What just happened? Google Chrome has, quite unsurprisingly, been crowned the world’s fastest browser. The latest version of Google’s software achieved the highest score ever on Speedometer 3.0, an open-source, industry-standard benchmark tool used to measure browser performance.
Speedometer 3.0 basically tests how well web browsers handle modern web apps by simulating real user actions like adding to-do items and editing text to see how responsive the browser is. By running these tasks repeatedly at an extremely rapid rate, the benchmark measures performance and gives a clear picture of each browser’s capabilities. It’s a collaborative effort by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla – all the major players in the browser market, so it’s as fair as it can get.
To nail these tests, Google focused on a few smart optimizations. “By looking at the workloads in Speedometer and in which functions Chrome was spending the most time, we were able to make targeted optimizations to those functions that each drove an increase in Chrome’s score,” notes the company.
Engineers dug into functions like ‘SpaceSplitString’ that were hogging resources and streamlined operations like string processing and stylesheet deduplication. They also fine-tuned rendering to curb excess memory usage when drawing things like form elements. Google also partnered with the maintainer of the HarfBuzz text shaping engine to improve how Chrome renders Apple’s AAT font formats.
Google says it also focused on “tiering up code,” a process where the right code is picked to further optimize the engine. At the same time, garbage collection improvements boosted Speedometer scores by around 3%.
Of course, speed is just one factor in what makes a great browser experience, and raw benchmarks only tell part of the story. With most browsers based on Chromium, their performance differences aren’t as wide as they used to be. But browser makers aren’t resting on their laurels. For instance, Firefox has long been trying to close the gap. Last year, it beat Chrome in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, an old speed test from Apple’s WebKit team.
What actually is wide is the sheer margin Chrome enjoys over the competition. As of May 2024, Google’s browser held a whopping 65.12% of the worldwide browser market, according to StatCounter. At a very distant second place is Apple’s Safari commanding just an 18.17% slice. Coming in third is Edge with a 5.21% share despite being the default option on millions of Windows machines worldwide. The market seems to have stabilized too, with the past five years or so seeing negligible changes in rankings – and appears poised to stay this way.
