
The browser “Brave” loads major news sites 2x – 8x faster - mathiasrw
https://brave.com/
======
clouddrover
And similarly for Firefox with Tracking Protection turned on. The speed gains
come from reducing the amount that's downloaded and rendered or executed:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/20/firefox-private-
bro...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/20/firefox-private-browsing-vs-
chrome-incognito/)

You can set Firefox's Tracking Protection to "always" so it's on all the time,
inside and outside of private browsing mode.

~~~
faitswulff
People who do that might like Firefox Focus, which ships with tracking
protection, adblocking, and no history by default:
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/mobile/#focus](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/mobile/#focus)

~~~
madez
I like the effort, but I think their target is slighty off. The privacy with
regards to the network (ads, tracking, fingerprinting, etc.) and the privacy
with regards to other users of the same machine (browsing history, downloads,
etc.) are orthogonal. FireFox Focus lumps them together into one, just like
FireFox private mode. I think they should be seperated. I want locally all the
convenience of usability, but towards the outside all the protection and
privacy features. FireFox doesn't offer that :-/

~~~
j_4
I honestly love the package as it is for this very reason - the browsing
experience is top notch, and the ephemeral nature of cookies, open sites etc.
keeps me off the phone, and social media in particular.

~~~
deltaprotocol
I like it so much that I can't help but dream with Focus for desktop. I
realized most of the times the browser can be amnesic (maybe should?) and
completely involve websites in private bubbles with mitigations.

The robust version of the browser ends up being the home of long therm,
trustworthy pages.

~~~
deltaprotocol
Sorry, j_4, reply was to parent.

~~~
deltaprotocol
My client is broken, it was meant to you. Hope this one goes to the right
place.

------
beauseant
Buy a $35 Raspberry Pi and setup Pi-hole; now all of your browsers are fast,
as well as your mobile phones, TVs, and other devices.

I prefer Firefox and derivatives because I can hack the guts to make it do
what I want. I also run uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, No Coin,
and others. I also block HTTP/S referrer, visited links (history visbile to
websites), geo location, WebRTC (prevents sites from seeing your private
address schema), and others. I also use a proxy server that allows me to
appear from different regions. I also block access to font discovery. Yes, I
realise this creates a unique "fingerprint" of my systems, but I've never had
malware, or rogue Javascript.

This is done for all devices on my network under my control. Needless to say,
with the Pi-hole and other settings, speed and bandwidth are great. Highly
recommended.

~~~
cripblip
+1 for pihole, the difference between home and public browsing on my phone is
striking. Considering setting up a vpn with proxy to have this functionality
all the time

------
rgbrenner
From the FAQ, this is just chromium + an ad blocker + something called Brave
Payments that's suppose to support publishers with micropayments.. and there's
an ad system you can opt into
([https://basicattentiontoken.org/](https://basicattentiontoken.org/)).

It seems to me that the last two are what's unique.. I think they would have
greater success by refocusing on those and just developing plugins for Chrome,
Firefox, and Edge. Getting everyone to install a browser seems like an uphill
battle.

~~~
donatj
You should actually give it a shot. It’s so much more than that, it’s simply
so much more than you could do with a Chrome extension.

It has privacy in mind to its core.

As an example, in a recent interview Brendan Eich mentioned that they are
working on making private browsing tabs go through tor in order to make them
truly private.

~~~
im3w1l
If they do that, they better not forget to enable "http nowhere" in those
tabs, or people will be in for a bad surprise.

~~~
solarkraft
They already "upgrade" web pages to https by default.

------
ladberg
I'm not a big fan of how they calculate load time. Usually you'll start
interacting with the website before every single external resource loads
(comments, Facebook integration, tracking scripts, etc.). Also, they should be
comparing against Chrome/Safari with adblockers. Comparing the load times of
one browser blocking the majority of the data downloaded vs one browser
downloading everything will be very different regardless of what you're using.

------
whyever
They compared a browser with ad blocking with one without it. Of course it's
faster not to load ads.

~~~
RobertRoberts
I think it's a completely fair assessment of apples to apples comparison. Each
browser in it's natural first installed state. How is that an unfair
comparison?

------
Alex3917
Flagged. You can't just not load the asynchronous assets that don't affect how
the page is displayed and then claim your browser is 8x as fast.

~~~
bartkmq
>You can't just

Why not? (Serious Question, I want to learn.)

~~~
fron
The reason that the adblocking bit is significant is that it makes the
benchmark comparisons pretty meaningless. Failing to load 40% of the content
that was served will obviously cut the load times by a comparable amount.

For an accurate comparison, Brave's adblocker should be disabled so that it
loads everything that Chrome did.

~~~
bartkmq
I disagree. Brave is targeted at the average browser user. Only ~10% of
Windows users use adblockers, 2% on Android/iOS.

And you can't tell me all of these people want to see ads, most of them
probably just don't know about adblockers (or find them to difficult to
install on mobile).

Brave solves that problem because they present a finished solution that simply
works for the user.

The comparison between Chromes and Braves (Electrons) internal details may be
interested for developers but the average end-user just cares about the speed
difference between Browser X and Y as they come out of the box.

------
tbolt
Time.com takes 98 seconds to load in Chrome? Well that’s something.

~~~
userbinator
_Load time is measured by calculating the duration from the start time for the
first network request, to the response time for the final request made for
each domain._

I guess you'll see the page much sooner than 98 seconds, because seeing
nothing for that long would probably mean the majority of visitors think the
site is broken. There is still a ton of stuff loading in the background.

------
Joking_Phantom
I wonder if there's an underlying reason for the Fox news benchmark being the
fastest. If page load time is largely determined by quality/quantity of ads,
is Fox News serving the "best" ads to make their website faster? Or is their
average user using a computer with less network bandwith and computing power,
thus forcing them to lower ad loading time to present a reasonable user
experience.

------
keyle
From my testing it was very interesting but the advertising part of it was
odd, and also it crashed too often.

------
fimdomeio
Personally after reading the page what I take is that the browser is
irrelevant unless I'm in the USA

------
jodrellblank
"Major news sites". Nobody goes to those anymore - they're too crowded.

~~~
mchahn
That is one of my favorite Yogi Berra sayings.

------
hndamien
I love Brave, but my main beef is that when you download a torrent, who know
where that file is actually stored on your file system....?

------
manicdee
My RSS feed loads even faster still.

------
_ao789
What's the dev stack on this?

~~~
mathiasrw
As I understand it is based on Firefox and have some neat features added: when
opening a new tab it displays how much time you gained from not loading adds
and tracking code + feature to provide payment to creators based on a monthly
budget and how much time you spend on different sites. Its like Patreon with
direct relation to your usage.

See "Enter Brave Payments" on
[https://brave.com/publishers/](https://brave.com/publishers/)

~~~
mburns
Brave is based on Chromium, not Firefox.

------
montrose
Not this news site I bet...

------
codinghorror
This is completely credible if it has built in adblocking.

------
dingo_bat
The browser indeed is fast to load websites, but in my experience it is still
a bit in the beta stage. Also I'm surprised how many websites these days just
work on Chrome and nothing else! We're back to IE6 folks.

~~~
solarkraft
I really notice it on FF.

------
donatj
I have been using Brave more and more. I am growing to love it.

It’s basically impossible to get an idea of global usage however because it
does such a good job of not letting servers know you’re using it. It just
looks like Chrome.

