Brave Origin | Brave
Get the Web your way: Best-in-class privacy, with just the features you want.
Brave browser, without the 'bloat'. Just a modern Blink-based renderer and minimal UI, with built-in 'Brave Shields' (fast, native Rust-written ad blocking and anti-fingerprinting) — and nothing else. No VPN, no wallet, no news, no AI, no bull. The only 'extra' it does have is optional sync. All the cruft is genuinely gone. Not just 'disabled in the settings', but literally absent — not compiled in at build time. The result is a modern, very ight and lean browser.
My only gripe with 'regular' Brave, the same as any mainstream browser these days, was the 'bloat'. Modern browsers are basically a self-contained OS-as-a-browser, with large binaries and creaking memory usage. That's before we even consider all the AI, search, shopping 'helpers' (Edge), telemetry/spyware and other crap that gets bundled in alongside. I just want to browse the Web quickly, damnit!
So Origin sounds ideal, right? I mean, there are other options like Helium or Ungoogled Chromium; but none of the smaller independent browsers/forks implement Widevine for DRM (so no Netflix etc). Brave Origin is both stripped-down and has the option for sync and Widevine playback and casting etc. So, what's the catch? Origin's downside is they are charging for it, on all platforms except Linux. The list price is USD $59.99 for a lifetime cross-platform licence, but the discount code
BRAVE30 gives 30% off (as of the time of my own purchase). So all in, $42 / £31. Not terrible for a lifetime licence on all platforms (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS), imo.Testing on an M3 MacBook Air, the native Safari idles with around 2GB of active memory usage before you even start using it, and causes a lot memory compression trades as well as reads and writes to swap. Firefox is actually quite light in comparison, idling around 900 MB to 1GB on launch, and swelling to about 2x to 2.5x that with YouTube open on a 1440p or 4k video. Firefox does make use of memory compression (correctly), but avoids hitting swap. Full-fat Brave sits a fraction lower than Firefox on launch, but also tends to not 'bloat up' when on heavy sites (again, like YouTube). Of the three, Brave is the best at memory management in my testing.
So, I tested Origin for a week. Its RAM usage is extremely low and efficient. I'm seeing only 600 MB to 700 MB of active memory on launch, and just over 1GB of memory used overall when I'm active on YouTube with a 1440p/4k video. Overall, about half the memory usage of other browsers — including the main Brave release itself! After several days testing, used and compressed memory was far lower than the other browsers, and zero swap activity. It's very snappy, too! The fact you can run it across your desktop, laptop and phone(s) with no device limit and with all synced together is a nice touch.
You definitely shouldn't search Github for the Brave Origin Unlocker to try it before you buy. Their activation is basically a text string in the browser's existing LocalState file, so there's no 'code' needed to run to activate it. They otherwise unfortunately offer no official free trial outside of the Linux version, which sucks. As it is, I'm so impressed by the app itself (and the bloat-free ethos) that I bought a licence. I considered it a 'donation' to fund development work (Brave is FOSS); and tbh I viewed it as a hard cash +1 vote on the 'keep it simple, stupid!' bandwagon, to rail against the modern trend to over-complicate and bloat absolutely every OS and every app for no real reason. Given the browser is FOSS, I had no issue with making a one-off contribution (I bought Opera back in the day too, when it was Scandinavian not Chinese), and I consider it money well spent.
I'd be interested to hear whether anyone else has tried it, on whatever OS, and what you think of the project as a whole. I have avoided the whole rendering engine debate on purpose (and it's a valid discussion!), just to focus on the product at hand. There's also an argument against not paying to support companies who bloat out software and then charge you just to give you a the version they should have released in the first place, but it is what it is.
Edit: Because apparently I write raw Markdown by default now, and the forum doesn't support it.
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