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Brave Claims Pages Load 20% Faster Than Chrome, Edge and Firefox
Brave appears to be significantly more efficient than its rivals, especially Chrome, Edge and Firefox. At least, that is what Brave's new series of benchmarks suggests, but what does it actually mean? Here's what you need to know.
On September 2, 2026, Brave published the results of its new desktop performance tests, after running the same exercise for Android in 2025. According to Brave, its browser would be faster, more energy-efficient, and lighter on CPU and memory, while transferring less data than its three competitors.
Before going into the numbers in more detail, I think it is important to remember that Brave, Chrome and Edge share the same engine, namely Chromium. Mozilla Firefox, on the other hand, relies on Gecko. The difference therefore does not come from the rendering engine itself, but from everything around it... According to Brave, the browser is able to perform better mainly by blocking ads and trackers through mechanisms enabled by default. In a way, that makes sense: fewer third-party requests, fewer scripts to parse, and less work for the CPU.
The figures put forward by Brave
First of all, you should know that these tests were not carried out on Windows or Linux, but on Mac. Brave chose to use a Mac mini equipped with an Apple M2 chip and 8 GB of unified memory, running macOS 26.5.1, with a dedicated 50 Mbps connection (in London). The versions compared in this benchmark were the following:
- Brave 1.92.139 (Chromium 150),
- Chrome 150,
- Edge 150,
- Firefox 146.0.1.
This automated benchmark was carried out using the Playwright framework, and the tool used is published on GitHub. The protocol: load the homepage of the 50 most popular sites according to Brave Search, ten times each, with a fresh profile on every run.
Here are the averages recorded across all competitors:
- CPU. Brave shows average usage of 33%, compared with 47% for Chrome, 53% for Edge and 78% for Firefox. Firefox even comes close to 100% on some pages.
- Memory. Around 1,200 MB for Brave (combined RSS for all processes), versus 1,750 MB for Chrome, 1,620 MB for Edge and 1,650 MB for Firefox.
- Energy. 31.1 mWh per page load for Brave, which is 4% less than Chrome, 12% less than Edge and 14% less than Firefox.
- Fully loaded time. 4.4 seconds for Brave, 5.1 seconds for Chrome, 5.3 seconds for Firefox and 6 seconds for Edge.
- Network data. 4.4 MB received per page for Brave, compared with 4.8 MB for Chrome, 6.3 MB for Firefox and 6.8 MB for Edge. Outbound data was 0.18 MB for Brave, while Chrome sends 0.34 MB, almost twice as much.
What you need to understand is that performance and privacy go hand in hand: outbound data largely corresponds to tracking codes and telemetry, which is precisely what Brave blocks by default. On paper, when you look at CPU and RAM performance, there is no contest. Still, it is also interesting to look at LCP.
The detail that changes the picture: LCP
The loading time measured in the tests mentioned above corresponds to the loadEventEnd event, that is, the moment when the page has finished loading everything, including background scripts. But if you look at another key metric, called LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), the results are less clear-cut. This metric is well known and serves as a benchmark when optimizing website performance (Google even uses it as a Core Web Vitals criterion). It measures when the main content appears on screen. And here, the four browsers are almost tied: around 2.4 seconds for Brave and Chrome, 2.5 seconds for Edge and Firefox.
In other words, the page appears ready at the same time for the user. But for your machine, there is still an advantage: lower resource consumption, which can also improve the device's battery life, but not the perceived speed on screen.
Finally, it should be noted that the competing browsers were tested with their default settings, so without an ad blocker. It would be interesting to compare Brave with Firefox or Chrome equipped with uBlock, and that would probably produce a very different result. It is also worth noting the absence of Safari, which is surprising since the test was carried out on Mac. Brave explains this absence by saying that Playwright does not fully support Apple's browser.
What do you think?
