
The New Brave Is 22% Faster - kristianp
https://brave.com/new-brave-22-percent-faster/
======
simias
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?

~~~
Lio
Just blocking ads with ublock solves the problem of annoying ads but leaves
the problem of website revenue.

Ads solve the problem of how to fund websites without subscriptions but create
the problem of annoying ads of no relevance.

Google and Facebook mitigate the problem of annoying adverts by trying to make
them relevant. That comes at the cost of their constant surveillance without
permission, and use of that information to try to “influence” people’s
opinions in unrelated ways.

The big lie of recent years has been “we value your privacy” followed some
details of how “we” don’t.

BATs try to solve all of these problems by placing control of personal
information back with the user.

If I give you a cryptographic representation of my interests you can serve me
ads without having to know the intimate details of my life. You only need to
know how to deal with the token.

What’s more I can compartmentalise my interests by sending different tokens at
different times.

Google could get involved in this sort of research but I suspect that their
interests go far beyond just serving ads.

~~~
simias
>If I give you a cryptographic representation of my interests you can serve me
ads without having to know the intimate details of my life. You only need to
know how to deal with the token.

>What’s more I can compartmentalise my interests by sending different tokens
at different times.

I'm really perplex. People who care enough about their privacy to make use of
something like that are probably those who don't want ads or tracking at all
anyway. The rest of the population obviously doesn't care.

I personally can't imagine ever willingly enabling ads in my browser. You want
me to pay for your service? Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it
to you. If you prefer to beg for me to turn my ad blocker off then be my guest
but I won't do it.

The idea of installing Brave, curating several "tokens" containing my
interests and selecting what to send to which website is frankly preposterous
to me and of dubious value for the advertisers.

~~~
omnimus
Well you should maybe think about the content creators. If they live off the
ads then you just killed their living. Bat is about micro transactions - you
load Brave with 20usd and leave it to distribute money. It is actually great
usecase for crypto. I doubt you want to be giving out your credit card to
sites you read and micro transaction services would also invade your privacy
by paying for you. All crypto is not bad and BAT is pretty legit in my
opinion.

~~~
simias
I refuse to accept that ads are the only way for content creators to make a
living online. It's not the first time that the cryptocurrency crowd sees a
problem and thinks "clearly the blockchain is the solution here". Except that
behind buzzwords and vague assertions I fail to see a coherent big picture of
how that's all going to work. Instead of giving me Internet Fun Bucks to watch
ads, how about you let me pay for your service?

I pay for Spotify, I pay for Memrize, I pay for Tarnsap, I bought a
Fontawesome subscription last friday, I used to donate to a couple Patreons. I
donate punctually to FreeBSD, Wikipedia and a few other open source projects.
I want to support people who offer services that I use. I don't want to
prostitute my private life to do it.

If content creators don't want my money but insist that I should let them spam
me with ads and share my private info with third parties then it's their
problem, not mine.

Life is too short for me to curate "cryptographic interest tokens" in order
for advertisers to serve me content that I don't want to see anyway.

Some cryptocurrency projects wanted to develop a cheap and easy micropayment
system. That seems a lot more interesting to me although that probably can't
work as long as the "currency" part of "cryptocurrency" remains more
aspirational than practical.

~~~
maxencecornet
>. I want to support people who offer services that I use. I don't want to
prostitute my private life to do it.

You don't have to, just don't opt-in for Brave rewards (aka ads), and fund
your tipping wallet with your money (you can as of today) and voilà !

You'll have:

\- No ads, no trackers

\- You contribute toward content creators with your cash like you do with
Spotify/Netflix using a built-in wallet in your browser

\- A fast and privacy-first browser

~~~
simias
That does sound a lot more like something I would use. Do the Brave folks get
a cut of that money or is it completely peer-to-peer using a cryptocurrency
network? If it's the latter what's Brave's business model, they just have a
whole bunch of BAT and bet on them gaining value through adoption and
deflation?

Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is
definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far
cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem,
mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a
tough problem to solve.

~~~
maxencecornet
>Do the Brave folks get a cut of that money or is it completely peer-to-peer
using a cryptocurrency network?

No, they don't take a cut if you fund your wallet directly and use it to tip
the content creators.

>If it's the latter what's Brave's business model

Here is how they make money, just pasting my comment from below:

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))

So the Ads / Get paid to browse part of Brave is 100% optional and opt-in,
many people think it is mandatory

>Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is
definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far
cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem,
mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a
tough problem to solve.

Yeah, I'm kinda fascinated about Brave's model, I'm wondering if it will be
the first cryptocurrency-based solution that make sense to me

~~~
rvnx
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_\(web_browser\))

Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave
Software 15% Brave ad partners 15% Browser users 15% of the revenue.

So roughly 30%

~~~
maxencecornet
Thank you for correcting me! I wrote the numbers that were on top of my head

------
konspence
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.

~~~
eivarv

        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.

~~~
jug
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
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.

------
jclay
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.

------
fourier_mode
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.

------
tootahe45
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
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
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.

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

------
jannes
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
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
There are Firefox plugins for that.

------
matt4077
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.

------
aestetix
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.

~~~
maxencecornet
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))

------
stockkid
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.

------
karmakaze
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.

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

------
jdlonas
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
You threw the baby out with the bathwater.

------
joelrunyon
Anecdotal -

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

~~~
bad_user
That’s probably just placebo since Brave is built on top of Chromium.

~~~
ummonk
The adblock probably blocks bloated ad scripts that slow down the browser and
use up power.

~~~
bad_user
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.

------
marvindanig
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
> I even integrated { content => BAT } payments for my website

What have you used to implement that?

~~~
WA9ACE
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
Yeah I know, but he seemed to imply that he was using some sort of paywall
based on BATs, I was interested in that.

------
0xmohit
The article mentions the speed, but a difference that I've observed is that
the newer version consumes significantly less CPU and memory.

------
maxk42
Just decided to give it a try.

I think this is my new browser.

