Brave uses, on average, 4% less battery and 9% less CPU; loads webpages 21% faster; and uses 14% less bandwidth among the tested Android browsers.
I’m surprised by the CPU utilization and battery discharge right of DDG of all things. Is there a reason for this?
Then again, this report was conducted by Brave themselves. I would love to see independent testing though.
This is just anecdotal evidence but on both iOS and android this tracks, from my experience. Everyone says safari is the fastest and most battery efficient browser on iOS but I’ve found safari to be an enormous battery hog, even without background activity, and websites load significantly slower than any other browser, and sometimes loading a page just times out or hangs indefinitely. Safari is also the only browser where pages will break or render incorrectly. I only use two extensions on safari (wipr 2 and noir) and acts like this this even with private relay turned off. Out of all the ios browsers I’ve tested Brave uses the least amount of battery and rivals chrome in speed and the ‘it just works’ factor.
On android I’d say Brave rivals vanadium and cromite on all fronts, but it’s a much tighter race since browser quality on android is far higher than ios imo.
It was mentioned in the article with reference to this issue: [Bug] WebView is not destroyed when a tab is closed · Issue #6433 · duckduckgo/Android · GitHub
I read the article expecting to see vivaldi being compared too. Anecdotically vivaldi felt snappier and faster when loading page on my phone compared to brave. Maybe theres still something, some config I missed on my brave install. Ff nightly also seems snappier by the day, only the tab reloading issue still prevent me from maining it.
Not dismissing your experience, but it’s been the opposite for me on most accounts, at least on iPads.
It’s true that pages break or render weird on Safari more often, but aside from that it sips battery compared to Brave and website scrolling is far smoother. Page loading times are about the same on both. Fwiw, the only extensions I have installed are Wipr2 and StopTheMadness.
The biggest irritation I have with Safari on the iPad is that it reloads tabs far more frequently nowadays. I suspect this is an iPadOS 18 bug, because my previous 6th gen Mini would keep tabs open for days on iPadOS 17 compared to my current 7th gen Mini (with double the RAM, I think) which reloads almost every Safari tab in less than 24hrs.
There’s also a UX issue with Brave (and DDG, Kagi, etc) that keeps me on Safari;- the two finger pinch gesture to bring up a grid view of all my tabs. It’s practically muscle memory at this point for me, and no browser other than Safari seems to support that. Grrr…