Kitesurf isn't Chromium. It's built from open parts of Firefox and Servo, and runs straight on the workers of Cloudflare. By their measurements it eats up to seven times less memory - the price is a response about twice as slow.
- By Cloudflare's measurements across 14 addresses: about 4 times less CPU time and up to 7 times less memory than Chromium, but about 1.7 times slower response time.
- It works with existing browser-automation tools, so trying it is a one-parameter swap.
- It can't do video, can't do 3D graphics and can't hold a long logged-in session. For those cases, Chromium stays.
By Cloudflare's own measurements Kitesurf eats up to seven times less memory than Chromium - and is slower. It's a browser not made for human eyes. There's no one to watch the screen - on the other end sits an agent that wants the page's text or one screenshot of it. Once no one's watching, half of a real browser's work is unnecessary.
Two different things are being traded, and that needs saying plainly - vendor posts like to blur it. The gain is in the bill: less CPU and memory means more concurrent work on the same machine. The loss is in the wait. If an agent is crawling a thousand pages in the background, the trade is great. If you're waiting on the screen for an answer, it's bad.
The gaps sit exactly where our real work lives. Logging into a site with a password, bot protection, anything with heavy graphics - Kitesurf doesn't do that job today. For the boring work of pulling text off public pages, though, the swap is one parameter, and it's worth measuring. And one more thing that mildly bugs me: the numbers are theirs, over their own set of 14 addresses. No outsider has checked them.