a single session.