The web has matured and has grown larger and larger. Despite network and connectivity have improved vastly, web browsers are still at war in terms of speed.
This is because in the fast-paced world where information is abundance, users want what they want fast. A slight delay will make them bounce elsewhere, ruining experience and engagement.
Google knows this too well. And because of that it is continuously improving its Chrome web browser in terms of performance.
And this time, the company said that Chrome version M99 managed to surpass Apple's Safari in terms of performance.
Google also claimed that the Chrome version is more responsive Safari, even on Mac computers.
This achievement is reached following the improvements Google made to Chrome over the years.
In a blog post detailing the process, Google said that:
"In our first The Fast and the Curious post of 2022, we are thrilled to celebrate how in the M99 release of Chrome we were able to substantially increase the speed of Chrome across all major platforms."
The company continued by explaining how Chrome managed to surpass Safari in terms of speed, and set a speed record with a score of 300 on a benchmark created by Apple’s WebKit team.
The Speedometer benchmark is meant to simulate what it’s like to use a web app running using various technologies to see how responsive the experience is.
"Building on many performance changes over the last year, we enabled ThinLTO in M99, a build optimization technique that inlines speed-critical parts of the code base, even when they span multiple files or libraries," Google explained.
The result of this, is an additional speed increase that makes "Chrome 7% faster than current builds of Safari."
Further improvements are also achieved by combining it with Chrome's existing graphics optimizations (namely, the pass-through decoder and out-of-process rasterization).
"Our tests have also shown Chrome’s graphics performance to be 15% faster than Safari. Overall, since launching Chrome on M1-based Macs in late 2020, Chrome is now 43% faster than it was just 17 months ago!"
Google also managed to improve Chrome's performance using the V8 Sparkplug compiler and short builtin calls.
According to Google, Sparkplug is a mid-tier JavaScript compiler for V8 that generates efficient code with low compilation overhead. Short builtin calls on the other hand, are used by the V8 JavaScript engine to optimize the placement of generated code inside the device’s memory.
Together, the technique managed to boost Chrome's performance by avoiding indirect jumps when calling functions and makes a substantial difference on Apple M1-based Macs.
Google also said that Chrome also becomes faster on Android as well.
The company said that page loads should take 15% less time, "thanks to prioritizing critical navigation moments on the browser user interface thread."
And lastly, Google said that Chrome's improvement in speed is also helped with improved speed and memory usage using Isolated Splits, which improved startup time by preloading the majority of the browser process code on a background thread.
Google noted that it ran the tests on a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 10-core M1 Max chip and 64 GB of RAM.
When it comes to performance, people on the web tend to be in hurry.
Users may open the first few tabs of their browsers to search for something on Google, and have the next tabs opening their social media accounts and email. They can have even more tabs open the longer they browse the web.
Chrome is the most popular web browsers in terms of number of users, and for more than years, people consider Chrome a resource hog.
Chrome isn't slow, but it just consumes too much of a computer's available resources that sometimes, the browser alone can make other apps to crash.
While Chrome isn’t entirely to blame for heavy RAM usage, it does have a reputation for being taking up lots of space in memory.
And lastly, benchmarking tools aren't created equal.
Benchmarks are just one of many ways of measuring the speed of a browser. At the end of the day, what matters most is that Chrome is actually faster and more efficient in everyday usage
Further reading: Using 'Native Window Occlusion', Google Chrome Eats Less Resources When It's Idle