Google Boosts Chrome Speed On Mac And Android: New Performance Milestone Achieved

Google has announced significant under-the-hood performance improvements to its popular Chrome web browser on both Mac and Android, leading to a new performance milestone. The company claims that a series of adjustments gave Chrome a 10% increase on Apple’s Speedometer 2.1 browser benchmark over three months. These changes include improved caching and better memory management, resulting in faster page load times and smoother browsing experiences for users.

Despite complaints from users over the years about Chrome's sluggishness, it still holds a large majority of the web browser market share. According to Statcounter’s March 2023 statistics, Chrome's global market share is 64.8%, while Safari, its closest rival, has just 19.5% across all platforms. On desktops alone, Chrome's market share is 65.8%, trailed by 11.12% for Edge and 10.91% for Safari.

Google explained the technical details of its tweaks in a blog post. It found targeted optimizations for the highly-used JS "Object.prototype.toString" and "Array.prototype.join" functions and implemented targeted improvements in CSS's InterpolableColor. Additionally, the company noted that "innerHTML" is a common way of updating the DOM via JavaScript, so it introduced specialized fast paths for parsing.

Furthermore, Google introduced more efficient pointer compression and better memory management techniques, leading to a more widespread performance boost. The company relocated frequently accessed objects, such as JavaScript's "undefined," to the beginning of the memory bases, where they can be accessed with faster machine code.

One of the improvements Google made will also benefit WebKit, the browser engine developed by Apple and used in Safari, meaning even more web browser users may see improvements, not just Chrome users. This news comes as a relief for many Chrome users who have experienced sluggishness in the browser's performance, with Google's latest tweaks promising faster browsing experiences across both Mac and Android devices.

In conclusion, Google has made significant under-the-hood performance improvements to its Chrome web browser, resulting in a new performance milestone on both Mac and Android devices. The changes include better memory management, improved caching, and more efficient pointer compression, resulting in faster page load times and smoother browsing experiences for users. These improvements may also benefit WebKit, the browser engine developed by Apple and used in Safari.