PC World - USA (2019-12)

DECEMBER 2019 PCWorld 53

Brave, Chrome 78, the current Edge 44, and
Firefox 70. (We’ll wait for the “new”
Chromium-based Microsoft Edge to be
released before adding it.)
WebXPRT is probably the closest to a
“real-world” test of Web apps like photo
manipulation and text editing, with the
other two focusing more on the basic
functions underlying Web applications and
general browsing.
For whatever reason, the current Edge

posted disastrous scores in our testing,

though we also used more modern

benchmarks than we normally run in our best

browsers roundup. (Edge flat-out didn’t run

the JetStream 2 benchmark.) All tests were

performed on the recently-released Surface

Laptop 3 (go.pcworld.com/sfl3), using the

Ryzen 5 version of the Surface Edition chip

and 16GB of memory.

We also loaded up all four browsers with

30 tabs of media-rich Web sites, including

CNN, ESPN, Comedy

Central, and our own. Doing

so is a bit controversial, for

one reason: Brave blocks ads

natively, like another niche

browser, Opera, which

should help both browsers

reduce their memory and

CPU load. Still, for those who

don’t tune their browsers

with ad blockers and tools to

block scripts, it’s another

indication how clean Brave’s

browser runs by default.

We loaded each tab until

we reached the required

thirty, then measured the

memory and CPU load after

a minute. The results aren’t

exactly comparable, since

we were loading live sites

with live content; on the

other hand, it’s a good

Resource consumption, 30 tabs

(Memory; MB)

SMALLER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

2,776

3,344

2,827

7, 4 2 0

Chrome 78

Brave 1.0

Firefox 70

Edge 44

In this chart, we show memory usage in thousands of megabytes
(gigabytes) on the left, with CPU utilization on the right. Brave does
excellently here.

Resource consumption, 30 tabs

(CPU Utilization; %)

SMALLER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

31.5

16.9

84.3

Brave 1.0 3.1

Chrome 78

Firefox 70

Edge 44