Brave mobile users can expect up to two and a half extra hours of browsing per battery charge.

This research was conducted by Dr. Matteo Varvello, performance researcher at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist.

We are continuing our series of posts evaluating Brave browser’s performance. This time we look at a key aspect for mobile users: battery consumption. In fact, very little is known of the additional battery cost imposed by the explosion of ads and trackers on the Web. In our research, we show that Brave consumes 40% less battery than popular browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, thanks to a combination of bandwidth savings and lower CPU pressure. When compared to various ad blocking browsers, Brave still manages to shave an extra 20% of battery savings, derived from the lower CPU consumption.

Measurement Methodology

We estimate a browser’s energy consumption leveraging recent hardware and software advances in Android. From a hardware perspective, most modern Android phones come equipped with battery sensors that can report the amount of charge (mAh) left in the battery, along with other metrics like current drawn and battery temperature. From a software perspective, battery-historian is an open-source tool which allows the analysis of battery consumption using Android “bugreport” files — which aggregate data about CPU and bandwidth usage, battery statistics from the above sensors, etc.