Brave appears to have used a 7 month old Firefox build in a recent benchmark — is it misleading?

Brave recently conducted a benchmark test, comparing itself to Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. For speed, RAM, and battery benchmarks, Brave absolutely crushed the others, coming out on top. However, taking these first-party benchmarks at face value is not a good idea, because people have started noticing more details hidden behind the flowery headlines and social media posts.

A post on r/firefox pointed out that Brave had used a substantially outdated version of Firefox. In the blog post that the company published, the version of Firefox was listed as v146.0.1. That’s a version from… December 2025. However, they used v1.92.139 for Brave, which was released in July 2026.

The official blog post clearly discloses all of the browser versions that things were tested on, and you can view the screenshot below.

You’ll also notice that Brave mentions “latest available at the time of testing.” This doesn’t make sense, since Firefox v153.0, which packed various features and efficiency improvements, also came out in July. Assuming they did the test in early July, it should be Firefox v152 at a bare minimum, and not 146, which is clearly outdated.

Brave didn’t completely obscure the fact that the “benchmark” was performed on an outdated version of Firefox, since it’s clearly stated in the blog. However, claiming that all browsers were on the latest version at the time of testing — that claim is misleading. If people don’t read the exact version numbers from the table and verify the individual values from that table, they could be misled into taking the test at face value.

Furthermore, Brave has an ad-blocker enabled by default, which Firefox doesn’t. This could explain some of the benchmark numbers being high. I don’t personally consider this a problem, because having that enabled by default (and a good-quality one at that) is a genuine selling point.

An argument can be made about Brave’s Chromium version being older, but that doesn’t change the fact that v146 wasn’t the latest version of Firefox at the time. Chromium-based Brave might indeed perform better than Gecko, but this whole thing could’ve been represented better. What the company has chosen to do can easily be called cherry picking/misleading statistics, even if the error was genuine.

In more positive Brave news, the browser might soon get a fully-fledged frameless browsing experience. More on that here.

Additionally, we covered the benchmark that Brave has done in more detail here.

Disclaimer: The Featured image was generated with AI.

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