The best browser 2021

By Carrie Marshall 06 April 2021

The best browsers for speed, privacy and customization

Speed and privacy are two of the biggest considerations when you’re looking for the best web browser. Some demand more of your system resources, while others are relatively lightweight. Some anonymous browsers offer full suites of security tools to protect your online identity and shield against malware, while others allow cookies and ads to run unhindered.

It’s a very close-run competition, but we believe that Firefox is the best browser you can download today. It’s not without its flaws, but developer Mozilla has committed to supporting its users’ privacy and developing tools to stop third parties from tracking you around the web.

Microsoft Edge comes a close second. It supports all the same browser extensions as Google Chrome (no surprise since it’s based on the same Chromium engine) but is noticeably less RAM-hungry, allowing for faster performance — plus it now comes with an in-built password manager.

These are far from the only options though, and there are lots of reasons to look beyond the biggest names to more niche browsers. Read on for our complete guide, and discover the best one for you.

1. ExpressVPN — The best VPN service for your browser
We have reviewed more than one hundred VPN providers, both free and paid, and our top recommendation right now is ExpressVPN. Given the risks of using free VPNs, we think the price of $6.67 per month is absolutely worth paying — it comes with a no-questions-asked 30 day money back guarantee too.
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2. Surfshark VPN — by far the best cheap VPN option
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3. NordVPN — the biggest name in VPN
Chances are, even if you don’t know a lot about VPNs you may have heard of NordVPN. They advertise on TV, they sponsor sports teams and they’ve been a leader in the VPN market for over 7 years. Nord doesn’t quite lead the way like it once did but it’s still a fantastic service from $3.49 per month.
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• As a final line of defence, take a look at the best firewalls right now

1. Mozilla Firefox

The best browser for power users and privacy protection

Specifications

Reasons to buy

Reasons to avoid

Firefox has long been the Swiss Army Knife of the internet and our favourite browser. Version 72 is particularly good: it can alert you if your email address is included in a known data breach, it blocks those annoying allow-notifications popups, it blocks “fingerprinting” browser tracking and it brings its picture in picture video mode to the Mac version. As before it’s endlessly customisable both in terms of its appearance and in the range of extensions and plugins you can use. Last year’s overhaul dramatically improved its performance, which was starting to lag behind the likes of Chrome, and it’s smooth and solid even on fairly modest hardware.

As much as we love Firefox – right now it’s still our favourite browser – we’re worried about its future. 2019 wasn’t a great year for Mozilla, with a major add-on crisis in May that Peter Saint-Andre and Matthew Miller claimed “was the result of having an interlocking set of complex systems that were not well understood across the relevant teams”. The lack of in-house quality assurance teams was also highlighted – much of Mozilla’s QA is outsourced – and in early 2020 the QA leads were reportedly let go in a round of layoffs. Mozilla’s struggling for income, so if you value Firefox you might want to visit donate.mozilla.org to help secure its future.

2. Microsoft Edge

A genuinely great browser from the former browser bad guys

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Older readers will remember Microsoft as the villains of the Browser Wars that ultimately led to the rise of Firefox and Chrome. But Microsoft is on the side of the angels now and its Edge browser has been rebuilt with Chromium at its heart. It’s Windows’ default browser and there are also versions for iOS, Android and Mac.

The new Chromium-powered version is considerably faster than its predecessor and includes some useful features including Read Aloud, the ability to cast media such as inline videos to Chromecast devices, an Opera-style start page and a good selection of add-ons such as password managers, ad-blockers and so on. You can also download web pages as apps which then run as stand-alone applications without having to launch the whole browser. That’s useful for the likes of Google Docs or Twitter.

There are lots of customisation options and we particularly liked the Privacy and Services page, which makes potentially confusing settings crystal clear, and the Site Permissions page. That gives you fine-grained control over what specific sites can do, including everything from pop-ups and ad blocking to MIDI device access and media autoplay.

Edge looks like Chrome and works like Chrome, but we like it more than Chrome: it’s noticeably faster on our Mac and the customization options are superb.

3. Google Chrome

It’s the world’s favourite browser, but it can be a memory-muncher

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If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery then Microsoft’s adoption of the Chromium engine for its own Edge browser must be making Google feel pretty good about itself.

But there are some areas in which Microsoft’s contender actually beats the big G, most noticeably in resource usage: Chrome is infamous for its hefty resource demands and it can fairly chug along on low-powered hardware with limited RAM.

The new Tab Freezing feature is designed to address that by automatically ‘freezing’ background tabs so they’re not using resources unnecessarily, but Chrome remains pretty hardware-hungry.

Chrome 79 is by no means a bad browser. Quite the contrary: it’s a brilliant browser with a superb library of add-ons, cross-platform support and sync, excellent autofill features and some great tools for web developers. It can warn you if your email’s been compromised, it has secure DNS lookup for compatible providers (Google’s own Public DNS is one of them) and it blocks lots of dangerous mixed content such as scripts and images on otherwise secure connections. It also enables the WebXR API for AR and VR. And don’t forget about Chrome dark mode, which makes browsing easier on the eyes at night.

These are all good, but we think Firefox beats it on privacy protection, Edge is nicer to spend time in and other, niche browsers don’t come with the lingering fear that Google’s just a little bit too involved in all of our lives.

4. Opera

A classy browser that’s particularly good for collecting content

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Opera sets out its stall the moment you first run it: its splash screen enables you to turn on its built-in ad blocker, use its built-in VPN, turn on its Crypto Wallet for cryptocurrency, enable in-browser messaging from the sidebar and move between light or dark modes.

It’s a great introduction to a really good browser, although if you’re a gamer you should check out Opera GX instead: that’s designed specifically for gamers and features Twitch integration and Razer Chroma support.

Opera is yet another Chromium-based browser, so performance is speedy and you can use add-ons from the Chrome library. It also has some interesting ideas of its own such as Flow, which is designed for people who often spot things they want to come back to later: if you’re constantly emailing or messaging interesting links to yourself, Flow enables you to do that more elegantly by making it easy to share content from Opera on your phone to Opera on your computer.

There’s also Personal News, which is reminiscent of the Feedly RSS reader, Apple News or the Flipboard tablet app: it enables you to add your preferred news sources to create a personalised online newspapers.

Opera is packed with useful features, but one of our favourite ones is no longer in the desktop browser: Opera Turbo, which compresses internet data such as images so things load faster on crap connections, is now only available for mobile browsers. You do get a handy battery saving mode, however, so when your downloads are slow at least you don’t need to worry about your laptop battery dying.

What is the Fastest Web Browser?

Last updated Jul 31, 2020

While Chrome and Firefox may still feel new, each browser made its debut more than a decade ago. In the meantime, a new generation of browsers has emerged. Are Chrome and Firefox outdated? What do new entrants like Brave offer that the old ones don’t? Which one is the fastest web browser?

We’ll look at the fastest web browser in this article, and we’ll also discuss some of the factors that affect browser speed.

What makes a web browser fast?

No one likes to click on a web page and wait. We want our browsers to load pages quickly, download, and stream videos instantaneously. Actually, we don’t really want to even have to think about a slow or fast browser.

If you DO think about what makes a web browser fast, you have to start with the external factors. Obviously Internet bandwidth, computer processing speed, and the platform itself can make a material difference between a fast browsing experience and a slow one. But when most people talk about a fast web browser, they’re assuming that those things are roughly equal.

So what factors, within the browser itself, affect speed? There are any number of them, but at least two big ones that are worth looking at.

Layout or browser engine

Every browser uses a different engine. Now, like a car company, some browsers might share an engine: Chromium-based browsers like Brave all share the Blink browser engine. Mozilla uses Gecko, all iOS browsers use Webkit. These engines drive the browser through the web page — they determine how and in what order the different elements of the page are processed.

How does that affect speed? Well, different engines will have a different loading order, so you’ll notice particular elements of the page loading at different speeds and times on different browsers. If you dive a bit deeper into the technical details, you will notice that some browsers handle particular elements better than others. Combine those two, and you’ve got significant differences between how browsers load a web page.

Javascript engine

Javascript determines a user’s interactions with the web page. Fill in a form or click a button, and Javascript jumps into action. Every browser uses a Javascript engine to handle these actions. Of course, not every browser was founded by the same person who created Javascript, Brendan Eich; Brave was.

Brave, and the other Chromium browsers, use the V8 Javascript engine.

Popular contenders

Most of the popular browsers share their underlying code. Google Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, and Opera are all based on the open-source Chromium language. Given that shared source code, you can expect broad similarities in performance. However, it’s the details of each browser that make the difference.

Test results

When it comes to fast browsing speeds, Brave more than holds its own. Advertising, trackers, and other material take time and data to download and even more time to run. When Brave Shields blocks those processes, Brave actually executes less code on a given website. As a result, sites load more quickly. The increased speed is even more noticeable for slower connections, where every bit counts, or on older systems with fewer resources to go around.

Reviews bear this out, giving Brave an edge over Google Chrome even though both browsers are based on the Chromium code. Brave Shields does its job by protecting users and speeding things up: the seconds not spent loading ads and trackers are seconds saved.

Brave — Estimated Time Saved

One of Brave’s unique features is the Estimated Time Saved tracker. Every time you open a new tab, you’ll be able to see an ongoing analysis of browsing time you’ve saved by using Brave. It’s a quick and easy way to see how fast the Brave browser is.

Brave’s browser speed derives from its radically different approach to Internet privacy. Because Brave blocks 3rd-party ads and trackers, it streamlines the website loading process. There are two major benefits here that result in a faster user experience.

Reduced bandwidth use Brave cuts out 3rd-party ads and trackers, so it doesn’t need to load those elements. Fewer elements to load mean reduced bandwidth required. And reduced bandwidth means that the overall experience feels quicker.

Reduced Javascript CPU use

Javascript runs automatically while you view a web page. Brave doesn’t cut those processes out, but it executes less of them thanks to Shields.

Together, these two factors determine how Brave calculates its Estimated Time Saved.

Fastest web browser for Windows 7 (and later)

Given their shared Chromium code, it’s no surprise that Chrome and Edge, two of the most popular browsers for Windows, score roughly similar marks. This isn’t to say that there’s no difference between them, only that the differences are slight.

How do you choose the fastest web browser for Windows, given that there’s no clear winner? It can be helpful to use the following tips:

• Use a next-generation browser.

This means the newest builds of Edge or Mozilla, or better yet a browser like Brave that shields you from unwanted ads — the latest and most advanced Internet browsers.

• Balance speed and privacy.

Speed isn’t the only important factor in the browser world. Security and privacy issues are becoming increasingly important, so be sure to examine both when choosing a new browser. Brave compares well to other browsers in speed, but with increased security measures and a privacy-first approach.

• Choose features that fit you.

Different browsers have different personalities, little things that each one does better. Brave offers a radically different approach to the Internet economy and gives users a chance to opt-in to ads to earn Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). Google Chrome provides the smoothest integration with Google Drive and Docs. Each browser does its own thing, and the newest versions do them well. Choose what suits you best — and if you like earning rewards while also being in control of your own data, choose Brave!

Fastest web browser for Mac and iOS

Safari is the default option for all Apple products. But Brave, Chrome, Edge, and Opera all work on Mac and iOS, and with Apple’s recent announcement that iPhone and iPad users will soon be able to change the default browser, it’s worth considering a better alternative to Safari.

Brave offers advanced security features that Safari lacks. If you want something that prioritizes your privacy and provides an extra jolt of surfing speed, consider adding the Brave browser to your Mac — the powerful, secure, and speedy alternative to Safari.

How to improve browser speeds

Is there any way to improve browsing speed within your browser itself? You probably notice an improvement if you upgrade your Internet bandwidth and invest in a new computer, but how can you improve your speeds solely through your browser?

1. Clean up your browser

Some online housekeeping can go a long way in making your browser faster. Reduce the number of tabs open on your browser to reduce the load, especially resource-heavy tabs like streaming sites or YouTube.

2. Remove extensions

Extensions are immensely popular, useful software add-ons for your Internet browser. Brave is compatible with most extensions for Google Chrome, and you can find extensions on the Chrome web store.

Used correctly, extensions are immensely helpful: they can store passwords, automate tasks, and improve your browsing experience. However, it’s worth remembering that every extension you add is an extra bit of work your browser needs to do. Add too many extensions, and you’ll start to notice a significant decrease in your browser speed.

If you want the fastest browsing experience possible, remove any old extensions and be careful which ones you add. You can read here to find out more info.

3. Install a next-generation browser

It’s no surprise that, in general, the fastest browsers are the newest ones; so if you’re looking for the fastest web browser, install a next-generation browser like Brave. Any of the new browsers, like Brave, Chrome, Mozilla, or Edge, will be significantly faster than older browsers like Internet Explorer. If you’ve been using the same browser for years, be sure to update to the latest version.

Certain browsers, like Brave, reduce the need to install extra extensions. With Brave, blocking trackers isn’t an after-market add-on, but is seamlessly integrated into the protection of the Brave Shields feature.

Speed and security — the Brave browser

Brave’s speed comes from the increased privacy and security it offers. On actual websites, Brave Shields makes the web 3x to 6x faster. It’s the combination of faster browsing and increased security that makes Brave such an appealing choice. Shields that block trackers and creepy Internet things, and the ability to earn BAT simply by watching opt-in ads: all of these make Brave one of the safest and fastest Internet browsers available today.

Download Brave and see the benefits for yourself!

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