Browser-laptop: How does Brave browser optimize webview loading and rendering?

[steverandy]

I notice Brave loads webpage more quickly and with less content flashes in comparison to standard electron webview.

I created 2 clips below to see the difference.

Brave: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2271268/brave.mp4
Electron webview: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2271268/electron.mp4

What are the optimizations have been done by the Brave team?

[bbondy]

This is pretty broad but we're fully open source so just take a look.
Mainly the difference is probably by not rendering ads and tracking elements.

[steverandy]

I actually disabled the adblocker for the testing.

I had explored the code some, but did not find anything specific.
If anyone has any pointers, please do share. Thanks.

[bbondy]

maybe it's faster by us doing less? Not sure. We aren't full chromium we just use libchromiumcontent via electron.

[quanglam2807]

@bbondy I have the same question. For example, https://google.com loads smoothly with Brave but not in other electron apps.

You can try this sample: https://github.com/hokein/electron-sample-apps/tree/master/webview/browser and compare to Brave. I can't find anything specific in the Brave's source code. It seems like it's because the webview blocks the rendering process but Brave avoids this situation somehow.

[quanglam2807]

@bbondy @steverandy Got it! I use https://github.com/brave/muon and recognize huge performance boost!

[bsclifton]

@quanglam2807 nice! Let us know in the Muon project if you encounter any issues or have any questions 😄

[bbondy]

At this point we're significantly diverged from electron and also we remove some APIs that cause performance trouble like sync IPC calls. This trend will continue as we use more built-in chromium things and adjust things that profiling finds are bottlenecks.

[quanglam2807]

@bbondy @bsclifton Thank you, guys! At the moment, I still need to keep using electron instead of muon because my app relies on electron-packager and it doesn't work well with muon.