Chromium-based Brave browser shows 22% faster page load time than its Muon-based counterpart

Back in March this year, the Brave team shared their plans of replacing their desktop Muon runtime, with a more comprehensive Chromium stack for the desktop browser. Yesterday, the team shared a report on performance improvements in Brave Core, which refers to the newly redesigned browser for desktop operating systems. It uses Chromium’s native interface and supports nearly all Chrome features and extension APIs.

Brave is a free and open source web browser, founded by the inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla, with the main focus on privacy and performance. By switching to the Chromium code base, the browser has become the latest addition to the Chromium bandwagon, which now includes Google Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, and most recently, Edge.

This evaluation of Brave Core’s performance was done based on two critical metrics: how quickly it loads pages and how much resources it consumes. Brave 0.24.0 was compared against Brave Core 0.55.12 Beta release. For this comparison, they considered Alexa News Top 10, as they are frequently visited by a lot of people and are run by reputable companies that pay attention to their readers.

Results of the performance comparison between Brave Core and Muon-based Brave

The team arrived at the following results after comparing the upcoming Brave Core browser with the current version of Muon-based Brave on a desktop computer:

• Load time savings on common desktops: Brave Core showed a load time savings of 10%-34% on the tested popular media websites with the same page content and blocking. Also, it showed a 22% average and 18% median load time savings.
• Performance on slower processors: On slower environments, similar to today’s average Android device on a fast 3G connection, the browser showed savings ranging up to 44%.
• Better CPU utilization: Brave Core showed better CPU utilization with all computationally intensive tasks running faster across all tested websites and configurations.

These time savings were a result of several improvements across HTML parsing, JavaScript execution, page rendering, etc.

To read more in detail about the performance analysis of Brave, check out their original post.

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