Google’s new Chrome 99, has taken on Apple’s Safari in its own backyard and left it in the dust according to latest reports.
In a recent test of responsiveness, Chrome 99 achieved the highest score ever achieved on Apple’s own WebKit Speedometer.
In a post on their Chromium blog, Google announced that Chrome 99 had “achieved the highest score to date of any browser – 300 – in Apple’s Speedometer.” What makes this most impressive is that Safari, Apple’s very own browser, achieved a score of 277.
The massive increase in speed comes courtesy of Google’s adoption of a build optimisation technique called ThinLTO (Thin Link Time Optimization), which they say “inlines speed-critical parts of the code base, even when they open multiple files or library.”
As a result of their efforts, Google say that this means that Chrome 99 is 7 per cent faster than Safari overall, and 15 per cent faster regarding graphics performance.
“We know that benchmarks are just one of many ways of measuring the speed of a browser,” says Google. “We want to ensure that you feel that Chrome is getting faster and more reliable in the real world, so we’ll continue to invest in innovative features that push the performance of Chrome.”
Google seem to be sticking to their word on this, and proudly point out that “since launching Chrome on M1-based Macs in late 2020, Chrome is now 43 per cent faster than it was just 17 months ago!”
However, as impressive as this may be, the main factor determining load times on your browser is the quality of your internet connection. With most any browser, if you have a stable and fast internet connection, a page is likely to load in around a second or two. A 7 per cent increase therefore may not be hugely noticeable to the everyday consumer.
Nevertheless, Google are proud to share their achievements and seemingly wish to continue their optimisation journey.
