Ad-blocking Brave gets memory advantage over Chrome on news websites

 You might run an ad blocker in your browser to cut website clutter and keep companies from tracking you online. But the ad-blocking Brave browser has another reason to intervene: to free up memory and preserve your battery life.

Detailed tests comparing Brave to Google's dominant Chrome browser, with and without the Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin ad-blocking extensions, show that blocking ads can help reduce browsers' ever-heavier use of precious computer memory on ad-heavy sites. Brave cuts memory use by 33 percent to 66 percent compared with ordinary Chrome, the company said Friday.

Memory is a precious resource on laptops and phones, critical to everything a device does. As browsers have increased in power, becoming full-fledged software foundations instead of just vessels for digital documents, memory usage has soared. But browsers are getting more assertive about displaying websites in ways that are good for those of us looking at them, not necessarily those publishing them.

Reader mode, tracking protection and ad blocking are some examples of browsers taking more control. Ad blocking helps not just with memory use, but also with power consumption, Brave has found.

"The primary savings come from blocking resource-hungry ads and trackers that popular sites are teeming with, especially news ones," Brave Chief Scientist Ben Livshits told CNET in an exclusive interview. "In our research, we show that Brave consumes 40 percent less battery than popular browsers like Chrome, Edge and Firefox thanks to a combination of bandwidth savings and lower CPU pressure."

Brave Software, founded by JavaScript inventor and former Mozilla Chief Executive Brendan Eich, got its start with an ad-blocking browser. But it isn't opposed to ads. In fact, its business strategy relies on showing its own ads with its own technology designed to protect privacy and share some of the ad revenue with anyone using its browser. In its first phase, now in testing on personal computers, ads are shown in notifications that have no tracking scripts, animation, audio or video.