This post is an abbreviated version of this report, based on research conducted at Brave by Andrius Aucinas (Performance Researcher), Peter Snyder (Privacy Researcher), and Dr. Ben Livshits (Chief Scientist), as well as by Mohammad Ghasemisharif (Ph.D student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and intern at Brave).

Summary: SpeedReader is Brave’s new approach to reader mode, the browser tool that makes web pages more pleasant and less complex to read. By removing all non-essential content before a page loads, SpeedReader goes beyond reader mode’s aesthetic improvements and delivers:

1) radical performance gains (speedups ranging from 20× to 27×, bandwidth savings on the order of 84×, and memory reduction of 2.4×);

2) significant privacy benefits, which include a complete elimination of ad and tracking related requests.

SpeedReader is useful on 22% of web pages in general, and has even higher applicability for user-shared content (31% on Twitter and 42% on Reddit).

A New Approach to Reader Modes: Performance and Privacy Gains

The modern web’s progress has led far beyond Hypertext Markup for document discovery, with media-rich experiences and dynamic applications. Such growth in capability has however resulted in page “bloat,” making pages expensive to load, and bringing along ubiquitous advertising and tracking.

Web browsers sometimes need to intervene for users to continue enjoying the web. As such, major browsers include a reader mode, which reduces the visual complexity of web sites by eliminating distracting ads, videos, sponsored content links, and other web elements not essential to the page. Reader modes aim to make the reading experience more pleasant, but do not try to improve page load times or protect users’ privacy, as the entire page is loaded first, before removing the bloat.

To address these issues, Brave is developing SpeedReader. SpeedReader is a new approach to reader modes. It delivers huge improvements to not only the aesthetics of the browsing experience, but to browsing performance and privacy as well. For suitable pages, SpeedReader removes all non-essential content before page load, saving time, bandwidth and removing ads and trackers; in that SpeedReader goes beyond what Brave does by default in terms of blocking trackers and ads. SpeedReader automatically detects which pages are suitable, significantly improving the end-user experience – especially on slower mobile connections.

On applicable pages, SpeedReader speeds up page loading by 27×, and reduces network use by 84×, compared to regular browsing. SpeedReader improves user privacy as well, by removing all commonly recognized trackers. During testing, SpeedReader issued 115 fewer requests to third parties, and interacted with 64 fewer trackers on average, on applicable pages. SpeedReader works on 22% of web pages in general, and a full 46% of pages shared on social media.