Ghostery Private Browser: Our New Browser is Lightning-Fast

What happens when we put two web browsers in the ring to duke it out?

We put in our new up-and-comer Ghostery Private Browser against a well-known champ, Google Chrome, and we’re proud to say that our brand-new, lightning-fast browser came out on top!

Our priorities when we built Ghostery Private Browser were split evenly among privacy, security, and speed. But we’re not going to lie — speed alone is a pretty big deal and some of the numbers we found are really exciting!

Ghostery Private Browser: A Faster, Safer Web Browser

Let’s check out this chart to understand what makes Ghostery Private Browser faster. In an internal test(1), we found that nearly one-third of the 92 websites we tested loaded at least 2x times faster on Ghostery Private Browser than on Chrome.

Here’s a better breakdown of our analysis:

• 33% of websites tested ran 2x faster on Ghostery Private Browser
• 17% of websites tested ran 3x faster on Ghostery Private Browser
• 10% of websites tested ran 4x faster on Ghostery Private Browser

And here are the results broken down by category:

• In the News Category, Ghostery Private Browser is 2.13x faster
• In the Entertainment category, Ghostery Private Browser is 2.63x faster
• In the Sports category, Ghostery Private Browser is 1.94x faster
• In the E-Commerce category, Ghostery Private Browser is 1.54x faster

Ghostery Private Browser saves you days each year

Since Ghostery Private Browser loads web pages up to 3x faster than Chrome, we wanted to see what would happen when we ran several speed test comparisons on average Chrome page load times.

The good news? Using Ghostery Private Browser may save you a few days’ worth of time per year! Here’s how we ran speed test comparisons on average Chrome page load times:

First, we determined the average page load speed for a web page on desktop is 10.3 seconds based on the 2019 data from Backlinko, which analyzed the speed of 5.2 million web pages.

Next, considering browser market share(2) and how many times faster each browser is than Chrome(3), we determined that Chrome has an average page load speed of 11.20 seconds.

Since Ghostery Private Browser is 2.08x faster than Chrome, the average page load speed in our browser is 5.4 seconds. This is a savings of 5.8 seconds per page load. 5.8 seconds x 140 sites per day(4) x 365 days balances out to be 3.44 days per year that Ghostery Private Browser saves you relative to Chrome.

That’s 3.44 days per year that companies are not making money from using your data!

How is Ghostery Private Browser so much faster?

For one, we built on the open source Firefox browser which itself is 1.78x faster than Chrome. We took this template and rebuilt it for the Ghostery Private Browser experience. Our test results show that Ghostery Private Browser is 1.34x faster than Firefox! Click here to take a look under the hood. Additionally, by blocking ads and trackers, we’ve minimized the amount of clutter that typically loads with a web page.

Page Loads: The Worst Offenders

We also wanted to take down the worst offenders. You know, those routinely “bad” sites with tons of tracking scripts causing the pages to load slowly, not to mention the tons of data they are collecting.

Yep, we’re looking at you TMZ. They not only come in first as the most bloated but they also are the slowest in our comparison.

‍In this chart, we’re comparing page load speeds by seconds. The comparison is how much faster Ghostery Private Browser is against Google Chrome. Keep in mind that by blocking ads and trackers, we’ve minimized the amount of clutter that typically loads with a web page. Let’s say you want to log onto Variety.com. Ghostery Private Browser loaded the page in 1.08 seconds and Google Chrome loaded the same page in 4.40 seconds. So, in that comparison, Ghostery Private Browser is 4.07 times faster than Google Chrome!

Before it felt like, as consumers, we were backed into the corner and on the ropes. By using Ghostery Private Browser, we’re able to bob and weave our way out and wind up for the knockout. Here’s a link to our FAQs page if you have any questions about the new kid on the block.‍‍

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1. Testing conducted by Ghostery in January 2021 using Selenium Webdriver to extract page load times using Navigation Timing. Tested with Ghostery Private Browser Beta and Chrome Version 88.0.4324.150 (Official Build) (x86_64), on Intel Core i5-based 13-inch MacBook Pro system with macOS Big Sur. Device tested with a WPA2 Wi-Fi network connection with download speeds of 306 Mbps, upload speeds of 341 Mbps, and 6 Ping (in ms). Performance will vary based on usage, system configuration, network connection, and other factors. Websites load three to four times faster in Ghostery Private Browser than in Google Chrome for almost a third of the tested sites using each browsers’ default settings.

2. 67% of people use Chrome, 10% use Safari, 8% use Firefox, and 15% other, as reported by the January 2020-2021 Desktop Browser Market Share data from StatCounter.

3. Compared to Chrome – Firefox is 1.78x faster, Safari is 1.28x faster, and other browsers are presumably 1.20x faster based on our speed tests.

4. We derived that an average user visits 140 sites per day based on our Whotracks.me data where we estimated about ~28 page loads per user per day. Heuristics filter out the bulk of the pages (around 80%). Some things to note:

5. Not all pages that you visit will lead to a “page” message

6. Pages that you visit multiple times a day will only result in one message (client side deduplication)

7. If we assume 80% are filtered out (rough estimate, since we can’t know the real number). 28/20% = 140 page loads per user per day.