Google says it just made Chrome much faster on Mac and Android
Google’s Chrome web browser is gaining speed. According to a news announcement Today, Google made several under-the-hood performance improvements to its popular browser, leading to another major performance milestone on Mac and Android. Collectively, a series of tweaks helped Chrome boost Apple’s Speedometer 2.1 browser benchmark by 10% over a three-month period, according to Google.
The changes involve a series of tweaks ranging from improved caching to better memory management, the company notes. This includes things like improved caching and better memory management. While not everyone cares about the technical details of how the speed improvements were accomplished, many will want to see their browser become faster.
Despite user complaints over the years about Chrome’s growing sluggishness, Google’s browser still trails with a vast majority of web browser market share. According to March 2023 statistics from Statcounter, for example, Chrome has 64.8% of the global market share, while its closest rival, Safari, has only 19.5% across all platforms. On desktop alone, Chrome’s share is even higher – 65.8%, followed by 11.12% for Edge and then 10.91% for Safari.
Picture credits: Google
In a blog jobGoogle explained exactly what kind of changes it made to achieve the new milestone.
He said he found targeted optimizations for the widely used `Object.prototype.toString` and `Array.prototype.join` JS functions, in particular. He also implemented targeted improvements in CSS’s InterpolableColor. Additionally, the company noted that `innerHTML` is a common way to update the DOM through JavaScript, so it introduced specialized fast paths for parsing.
Another improvement involves more efficient compression of pointers and involves better memory management techniques. This impacts operations that occur frequently, resulting in a more generalized performance improvement. The post also talks about relocating frequently accessed objects – like JavaScript’s “undefined” – to the beginning of memory bases, where they can be accessed with faster machine code.
If none of these details matter to you, it could: At least one of Google’s improvements will also benefit WebKit, the Apple-developed browser engine used in Safari and will be included in this engine, Also. This means that even more web browser users may see improvements, not just Chrome users.
