Battle of the Browsers, a benchmark of Brave, Chrome Firefox and Edge
I have been following Brave closely for some time, have been using it for a couple of days and decided to benchmark on my machine to see how each browser would stand.
Platform: Windows 10.0.19042 Build 19042
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor 3.59 GHz
GPU: Nvidia RTX 2060
I ran the full test suit available on browserbench.org.
The results:
| Chrome 89.0.4389.90 | Brave V1.21.77 | Firefox 86.0.1 | Edge 89.0.774.54 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetStream 2 | 103.653 | 130.279 | 89.763 | 138.492 |
| MotionMark 1.0 | 536.45 | 490.46 | 661.23 | 606.42 |
| Speedometer 2.0 | 68.6 | 65.01 | 114 | 134.7 |
The browser I currently use is Chrome so, for me, what really matters is how browsers compare to what I'm using. The following table takes chrome as the baseline and and shows a comparison:
| Brave | Firefox | Edge | |
|---|---|---|---|
| JetStream | 25% | -13% | 34% |
| MotionMark | -9% | 23% | 13% |
| Speedometer | -5% | 66% | 96% |
It's easy to see that Edge is the overall winner.
Little quirks:
Brave:
- Brave shows a lot of promise. They have a novel concept where adds are automatically stripped (you can read more on cookies, adds and uBlock here) and replaced by less intrusive adds run by Brave. Those adds then return money to the individual browsing the web as BAT (Basic Attention Token); which then gets distributed - if you so desire - to the websites where you spent your time.
While the experience between browsers is pretty much the same, there is a bug(?) with Brave that completely messes my workflow. Do you know how you can doCtrl+Shift+Vto paste whatever as clear-text in Chrome? I use it a lot. Specially on Google Sheets. Brave sometimes will not paste. Anything.
I had reported this bug, but it turns out that this not Brave-only and you can fix-it by adding Google Docs Offline extension.
Firefox:
- To measure Firefox I had to go into
about:configand disable the options bellow. Otherwise Firefox would (very nicely) detect an abusive tab and stop it.
dom.ipc.processHangMonitor=false;
dom.ipc.reportProcessHangs=false;Final thoughts
The one browser I've spent the last week testing, Brave, will be put on hold for a while. Firefox has returned from the ashes and is now a powerful contender but the browser I should probably give a try is Edge. Microsoft has stepped up their game on several areas and, apparently, browsers is one of them. Having designed a lot of websites in the 2000's, just thinking of Internet Explorer makes me irked, but clearly things have changed.
You can explore the data in it's full detail here.
Addendum
Since writing this post I went hybrid. I'm doing a conscious effort to keep using Brave and, on Google Sheets, falling back to Chrome.
While benchmarks tells a story, it's not the full picture. On my machine, speed is mainly affected by network conditions and not browser delay. Braves native support for Tor, IPFS and uBlock, alongside with the BAT token (which this site uses) makes it an excellent alternative.
One of the things that using multiple browsers has reminded me of, is that settling for something can numb you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.