11 ms·

The New Brave Is 22% Faster

189 points by kristianp 8y ago

maxk42 8y ago
Just decided to give it a try. I think this is my new browser.
gvand 8y ago
The article is a few months old, they now use chromium 71.x in the dev version described in the article (still faster).
jclay 8y ago
I really don’t think they’re giving this a fair treatment. From what i gather, they switched from Muon which looks to be an Electron that uses later versions of Chromium. This version also had a custom UI written entirely in web technologies. They’re comparing that to their new version based directly on the Chromium code base + some privacy related patches. Their UI changes are now mostly relegated to a bundled extension so it looks and feels like Chrome. It seems they could have dug a bit deeper to find out where the speed up actually came from. The chromium build system is incredibly complex but very specially tuned to produce maximum performance for a specific configuration (Google Chrome Branded Release). When you go in trying to use bits and pieces of Chromium as dynamic libraries, things can go south rather quickly for performance. It could also mean that GPU acceleration or sandbox configurations differed between their modified Chromium versions they’re comparing here. Was LTO enabled on both builds? Either way, It feels like they’re taking claim for developing some browser performance increase of what is in all likelihood solely attributable to the Chromium project.
marvindanig 8y ago
I love Brave, especially its tab into Tor functionality. I even integrated { content => BAT } payments for my website! Been minting some genuine crypto thanks to Brave!
- gvand 8y ago
  > I even integrated { content => BAT } payments for my website What have you used to implement that?
  - WA9ACE 8y ago
    With brave you can make money as a publisher here https://brave.com/publishers/ https://brave.com/publishers/ Essentially, people browsing with brave who have put some amount of money in a wallet will disburse at the end of a cycle some funds to each publisher based on how much attention they spent on each site.
    - gvand 8y ago
      Yeah I know, but he seemed to imply that he was using some sort of paywall based on BATs, I was interested in that.
- r_singh 8y ago
  Would you mind sharing some numbers (in USD / 100 hours or similar unit) ? Thanks!
joelrunyon 8y ago
Anecdotal - Switched from Chrome => Brave. So much faster and no more fan freakouts. Love it.
- lmedinas 8y ago
  If someone from the Brave Team can explain why Brave is "so much faster" than Chrome i would like to be interested. Chrome + ublock wouldn't archive similar results ?
  - jclay 8y ago
    Correct. IIRC,Cosmetic adblocking is also not possible without adding uBlock. I guess one advantage with their approach is that they’re doing their network filtering “closer to the metal” from what i’ve seen from a recent look at their codebase. If they’re able to block requests by bypassing the extensions API, it’s likely faster. They can probably also achieve some parallelism here since requests are done in multiple processes. If you can simply hook in and block a site, you likely eliminate several layers of IPC messages to the extension.
- bad_user 8y ago
  That’s probably just placebo since Brave is built on top of Chromium.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    The adblock probably blocks bloated ad scripts that slow down the browser and use up power.
    - bad_user 8y ago
      I doubt that the parent is talking about the out of the box experience. Installing uBlock Origin takes less effort than installing Brave and probably does a better job at blocking ads than Brave, as it is the most aggressive ad-blocking engine available right now.
  - 8y ago
konspence 8y ago
I see this browser as a skin on top of Chrome, much like Opera or (now) Edge. Hearing that it's 22% faster tells me it had a 22% overhead over the Chromium rendering engine. What am I missing? I'm struggling to see serious innovation on display here - and I read TFA. The article is 99.9% a discussion on testing methodology, and not an analysis of the changes to Brave's core which may have resulted in the performance improvements. As far as I'm concerned, Chromium released a more performant rendering engine and Brave merged it into their branch.
- r_singh 8y ago
  I think it's more of a progress report than a display of innovation targeted towards people who are looking to switch over from Google Chrome due to privacy issues.
- eivarv 8y ago
  What am I missing? They replaced Muon (their Electron-fork) with straight Chromium. Brave is now 22% faster than it used to be, if I read TFA correctly.
  - aiCeivi9 8y ago
    OP asks why should he care, that Brave is no longer slower than Chromium it is based on. It doesn't sound like something impressive.
  - jug 8y ago
    Oh. I wonder if this post had gained as much attention if the header was "Brave is now about as fast as Chrome".
    - Derek_MK 8y ago
      I mean, if you consider the adblocking, tracker blocking, etc, then it's faster than Chrome, and may have been even before the switch (citation needed on that though). That stuff takes a long time to load, even on Chromium. So the idea is that they've always been loading fewer things (so it's faster in that aspect), but now the speed of loading the same content is better.
nocture 8y ago
Been really happy with the new Brave so far. Made me able to drop my the last Google application on my computer. Only thing that bugs me is still having to resort to either Firefox or Safari on mac when on battery, since Brave keeps the dedicated GPU in use after navigating to anything that activates it (a Brave Helper process seems to keep it active in the background).
- walterbell 8y ago
  Have you tried killing that process manually? If it improves battery life, contact Brave support and ask for a configurable timeout.
simias 8y ago
I hear a lot of praise for Brave but I don't really get what's so great about it and the fact that it's cryptocurrency-related triggers all kinds of red flags and make it difficult for me to heed the praise. Are the fans genuine or do they have a vested interest in pumping BAT? Trying to be a little more constructive, can somebody explain what's so great about it compared to Firefox? Because as far as I can tell it's just yet another Chromium derivative with built-in ad blocker, I don't really see what's so novel or exciting about that. Also AFAIK the source is available but it's not technically under an Open Source license? Then of course there's the whole BAT thing which as far as I understand it replaces ads with... other ads but it's cryptocurrency based so it's better somehow? I never quite got that. So what am I missing here? Why is Brave better than Firefox + uBlock origin?
- pedrocx486 8y ago
  I use it simply because it's de-Googlyfied and because of the integrated mix of adblock/https everywhere/NoScript without the need to install plugins and Tor tabs (without the need to switch browsers). I have absolutely no idea what the BAT thing is. It's disabled on my install since I never even clicked on it.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Not sure if there is much better in Brave than Firefox + Containers + uMatrix, unless you like ads in your browser injected by the browser developer. There are ethical concerns, half the Mozilla board resigned over Brendan Eich's appointment as CEO of Mozilla, and Brave is his new venture after essentially being ejected from Mozilla: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Mozilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Mozilla I want nothing to do with such a divisive character like Brendan, thus I'll steer clear of Brave.
  - geowwy 8y ago
    Brave is a little better than Firefox in terms of trustworthiness: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html Neither is great though.
aestetix 8y ago
How does Brave make money? My understanding is that their entire purpose is to block tracking and ads, but those ads is how a lot of places fund their services.
- fpoling 8y ago
  The default search engine plus partnership deals on bookmarks and speed dials or tiles on a new page can bring roughly 1USD/year/user for a browser.
- maxencecornet 8y ago
  By default, ads are blocked, but users of Brave can opt-in to have privacy-friendly ads from the Brave network displayed on websites they browse. Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers https://batgrowth.com/publishers)
tootahe45 8y ago
I thought brave was going to become the privacy/security browser but they seemed to push that to the side while Firefox rapidly filled that niche in the past year at least for privacy. I just don't get why I'd use brave over Chrome, they renamed a lot of options just for the sake of differentiating, which makes it unintuitive at times.
- cyphunk 8y ago
  until recently i tried using firefox to quarantine social media and google but the persona extensions would break all the time, leaving me to reconfigure things over and over. Is there another way to quarantine now?
  - timbit42 8y ago
    There are container plugins. There is a Facebook one and a Google one, but I'm using a generic one that lets you create containers for any website you want.
stockkid 8y ago
It's unclear from the title and the first paragraph what it is actually 22% faster at doing. Deep into the first paragraph, the article finally reveals that the new version has 22% faster 'load time' but to me it wasn't immediately clear what the loading time meant. Is it startup time or time to load a site? What site did it load? I wish engineering articles such as this can be more to the point instead of being ceremonial.
jannes 8y ago
What I love about Chrome and what I have not seen in any other Chromium-based browser is the inline translation feature. It allows you to translate a website on the fly (even websites that require a login). Sadly, Brave does not have this feature neither.
- kilroy123 8y ago
  Very true. I use Firefox these days but have to switch over to chrome when I need to see pages translated. I live abroad so it's fairly often I have to interact with pages in another language.
  - timbit42 8y ago
    There are Firefox plugins for that.
- WA9ACE 8y ago
  This is by design. They list all the things they do to de-googlify Chromium https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... including removing the translation code so that information is not transmitted to google. See also this thread on ProtonMail+Chrome https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490458
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jdlonas 8y ago
I stopped using Firefox when they hijacked my browser by installing an extension I did not approve (the one about Mr. Robot). Moved back to chrome for a bit and finally moved over to Brave. For the most part, it feels like I'm using chrome, although a lot of sites break because of the built-in ad blocker.
- timbit42 8y ago
  You threw the baby out with the bathwater.
0xmohit 8y ago
The article mentions the speed, but a difference that I've observed is that the newer version consumes significantly less CPU and memory.
matt4077 8y ago
It's still morally bancrupt, hijacking ads and replacing them with their own, then holding the money hostage until the actual creators give in to whatever cut this software-enabled protection racket demands. It also does nothing against the fear of a Chromium monoculture, since it's just yet another reskinned fork. Very "Brave", indeed. Kinda telling when you have to come up with the laudatory adjectives yourself.
fourier_mode 8y ago
Well, the one thing I see on HN is that people are crazy about Firefox, and I see where they are coming from. And I agree too that Firefox separates itself from the rest by setting higher moral standards, but on the same hand Brave is a good browser, atleast on Ubuntu 16.04 Brave performs way better than Firefox. Using firefox has given me frozen screens quite a number of times, they really need to improve their resource management process. However, in the meantime we should not undermine the engineering effort being put into it.
karmakaze 8y ago
Perhaps I've become a bit of a cynic but I find it hard to imagine a well funded company without an exit plan. I applaud BAT and hope either it or a successor works out to make it clear how we pay as users. I expectation (or fear/disappointment) is that if Brave and BAT become widespread it will merely just form a new ad serving network with a different group collecting transaction fees.

189 points by kristianp 8y ago

maxk42 8y ago

Just decided to give it a try. I think this is my new browser.

gvand 8y ago

The article is a few months old, they now use chromium 71.x in the dev version described in the article (still faster).

jclay 8y ago

I really don’t think they’re giving this a fair treatment. From what i gather, they switched from Muon which looks to be an Electron that uses later versions of Chromium. This version also had a custom UI written entirely in web technologies. They’re comparing that to their new version based directly on the Chromium code base + some privacy related patches. Their UI changes are now mostly relegated to a bundled extension so it looks and feels like Chrome. It seems they could have dug a bit deeper to find out where the speed up actually came from. The chromium build system is incredibly complex but very specially tuned to produce maximum performance for a specific configuration (Google Chrome Branded Release). When you go in trying to use bits and pieces of Chromium as dynamic libraries, things can go south rather quickly for performance. It could also mean that GPU acceleration or sandbox configurations differed between their modified Chromium versions they’re comparing here. Was LTO enabled on both builds? Either way, It feels like they’re taking claim for developing some browser performance increase of what is in all likelihood solely attributable to the Chromium project.

marvindanig 8y ago

I love Brave, especially its tab into Tor functionality. I even integrated { content => BAT } payments for my website! Been minting some genuine crypto thanks to Brave!

gvand 8y ago
> I even integrated { content => BAT } payments for my website What have you used to implement that?
- WA9ACE 8y ago
  With brave you can make money as a publisher here https://brave.com/publishers/ https://brave.com/publishers/ Essentially, people browsing with brave who have put some amount of money in a wallet will disburse at the end of a cycle some funds to each publisher based on how much attention they spent on each site.
  - gvand 8y ago
    Yeah I know, but he seemed to imply that he was using some sort of paywall based on BATs, I was interested in that.
r_singh 8y ago
Would you mind sharing some numbers (in USD / 100 hours or similar unit) ? Thanks!

joelrunyon 8y ago

Anecdotal - Switched from Chrome => Brave. So much faster and no more fan freakouts. Love it.

lmedinas 8y ago
If someone from the Brave Team can explain why Brave is "so much faster" than Chrome i would like to be interested. Chrome + ublock wouldn't archive similar results ?
- jclay 8y ago
  Correct. IIRC,Cosmetic adblocking is also not possible without adding uBlock. I guess one advantage with their approach is that they’re doing their network filtering “closer to the metal” from what i’ve seen from a recent look at their codebase. If they’re able to block requests by bypassing the extensions API, it’s likely faster. They can probably also achieve some parallelism here since requests are done in multiple processes. If you can simply hook in and block a site, you likely eliminate several layers of IPC messages to the extension.
bad_user 8y ago
That’s probably just placebo since Brave is built on top of Chromium.
- ummonk 8y ago
  The adblock probably blocks bloated ad scripts that slow down the browser and use up power.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    I doubt that the parent is talking about the out of the box experience. Installing uBlock Origin takes less effort than installing Brave and probably does a better job at blocking ads than Brave, as it is the most aggressive ad-blocking engine available right now.
- 8y ago

konspence 8y ago

I see this browser as a skin on top of Chrome, much like Opera or (now) Edge. Hearing that it's 22% faster tells me it had a 22% overhead over the Chromium rendering engine. What am I missing? I'm struggling to see serious innovation on display here - and I read TFA. The article is 99.9% a discussion on testing methodology, and not an analysis of the changes to Brave's core which may have resulted in the performance improvements. As far as I'm concerned, Chromium released a more performant rendering engine and Brave merged it into their branch.

r_singh 8y ago
I think it's more of a progress report than a display of innovation targeted towards people who are looking to switch over from Google Chrome due to privacy issues.
eivarv 8y ago
What am I missing? They replaced Muon (their Electron-fork) with straight Chromium. Brave is now 22% faster than it used to be, if I read TFA correctly.
- aiCeivi9 8y ago
  OP asks why should he care, that Brave is no longer slower than Chromium it is based on. It doesn't sound like something impressive.
- jug 8y ago
  Oh. I wonder if this post had gained as much attention if the header was "Brave is now about as fast as Chrome".
  - Derek_MK 8y ago
    I mean, if you consider the adblocking, tracker blocking, etc, then it's faster than Chrome, and may have been even before the switch (citation needed on that though). That stuff takes a long time to load, even on Chromium. So the idea is that they've always been loading fewer things (so it's faster in that aspect), but now the speed of loading the same content is better.

nocture 8y ago

Been really happy with the new Brave so far. Made me able to drop my the last Google application on my computer. Only thing that bugs me is still having to resort to either Firefox or Safari on mac when on battery, since Brave keeps the dedicated GPU in use after navigating to anything that activates it (a Brave Helper process seems to keep it active in the background).

walterbell 8y ago
Have you tried killing that process manually? If it improves battery life, contact Brave support and ask for a configurable timeout.

simias 8y ago

I hear a lot of praise for Brave but I don't really get what's so great about it and the fact that it's cryptocurrency-related triggers all kinds of red flags and make it difficult for me to heed the praise. Are the fans genuine or do they have a vested interest in pumping BAT? Trying to be a little more constructive, can somebody explain what's so great about it compared to Firefox? Because as far as I can tell it's just yet another Chromium derivative with built-in ad blocker, I don't really see what's so novel or exciting about that. Also AFAIK the source is available but it's not technically under an Open Source license? Then of course there's the whole BAT thing which as far as I understand it replaces ads with... other ads but it's cryptocurrency based so it's better somehow? I never quite got that. So what am I missing here? Why is Brave better than Firefox + uBlock origin?

pedrocx486 8y ago
I use it simply because it's de-Googlyfied and because of the integrated mix of adblock/https everywhere/NoScript without the need to install plugins and Tor tabs (without the need to switch browsers). I have absolutely no idea what the BAT thing is. It's disabled on my install since I never even clicked on it.
StudentStuff 8y ago
Not sure if there is much better in Brave than Firefox + Containers + uMatrix, unless you like ads in your browser injected by the browser developer. There are ethical concerns, half the Mozilla board resigned over Brendan Eich's appointment as CEO of Mozilla, and Brave is his new venture after essentially being ejected from Mozilla: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Mozilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Mozilla I want nothing to do with such a divisive character like Brendan, thus I'll steer clear of Brave.
- geowwy 8y ago
  Brave is a little better than Firefox in terms of trustworthiness: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html Neither is great though.

aestetix 8y ago

How does Brave make money? My understanding is that their entire purpose is to block tracking and ads, but those ads is how a lot of places fund their services.

fpoling 8y ago
The default search engine plus partnership deals on bookmarks and speed dials or tiles on a new page can bring roughly 1USD/year/user for a browser.
maxencecornet 8y ago
By default, ads are blocked, but users of Brave can opt-in to have privacy-friendly ads from the Brave network displayed on websites they browse. Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers https://batgrowth.com/publishers)

tootahe45 8y ago

I thought brave was going to become the privacy/security browser but they seemed to push that to the side while Firefox rapidly filled that niche in the past year at least for privacy. I just don't get why I'd use brave over Chrome, they renamed a lot of options just for the sake of differentiating, which makes it unintuitive at times.

cyphunk 8y ago
until recently i tried using firefox to quarantine social media and google but the persona extensions would break all the time, leaving me to reconfigure things over and over. Is there another way to quarantine now?
- timbit42 8y ago
  There are container plugins. There is a Facebook one and a Google one, but I'm using a generic one that lets you create containers for any website you want.

stockkid 8y ago

It's unclear from the title and the first paragraph what it is actually 22% faster at doing. Deep into the first paragraph, the article finally reveals that the new version has 22% faster 'load time' but to me it wasn't immediately clear what the loading time meant. Is it startup time or time to load a site? What site did it load? I wish engineering articles such as this can be more to the point instead of being ceremonial.

jannes 8y ago

What I love about Chrome and what I have not seen in any other Chromium-based browser is the inline translation feature. It allows you to translate a website on the fly (even websites that require a login). Sadly, Brave does not have this feature neither.

kilroy123 8y ago
Very true. I use Firefox these days but have to switch over to chrome when I need to see pages translated. I live abroad so it's fairly often I have to interact with pages in another language.
- timbit42 8y ago
  There are Firefox plugins for that.
WA9ACE 8y ago
This is by design. They list all the things they do to de-googlify Chromium https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... including removing the translation code so that information is not transmitted to google. See also this thread on ProtonMail+Chrome https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490458

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jdlonas 8y ago

I stopped using Firefox when they hijacked my browser by installing an extension I did not approve (the one about Mr. Robot). Moved back to chrome for a bit and finally moved over to Brave. For the most part, it feels like I'm using chrome, although a lot of sites break because of the built-in ad blocker.

timbit42 8y ago
You threw the baby out with the bathwater.

0xmohit 8y ago

The article mentions the speed, but a difference that I've observed is that the newer version consumes significantly less CPU and memory.

matt4077 8y ago

It's still morally bancrupt, hijacking ads and replacing them with their own, then holding the money hostage until the actual creators give in to whatever cut this software-enabled protection racket demands. It also does nothing against the fear of a Chromium monoculture, since it's just yet another reskinned fork. Very "Brave", indeed. Kinda telling when you have to come up with the laudatory adjectives yourself.

fourier_mode 8y ago

Well, the one thing I see on HN is that people are crazy about Firefox, and I see where they are coming from. And I agree too that Firefox separates itself from the rest by setting higher moral standards, but on the same hand Brave is a good browser, atleast on Ubuntu 16.04 Brave performs way better than Firefox. Using firefox has given me frozen screens quite a number of times, they really need to improve their resource management process. However, in the meantime we should not undermine the engineering effort being put into it.

karmakaze 8y ago

Perhaps I've become a bit of a cynic but I find it hard to imagine a well funded company without an exit plan. I applaud BAT and hope either it or a successor works out to make it clear how we pay as users. I expectation (or fear/disappointment) is that if Brave and BAT become widespread it will merely just form a new ad serving network with a different group collecting transaction fees.