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I'm surprised that Brave performs so poorly. Isn't the whole point of having a dedicated privacy-aware browser supposed to be so that the ad/tracker blocking co

I'm surprised that Brave performs so poorly. Isn't the whole point of having a dedicated privacy-aware browser supposed to be so that the ad/tracker blocking code can be written directly in C++ and not have to run in Javascript and talk over plugin APIs? Maybe these results are only applicable to the desktop version of Brave?

bbondy 8y ago
Some things are very wonky with the experiment: Brave is intentionally slow on parsing and do as much work there because it doesn't parse from client code, it only use already parsed lists from memory. "The memory usage of Brave could not be evaluated using the devtools and thus is not included in this section." That doesn't make sense, I wonder if it's maybe using a very old version based on the old muon code base? If you can get the memory from Chrome you can get it from Brave. No information was given about versions that were tested. Total parsed rules is too small.
- pythux 8y ago
  > Some things are very wonky with the experiment: Thank you for taking the time to read this study. We do not think we claimed anything that was false in this study (although the scope might not be as wide as some would expect or desire); this is not a reason to be dismissive. We have ourselves a lot of respect for the work done at Brave. > Brave is intentionally slow on parsing and do as much work there because it doesn't parse from client code, it only use already parsed lists from memory. That was indeed one of the things measured, but not the most important one. In fact we explicitly say that this is a one time operation and does not necessarily matter, especially if as you suggest you can perform this work backend-side and ship the serialized version to clients. What is more interesting is the time it takes for matching requests. > "The memory usage of Brave could not be evaluated using the devtools and thus is not included in this section." That doesn't make sense, I wonder if it's maybe using a very old version based on the old muon code base? If you can get the memory from Chrome you can get it from Brave. If we got this thing wrong we would be very happy to update the results with the correct measurements. The version we used was the latest version from `master` on the following repository: https://github.com/brave/ad-block https://github.com/brave/ad-block > No information was given about versions that were tested. This is indeed unfortunate and we will be correcting this. The measurements were performed last week with the latest version of each projects but we should definitely indicate the exact version used. > Total parsed rules is too small. Too small for what exactly? Easylist is one of the most popular lists and it's pretty common to use it as a base-line for comparison. It is trivial to re-run the experiment with different lists given that all the code is open-source.
Ragib_Zaman 8y ago
> All blockers except uBlock Origin are available as JavaScript libraries which can be loaded in Node.js I may be incorrect, but I think their testing methodology involved loading a JavaScript version of the Brave adblocker and ran benchmarks inside the Node.js runtime, and indeed the results may be different if they had used the Brave browser itself written in C++.

bbondy 8y ago

Some things are very wonky with the experiment: Brave is intentionally slow on parsing and do as much work there because it doesn't parse from client code, it only use already parsed lists from memory. "The memory usage of Brave could not be evaluated using the devtools and thus is not included in this section." That doesn't make sense, I wonder if it's maybe using a very old version based on the old muon code base? If you can get the memory from Chrome you can get it from Brave. No information was given about versions that were tested. Total parsed rules is too small.

pythux 8y ago
> Some things are very wonky with the experiment: Thank you for taking the time to read this study. We do not think we claimed anything that was false in this study (although the scope might not be as wide as some would expect or desire); this is not a reason to be dismissive. We have ourselves a lot of respect for the work done at Brave. > Brave is intentionally slow on parsing and do as much work there because it doesn't parse from client code, it only use already parsed lists from memory. That was indeed one of the things measured, but not the most important one. In fact we explicitly say that this is a one time operation and does not necessarily matter, especially if as you suggest you can perform this work backend-side and ship the serialized version to clients. What is more interesting is the time it takes for matching requests. > "The memory usage of Brave could not be evaluated using the devtools and thus is not included in this section." That doesn't make sense, I wonder if it's maybe using a very old version based on the old muon code base? If you can get the memory from Chrome you can get it from Brave. If we got this thing wrong we would be very happy to update the results with the correct measurements. The version we used was the latest version from `master` on the following repository: https://github.com/brave/ad-block https://github.com/brave/ad-block > No information was given about versions that were tested. This is indeed unfortunate and we will be correcting this. The measurements were performed last week with the latest version of each projects but we should definitely indicate the exact version used. > Total parsed rules is too small. Too small for what exactly? Easylist is one of the most popular lists and it's pretty common to use it as a base-line for comparison. It is trivial to re-run the experiment with different lists given that all the code is open-source.

Ragib_Zaman 8y ago

> All blockers except uBlock Origin are available as JavaScript libraries which can be loaded in Node.js I may be incorrect, but I think their testing methodology involved loading a JavaScript version of the Brave adblocker and ran benchmarks inside the Node.js runtime, and indeed the results may be different if they had used the Brave browser itself written in C++.