- Google has made a number of fine tuning under the hood for Chrome
- It claims that the browser is now 10% faster than it was a year ago
- It’s based on benchmarking with speedometer 3.0, but we haven’t shown comparative results with other popular web browsers
Google has boasted that Chrome is now faster than ever and outlines the improvements it has made to its popular web browser to achieve this speed increase.
Neown marked the latest blog post from Google in a series entitled ‘Fast and the Curious’ for those fascinated by seeing what tinkering Google has done.
We are told that Chrome has registered its highest score ever on Speedometer 3.0, a browser -barking tool, and that it is now 10% faster than in August 2024 with the release of the latest version 139 (still in testing, in the DEV channel).
Google says these improvements have been possible because of the Chrome team that works across all the most important ‘rendering paths’ in the browser, referring to the basic mechanisms that convert the nut-and-bolts into code to a site for a visible web page in Chrome.
With the work that happens faster across multiple fronts, you see web pages reproduced in the browser a little faster and it should act more responsive in general.
However, performance mileage depends not only on the browser, but of many factors (including a given site itself and how it is implemented, along with the PC’s spec and its current total workload).
Analysis: faster than ever – but there are still some RAM -AS
There is a good bit of Techie detail delivered in terms of the exact adjustments that Google has used here, but to summarize includes the memory-related optimizations, better use of caches and work on refining data structures.
Fortunately, we just need to not need to know mortals not to know these ins and outs. The simple takeaway is that, as mentioned, Chrome is now 10% faster – at least based on this benchmarking.
This is the latest in a series of boosts for Chrome when Google showed us how much faster its browser was at the same time last year that Neowin pointed out.
The benchmarking tool used, Speedometer, is a respected package of web browsers tests that are generally recognized to reflect a real browsing experience with a commendable degree of accuracy. What we do not see here, however, are some comparative results showing how fast edge or Firefox, or some of the other best web browsers are compared to Chrome.
That said, a quick scan of recently independent tests with speedometer suggests that Chrome is no slouch and it seems that it currently has the edge (no word games calculated) over other browsers.
Google seems to do good work on the performance front, despite Chrome’s reputation as a Ram Hog, a question it has tried to address. However, there have been improvements in the streamlining of memory consumption with Chrome in the newer past – and generally Google’s browser nipy seems enough these days.
That said, concerns remain about ram-related performance slim. How much of this is down to tainted perceptions is debatable, but complaints persist determined on various online forums that Chrome is not doing so well here and overreacting with its demands on the system, especially with lower PCs that are not well-equipped in the RAM department.
There is more to web browsers than also speed, and one of the remaining remaining problems for Chrome is one of the trust – or rather a lack of it, in terms of Google ‘espionage’ on its users, which is a common theme in terms of accusations that are leveled online. Not that Google is alone in terms of tech giants in this regard – far from it.
