Bad Performance on MacOS with 1.74.48

On my Macbook Air M1 (MacOS Sequoia 15.2), performance is significantly worse on 1.74.48, especially noticeable when zooming in & out of pages with a double tap. It lags like crazy. It is improved if I disable graphics acceleration, but then videos/graphics will use a lot more battery life and won’t playback as well.

My speedometer 2.0 score (that I test with every new version of brave) dropped from 415 to 370. when I run it again right afterwards, it drops even more to 285!! usually it is very stable. my CPU temps were exactly the same.

Happy to provide anything the Brave team needs to investigate this further. Thank you

How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Open a website like reddit or twitter in MacOS
  2. Double tap trackpad with 2 fingers for smart zoom
  3. Experience significant lag and choppiness zooming
  4. Test speedometer 2.0 and notice a large dropoff in performance compared to the previous brave based on chromium 131. (415 to 370 / 285 performance)

Expected result:

Smooth performance, which has been the norm.

Brave Version( check About Brave):

1.74.48

Additional Information:

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Sounds very much like the problem I’ve had since upgrading to Monterey. That system upgrade requires (apparently) the new Brave release 174.48, which this report calls out.
Now whenever Brave is running and is connecting to anything on the Internet, my laptop (Macbook Pro, vintage 2019) heats up furiously. After a couple of minutes, the fan turns on and stays on till after Brave is turned off. Meantime, the computer is drawing about as much current as the standard Mac power supply can feed it - sometimes more so that the charge level on the battery goes down slowly.
I said this looked familiar. A few years ago, when I updated the OS, I had weird performance issues, and when this was fixed, the analyst at Apple showed that the problem was iCloud running in a tight loop because of a problem in the configuration. Sounds like the same sort of problem. Apologies for the great length of this, but in the ancient days when I was fixing system bugs, I learned to appreciate detailed data. Also, my first time posting here, so I don’t know the unwritten rules.

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Left this out: Of course, I tried other browsers, all in the most up-to-date releases: Apple’s Safari, which incorporates a lot of special maintenance data proprietrary to Apple; good old Firefox; and an upstart named Vivaldi, which actually has works better with certain important websites than the other two. All work just fine, within their own limitations, with no signs of what I’m getting from Brave.

Apologies for the late reply here — was off most of last week and still catching up.

@nintendork07 wondering if you’ve update to Sequoia 15.3 yet and if so, whether or not the issue persists. On my end, I’m seeing a 517 score on my Macbook (using Sequoia 15.2) in Brave:

@dandrake what version of macOS are you using when you see this? Also Sequoia 15.2?

Additionally, the most recent version of the browser is 1.74.50 — can you both update to the latest build and confirm whether or not the issue is the same?

Running 174.51

BTW I now see that it’s not necessarily related to my upgrade to Monterey. I had so many things going weird that I reverted to Big Sur (recovery boot from my last Big Sur dump by Time Machine). And this overheating effect is still happening.

thank you for getting back to me. i just updated to 15.3 and sadly have the same issue still on my macbook air M1

i’m on 1.74.51

my first run of speedometer is 370. the second tanks to 286. third run is 236.

brave shields are disabled. ad blocker is disabled. i’ve tried with all extensions enabled vs disabled, no difference.

back on december 11th, i tested my speedometer 2.0 score was 415. it would remain above 400 in consecutive runs.

Not sure what to do about this, considering that this does not appear to be a general/wide spread issue and I cannot reproduce it, nor can any members of my team.

One thing you can test is to try downloading the Beta build of the browser and check to see if the performance there is the same or not.

Great news! I was able to figure it out. It was the extension called Stylus, which I only use for Youtube. I tried disabling extensions before, but didn’t fully restart the browser to test. I was able to fix this issue by changing the extension’s ability to access “all sites” to only allowing it to access Youtube.

I was able to get a 435 speedometer 2.0 score and a 32 speedometer 3.0 score, which are both what the Apple M1 should be getting.

Thank you for your help @Mattches I’m going to submit an issue to the Stylus github and if you could please make the Brave team aware, that would be appreciated.

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Thank you for confirming — glad you were able to find the solution.

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