The right plot above shows the CPU utilization reported by battery-historian as user-time and system-time. This is thanks to a more stable browsing experience, e.g., no unpredictable pop-ups (as observed in Firefox and Edge), and lack of dynamic advertisement that can change in between runs. Further, Brave’s bandwidth consumption is very stable across experiments, i.e., significantly lower standard deviation of few MBytes versus tens of MBytes. Less traffic implies less wifi usage, less CPU work, etc. These traffic savings derive from Brave’s policy of blocking third party tracking and ads. Bandwidth Measurementsīrave consumes, on average, 40% less bandwidth than the other browsers (left plot in the figure below). To understand why, we below report on its resource usage, specifically bandwidth and CPU. The previous results suggest that Brave, on Android, is more energy efficient than its competitors. However, both tools report the same trend and the overall results do not change. Battery-historian reports higher battery discharge values than batterystats.“Healthy” refers to a battery with small variability in the discharge rate as the overall battery charge drops. On a healthy 3,000mAh battery, as in our S9, this implies that Brave’s users can enjoy an extra two and half hours of browsing per battery charge, i.e., 6.8 hrs for Brave, 4.4 hrs for Chrome/Edge, and 3.4 hrs for Firefox. Brave consumes 35-39% less battery than Chrome and Edge, respectively.Despite favorable testing conditions, Firefox consumes twice as much battery as Brave (164 vs 80mAh), 30% more than Chrome (124mAh), and 23% more than Edge (132mAh).We compare the battery discharge directly computed from Android’s bugreport (–batterystats) and reported by battery-historian. The plot shows, for each browser, the average battery discharge (mAh) across the 5 test runs, with error-bars reporting the standard deviation. The above figure compares Brave’s battery consumption against three popular Android browsers: Chrome (.96), Firefox (65.0), and Edge (42.). Note that automated page scrolling (via ADB, e.g., adb shell input swipe … ) does not work on Firefox-based browsers, which implies an underestimation of their battery consumption which we quantify below. This workload is executed in ~11 minutes, and repeated 5 times per browser, for a total of about one hour of browsing, per browser. When loading a website, the testing tool waits 5 seconds - which we empirically measured to be enough to load these popular websites on our fast wifi network - followed by scrolling over the page multiple times for ~30 seconds. Each website is loaded in a new tab which is then kept open in the background. For each browser, we measure the battery consumption of sequentially visiting 20 popular websites (news, e-commerce, and tech). The device under test is a Samsung Galaxy S9 (Android 9.0). This process is automated by connecting the phone to a smart power socket which our measurement tool activates as needed. Each browser is tested at the same initial battery level (80%) to eliminate the issue of variable discharging rate as the battery level drops. It follows that the results reported here are obtained while the phone under test was connected to a 5.8Ghz wifi (North American IP) and set in airplane mode. We automate browser testing using the Android Debugging Bridge (ADB) over wifi to eliminate the noise caused by USB charging of the device. 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. 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. We estimate a browser’s energy consumption leveraging recent hardware and software advances in Android. When compared to various ad blocking browsers, Brave still manages to shave an extra 20% of battery savings, derived from the lower CPU consumption. 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. In fact, very little is known of the additional battery cost imposed by the explosion of ads and trackers on the Web. This time we look at a key aspect for mobile users: battery consumption. We are continuing our series of posts evaluating Brave browser’s performance. Matteo Varvello, performance researcher at Brave, and Dr. Brave mobile users can expect up to two and a half extra hours of browsing per battery charge.
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