I often hear my Mac Mini (quad 2.6GHz) fan sounding like it is about to take off when I’m watching videos full screen on all video sites though I tend not to use YouTube so much. Today, I was watching a video on Odysee (odysee.com) and the same thing happened so I thought I’d do a test with barely any applications running apart from the browser and a couple of background programmes which don’t use much CPU - only one browser running at once. I used Firefox for comparison for no other reason that it is sitting next to Brave in my Dock.
Brave’s CPU averaged about 155% and hit 299% at one point but I only managed to capture it using a timed screen grab at 185%. Firefox averaged around 40% and peaked at about 72%, I captured it at 45%.
So, Brave seems to be using around four times the CPU as Firefox to do the same thing.
I then tested all the other browsers I have on my Mac (sometimes I have problems with particular pages and it is useful to have options). All the others faired like Firefox, around 40-50% but Safari only used 25%, actually dipping to 12% and peaked at 40%.
Why is this? I like what Brave is supposed to be about but 'm getting so fed up with the noise, I’m considering dropping Brave altogether.
I’d be interested to know if other people have similar results.
I only just updated Brave due to a previous version being unable to handle payments for my food shopping but I’ve had enough of the CPU robbery and switched everything over to Chrome.
If there had been a single other browser which had shown a similar CPU usage, I might have understood that it’s just a different browser thing but every single browser used about 25% of the CPU that Brave uses and that is pretty awful - especially when I get a big splash screen boasting about how great Brave is having saved me how much bandwidth and time it has saved me. And just to be absolutely certain, I have every extension which I had installed on Brave now installed on Chrome and I tested the same video and others that I had been watching earlier - 22% CPU and most of the time, Chrome isn’t even in my top 5 CPU using processes.
Is there something fishy about this? I don’t take any notice of all the rewards and other stuff in Brave but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that there was a link.
I hear ya. I recently switched back to Chrome and Firefox due to the CPU spike. It is crazy that my CPU fans spinning all the times whenever I go to youtube.
I don’t think it is just video sites (I rarely watch YouTube on my Mac - I use BitChute, Rumble and BrandNewTube), my Mac has just been generally quieter in the last hour than I remember for weeks. I regularly check total CPU usage in my menu bar and I have never seen it so low - currently 8.4%. Even just typing a post on here and Brave would be jostling for the top CPU hog slot and most of the time, Chrome isn’t even in the top five which are visible.
I really hate having to use Chrome and I’ve spent a while doing what I can to mitigate the tech tyrant slurping up my data but it’s just nice not to feel like my Mac is struggling.
I have the same issue in Windows.
Filtered Event viewer log for errors based on Brave records and found none.
Unable to find the exact reason. The computer runs on a fresh Win 10 pro installation (Mid Feb21). However, this seems to be the case for the last 1 month.
Thinking to drop Brave, too. Sick of the fans because I use it for work.
A bit late now - I have fully migrated everything to Chrome (including my history, browser and extension setting which I hadn’t thought possible).
So far, my stress levels are reflected in my Mac’s CPU usage. The difference is remarkable. I have an animated cat in my menu bar which gives an instant indication of CPU usage (the faster it runs, the greater the CPU usage) and it is practically stationary.
The claim that Brave is 3x faster than Chrome is demonstrably not true on my Mac. If one considers the moment that the reload icon appears in the menu bar as being the moment that a browser considers a page fully loaded, for me, Brave is slightly slower than Chrome and as I mentioned in a previous post, I have ALL the same extensions installed.
I hope that Brave gets sorted out ASAP and I’ll migrate everything back now I know how but in the meantime, I think the developers are resting on their laurels and the claims about time savings etc. are illusory because any benefit comes at huge cost, at least in my experience and I see no other explanation. I have a background which involves troubleshooting so I know even if I don’t know how to fix a problem, I know how to isolate it. I had a problem a month or so ago and I proved that there was a problem within the browser by doing all the necessary deductive testing but the developers just fobbed me off with patronising responses and the thread subsequently closed because I didn’t have the energy to bang my head against the wall and it was easier to revert to an older version and edit my hosts file to block Brave from updating (a feature which most applications give users without having to ‘hack’ into their OS). It wasn’t the first time that I have felt that Brave was trying to out-Apple Apple; i.e. limiting user choice under the guise of control, dressing up a prison camp to look like a holiday camp and not even being able to get the advertised features to work; e.g. syncing is an absolute joke for Mac/iOS users. The only help is like having a game of tech-fetch until the support person runs out of ideas and slips down an alley and is never seen again. Brave support staff being a bit of an oxymoron.
Anyway, this situation reminds me of people who let their car insurance renew every year without bothering to check if they could get a better deal elsewhere then years down the line they discover that they have overpaid enough to have bought a new car. So, as far as I’m concerned, fix it or forget it.
@okulo,
Appreciate your feedback.
If this is enough for you to move back to Chrome or some other browser, I won’t waste your time. However, if you’re interested in actually troubleshooting the issue, I’m happy to help. I’ll note that right now, I’m on my macOS laptop and have 3 different Brave instances (Nightly, Dev, Stable) all running at the same time using a fraction of the resources you’re reporting:
So it stands to reason that there are additional factors at play here that are likely influencing the impact the browser is taking on your resources. I would be very interested to know how Brave runs on your machine when using a fresh profile.
Same problem here, on a MBP. I created a fresh profile, but that didn’t help. Enabled/disabled hardware acceleration, but that also didn’t fix anything. Brave is unusable at the moment, the fans start to spin as soon as I start a video and they take a while to quiet down.
I loved Brave, a lot. But this adds to the pile of reasons why I think Brave is just not that amazing anymore. Things added as features that are annoying, but aren’t optional is one of them. High CPU causing lot of noise is another and no way to revert to a previous version of the browser is another.
@Mattches I also have this problem, specifically with youtube. By creating a new profile, and assuming abandoning the old profile should it work, would I be right in saying you are forfeiting your uphold verification if you have already linked 4 devices/profiles previously and is there a work around in the pipeline yet to delete historic profiles from uphold because of maybe getting a new phone or corrupted profiles etc?
@Willy123,
This test with a fresh profile is simply a test – I’m not suggesting you delete your old profile. I’m simply suggesting testing a new profile without any associated data, extensions, etc will give us a better idea of what’s going on with the browser and why it’s consuming the high amount of resources.
For anyone testing with a fresh profile, it would be very useful to see the browser task manager (Menu --> More tools --> Task manager) so we can see what component is hogging those resources.
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