Interesting discussion. I'm probably not the only one who started using Brave (on the side) because it's being put forward as one of the fastest/leanest browsers around. And I need something like that for the hybrid Win10 PC I chose as a cheap tablet alternative that will also run desktop software.
I can't attest to "leanest", but it is indeed the only browser that works reasonably well with something like Facebook on that tablet. Anything else becomes unbearably sluggish after a short while, an MS Edge just has a too much crippled UI (and general incapability to function with my filtering proxy, Privoxy).
I see lots of remarks about FF being slow. It's a memory hog indeed (can't use it on my tablet because of that), but so are Chromium-based browsers, and FF is the only one I know where you can trigger a GC run that actually has some effect. I combine that with "The Great Suspender" extension to keep things manageable.
Funny enough it was by far the fastest a year or 2 ago on what seemed a reasonably representative HTML5 benchmark that has been taken offline since. It's also the only option to have an up-to-date browser on my Mac that I've been keeping under OS X 10.9.5. That alone earns them my support...
I do wonder why WebKit2 isn't been used more; outside of the Apple universe (where it's sadly linked to the OS version) the only "official" browser I know of that uses it is Gnome's epiphany which isn't exactly cross-platform. My tests with the rebooted QtWebkit suggest that the older (but maintained, AFAIK) WebKit codebase superior in performance and resource use to Chromium ("WebEngine") for sites that don't require newer, unsupported features (and as an embedded HTML renderer).
I see lots of remarks about FF being slow. It's a memory hog indeed (can't use it on my tablet because of that), but so are Chromium-based browsers, and FF is the only one I know where you can trigger a GC run that actually has some effect. I combine that with "The Great Suspender" extension to keep things manageable. Funny enough it was by far the fastest a year or 2 ago on what seemed a reasonably representative HTML5 benchmark that has been taken offline since. It's also the only option to have an up-to-date browser on my Mac that I've been keeping under OS X 10.9.5. That alone earns them my support...
I do wonder why WebKit2 isn't been used more; outside of the Apple universe (where it's sadly linked to the OS version) the only "official" browser I know of that uses it is Gnome's epiphany which isn't exactly cross-platform. My tests with the rebooted QtWebkit suggest that the older (but maintained, AFAIK) WebKit codebase superior in performance and resource use to Chromium ("WebEngine") for sites that don't require newer, unsupported features (and as an embedded HTML renderer).