I just switched to the Macbook Air M1, and decided it was time to do a little roundup of the browsers natively supporting the M1 CPU architecture. I found Brave, which I hadn’t tried before, and I really like it a lot. Lots of great ideas here!
Problem is performance. I tried two different benchmarks:
https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
Brave (current build 1.21.73): 181
Brave (previous build downloaded end of February): Was in the 120 so there is improvement with the latest build
Safari: 223
I was expecting similar performance to Chrome which is in the same ballpark as Safari. Did I miss something? Is the performance of the M1 build of Brave still a work in progress?
So far, I stick with Brave because I like it. Also to be honest in daily usage, this is still way beyond what I was used to with my older Macbook Pro, but I would like to be sure to get the best performance possible.
@tr0,
Thank you for reaching out to us.
I believe that we should perform similar or better to Chrome in terms of performance. With that said, some level of variance in results is expected from case to case, given users individual device and browser setup.
I will report your findings to our performance team, however, for further review in the event that there are any other underlying issues at play.
Thanks for your reply, I had read about Chrome ARM64 build having the same speed as Safari, but I just tested it myself (Chrome latest Version 89.0.4389.72 (Official Build) (arm64)), this is the updated results:
https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
Brave (current build 1.21.73): 181
Brave (previous build downloaded end of February): Was in the 120 so there is improvement with the latest build
Safari: 223
Chrome: 197.3
So in fact Chrome performances are a bit above but similar to the one of Brave. Safari is actually faster, but at such an early stage, it is probably normal that Safari is still better optimized for the M1 chip.
