Brave has now officially relaunched with a completely rebuilt browser intended to set it apart as its user base continues growing. In terms of growth, the company says it now has 13.5 million monthly active users. That’s accented by as many as 4.3 million daily active users.
The numbers represent a fairly significant jump over last year’s figures. As recently as November, Brave indicated that it saw around 8.7 million monthly active users. That’s a growth of more than 55-percent in just over 5-months.
At the time, the company’s growth and user demand spurred the addition of a new dedicated Dark Mode. But this time around, it has put its focus on better performance. The new Brave for mobile has been built out on the same Chromium code repository as its desktop browser. That will enable a more efficient implementation of changes and fixes across the board.
Simultaneously, Brave says its latest browser update delivers 5-percent battery savings over its predecessor. That’s atop a 3-percent improvement in terms of both data and CPU savings. On bandwidth, Brave says its new browser shows an 18-percent saving over the previous variant.
How does the new Brave browser stack up to the competition?
The latest changes should help cement Brave’s position among the best browsers available for mobile. The company has already occupied that list for some time as both a privacy- and efficiency-focused option for end-users.
With the new improvements in place, Brave claims it does even better than it previously did against major competitors. Namely, that’s its claimed savings compared to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Chrome has a far larger user base, with over 2-billion instances of Chrome in use as of 2016 and continued dominance in the market. Firefox, comparatively, has boasted more than 250-million monthly active users as of December 2019.
But Brave says it already saw savings of 30-percent to 50-percent in terms of both bandwidth and battery compared to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. That’s prior to the newest update.
Brave also compared its newest browser to more efficiency-focused competitors Vivaldi, Firefox Preview, and DuckDuckGo. It indicates that according to Greenspector, it offers as much as 30- to 50-percent performance improvement on battery, bandwidth, and CPU compared to both Vivaldi and Firefox Preview.
DuckDuckGo comes much closer to Brave, the company says. But Brave does still manage to reduce CPU consumption over its competitor, it claims.
What else is changing for Brave users?
Now, data, battery, and CPU savings are great but Brave already offered users a good experience and the company isn’t looking to rock the boat. Instead, it says that all of the features, UI layout, and other interactive elements are already enjoyed by end-users. Most of the demand, conversely, has been for better performance.
To that end, Brave isn’t actually stacking in any new features with this changeover — breaking with the usual approach taken with these types of apps. It also isn’t rearranging the UI or making any other similar changes. The company says it wants users who are already using Brave to still have the familiarity of the previous iterations.