If you’ve thought Chrome has been running a bit faster on your Mac recently, you’re not imagining things. On its Chromium Blog Thursday, Google highlighted a series of backend improvements it has made to its Chrome browser to make it faster on the Mac. The improvements go back about three months and have resulted in a 10 percent boost in the Speedometer browser benchmark, according to Google.
The blog post highlights the following optimizations:
- Improved HTML Parsing & optimizing specific features: Google “targeted” JavaScript
'Object.prototype.toString'and'Array.prototype.join'functions and made improvements in CSS’s InterpolableColor. - HTML modifications: Google added specialized fast paths for parsing
'innerHTM'to update the Document Object Model via JavaScript. - More efficient pointer compression: Pointer compression is done frequently, so Google made optimizations to this function, which resulted in better performance.
Of note, Google reports the new fast path for innerHTML parser will also be used by Apple’s WebKit engine to “create a better web experience for all web users.”
The optimizations were made over a period of time, and Google does not state a version number for Chrome as to when the optimizations started to be implemented. The current version of Chrome for Mac is 112.0.5615.49.
In our own testing with Speedometer 2.1, the latest version of Chrome posted a score of 405, which is 5.5 percent faster than the latest version of Safari (16.5), which posted a score of 384. Speedometer 2.1 is a benchmark that gauges a browser’s responsiveness with timed simulated user interactions. It is freely available for anyone to use at https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/. Google Chrome is available on the Chrome website.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor
Roman has covered technology since the early 1990s. His career started at MacUser, and he's worked for MacAddict, Mac|Life, and TechTV.