Brave is Still the Fastest Web Browser

It’s well understood that Brave is among the fastest web browsers on desktop because it blocks ads and trackers. But it’s always nice to get up-to-date data, and it appears that Brave is even better than the competition than it’s ever been, and not just for performance.

“We recently ran new benchmarks comparing Brave against the three most widely used desktop browsers: Chrome, Edge, and Firefox,” the Brave machine learning research team writes. “We found that Brave for desktop is faster, uses less energy, consumes less CPU and memory, and transfers less data.”

On average, Brave uses 44 percent less CPU than the competition, consumes 10 percent less energy, uses 28 percent less RAM, loads pages 20 percent faster, transfers 26 percent less data, and transfers 39 percent less outbound data. As with a 2025 round of benchmarks on Android–surprise, Brave nailed it on that one, too–the company attribute its wins to its built-in adblocking and tracker blocking. “These eliminate unnecessary network requests and reduce processing overhead during browsing,” the team notes.

One of the highlights from the benchmarks sadly confirms my own ad hoc experiences: Firefox CPU usage is notably bad, over 2.5x greater than Brave’s, and in the worst cases (which, granted, were on an 8 GB Mac Mini) it approaches 100 percent CPU utilization while saturating one or more CPU cores entirely during loading and rendering. Interestingly, memory usage across Chrome, Edge, and Firefox was similar.

Brave says it will perform similar tests on iOS soon, and it will periodically re-run these tests on all platforms going forward to ensure that Brave remains the most performant major browser available.