I just had Chrome opened with 7 tabs, it was using 700 Mb memory. Brave with only 4 tabs (less than Chrome), was using 1000 Mb memory. For a better comparison, in both browsers I had the same tabs open: facebook, youtube, gmail and so on. I’m a long time Chrome user and decided to try Brave but this worse memory usage disappointed me. It’s not like the reviews said that Braves uses less memory, lies all lies. Maybe you paid the reviewers to say that but it’s misleading. I know I’m not the only one having this issues, as I saw many more users complaining about the same issue.
@Brav_e_MemoryHog first, it may depends and different for each users. Like if you have extension/s installed, the number of opened tab/s, etc.
cc @Mattches for additional assistance here.
@eljuno is correct – there are a variety of factors at play here that may influence cpu/memory usage.
- When testing, make sure you’re using the same number of tabs and the same sites between the two (it looks like you already did this but just wanted to highlight it)
- Do you have any extensions installed in Chrome or in Brave? Are they the same? Try running them both with extensions disabled.
- Are you using any of the built-in Brave features? For example, Brave Rewards/Ads, Brave Sync? If so, these function similar to extensions with respect to resource consumption – you’re likely to see more resources used if your device is on a Sync chain (which updates itself automatically) or if you have Brave Rewards enabled.
@Mattches yes I already did your point 1 as I explained in my original post. I don’t use any extentions on Chrome and on Brave. As I thought my post made clear, I just installed Brave for the first time yesterday to try it out and I was disappointed when I saw memory usage was not better than Chrome like the reviews said (some of them probably paid by you). I’m using the rewards and sync, since those are built-in and new, I wanted to test them.
I know I’m not the only one reporting this issue, I’ve seen a lot of other people reporting it too, therefore it’s a known issue that should be acknowledged, addressed and worked on by your team if you want to improve the browser.
Memory usage is a part of performance, a big part to consider when we compare browsers to give the opinion what is the best one overall. Chrome has been around for many years, Brave is more recent, still Chrome is better than Brave when it comes to memory, is that what you’re saying? And you don’t plan on optimizing this until release? Judging from past experience with other software companies, I don’t have any faith to be honest and I’m an optimisitc person. If I saw Brave’s memory usage being lower than Chrome I would be the first one to applaud you, sadly, reality says otherwise.
At one point yesterday, during my comparisons, again with the same amount of tabs opened on both, I saw Brave using more than 2100 Mb (2 Gb) memory while Chrome was only using 700 Mb. I thought this is ridiculous for a newer browser like Brave that announces itself to have better performance than Chrome. I’m also finding Brave is slower loading compared to Chrome.
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To test your hypothesis . Would replicate this on several systems and share my findings
@Dgenies lol as one genius film maker would reply, “I reject your hypothesis”. You must be a millennial. Let me enlighten you. That’s THEIR job, not mine. I shared my feedback, which is valuable and there’s plenty of more feedback out there by other people who reached the same conclusion I did. Use something called COMMON SENSE if you have any. Lots of millennials don’t. All they see nowadays is beta, alpha pre-access, pre-order, early access, gold edition, deluxe edition, so they have no standards for quality and no brain.
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that is mean but I can take it. the generational branch I would say Gen Z or better post millennial. Your test never stated the os, cpu type, Ram size, Ram speed, and Ram type. These are things am going to consider. would be using 3 different windows computer and 1 Kubuntu computer would state my result and each device specs. I am not rejecting your hypothesis am undergoing a scientific process of confirmation or rejection
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@Dgenies still a valid feedback just like the one from lots of other people. Ubuntu? Lol what about people who don’t have access to 3 different computers? They can’t give an opinion? Give me a break, you have no clue what you are talking about bye.
@Brav_e_MemoryHog @Mattches @eljuno I did carry out the test on all 3 window devices and the results were similar regardless of the cpu type Ram type or any other varying factor. Yet to test on my Kubuntu laptop but we all know ubuntu ram management is terrible. The ram usage is usually over 2.2X with a clean installation. The heaviest on was on the window 7 laptop which was almost 2.9X . Startup time were similar. in 10 tries on the window 7 chrome took the lead 6 times avg at 18.65s but on window 10 it was a time in number of times one took the lead but avg time chrome was still better with a second lead. PS all the systems I used were intel based. I didn’t investigate what was using what in terms of ram usage. If I was to guess the shield adblocker is more like an extension, Brave reward and others like sync are all contributing to the ram size. I would do another test to see how they both accumulate ram under same work load, stress and time.
lol if i was going to be picky like you, i would tell you the same you told me: "Your test never stated the os, cpu type, Ram size, Ram speed, and Ram type. "
Anyway, thanks for proving me right, your tests agree with my conclusion that Chrome was faster loading compared to Brave. In terms of RAM, unlike you, I did test it and showed real resuls, Chrome won again.
As I said before, it’s their job to test their product, not ours. You’re missing they are not paying us to work for them. You must not know how software beta testing was decades ago, when companies paid beta testers, today it’s ridiculous, companies got used to having people beta test for free, resulting in companies being more lazy, less professional and costumers like you have much lower quality standards.
No need to fire shots here, we just met one another 
Also this is definitely not true. But also not the point.
You’re right, there have been some users experiencing high resource usage when running Brave. This means that there’s likely an issue of some kind taking place between Brave and those users.
This is not, however, indicative of browser performance overall (for all users).
I actually wasn’t saying anything – I was gathering data. As stated, given the scope of possible factors that play into performance per user, it can sometimes be hard to diagnose issues like this or even tell if an issue exists to begin with. The reason I asked all the questions above was to get a better picture of what’s happening on your end and rule out any usual suspects.
The last question is of particular importance – the features that come built in with Brave also require resources. While their consumption shouldn’t be anything drastic (and wouldn’t account for all the usage you’re seeing I don’t believe), we may be able to isolate the greedy one.
You mentioned that you’re using both Rewards and Sync, right? You could try disabling one of these features (one at a time) and checking to see if performance is any better. I know, you don’t think it’s your job to do so (and it’s not!), but when testing on my end, I have fresh installs of both Brave and Chrome on Win10 and macOS showing comparable memory and cpu resources.
We do appreciate the help
Not firing at you, I don’t even know you, just telling the truth, in this pocketvideo’s youtube video, he added to the description: “We thank Brave for sponsoring this video.” so it is true your company endorsed paid reviews. The problem with paid reviews is they try to sell a product, are not unbiased and totally honest about the product’s pros and cons, this review only said wonderful things about Brave (nothing is perfect), then my personal experience wasn’t as good as that.
I believe I answered your 3 questions, if you have more, I don’t mind answering them as well, I only don’t cooperate with companies in general when I see their actions are arrogant, not worthy of my time.
To be honest, I still didn’t explore Sync at all, I’m not aware of what it really syncs, I suppose in Chrome’s case, it will sync its bookmarks between different devices like desktop, cell phone and so on and, as Chrome is developed by Google, anything related to our Google account and data like contacts would me important to sync to the cloud, between devices. If Brave offers the same kind of bookmark sync Chrome does, in theory we won’t see much difference there?
I already know Brave is based on Chromium, like Chrome. However, this is a HTTP USER AGENT generated by a Chrome user:
“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.46 Safari/537.36”
I compared to a Brave HTTP USER AGENT, it also says “Chrome” but with the version 75 (earlier than 76). Is Brave an older version compared to Chrome?
Obviously, different users will share different results, I expect some to have worse results than others, it’s normal. Anyway, the more feedback you get like mine and from other people, the better for you because you have more real user experiences to analyse and compare. I also tested on Windows 10.
What I can also tell you about my initial disappointing memory comparisons, is that after some time, I compared again and Brave was overall using less memory than Chrome, although Brave had 4 separate tasks in task manager, some of them using very little memory, not just 1 task with around 22 substasks like I saw other times.
I tried to screenshot those task manager results to show you but Win 10 was being picky and didn’t let me screenshot it.
There seem to be some spikes of much higher memory usage, varies a lot with time.
I don’t mind helping if you’re polite but while at it, can I get paid for beta testing? Lol just kidding. Sadly, we are not in the 90s anymore, those were better times for software. Yahoo Messenger, who remembers? The best and most fun to use chat messenger, doesn’t exist anymore, nothing today comes close, so many years after. It’s like we’re regressing.
@Brav_e_MemoryHog,
I’ll make some noise about this internally and see what shakes out but I can’t give any guarantees as far as actionable items. Again, I do appreciate the report in general.
Also, just to clarify:
Brave (at this time) masquerades as chrome by sending the Chrome user agent – we have plans to implement our own user agent in future releases as well as the option to customize your user agent string while browsing:
Additionally, Chromium updates between Brave and Chrome should be equivilent or perhaps one bump behind from time to time:
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