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Comment by konspence | Hacker News Reader

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.

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From the linked article:

> Note that we are comparing released versions; Brave 0.24.0 is based on Chromium build 69.0.3497.100, while Brave Core 0.55.12 uses a newer Chromium build 70.0.3538.45. We do not expect the move to a later underlying Chromium version to be responsible for significant performance variations. We don’t observe a statistically significant difference for unthrottled measurements—in fact, Chrome 70 is sightly slower for the sites we considered.

    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.

OP asks why should he care, that Brave is no longer slower than Chromium it is based on. It doesn't sound like something impressive.

Oh. I wonder if this post had gained as much attention if the header was "Brave is now about as fast as Chrome".

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.

I think it's more of a progress report than a display of innovation targeted towards people who are looking to switch over from Google Chrome due to privacy issues.

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