What you need to know
- Google Chrome has gained a major speed increase on macOS.
- The web browser is now 20% faster on MacBooks based on Apple’s Speedometer.
- Chrome previously outmatched all other browsers on macOS, including Safari.
Google revealed a few months ago that Chrome achieved greater speeds on macOS, beating all other browsers, including Apple’s own Safari. The search giant now says the web browser has gained yet another speed boost on MacBooks.
The company says the latest version of Chrome is now 20% faster on Apple’s best laptops (opens in new tab). It registered a score of 360 based on Apple’s Speedometer, a benchmarking tool for measuring responsiveness.
“Three months ago, we recorded the highest score on Apple’s Speedometer — and now, Chrome is 20% faster on Mac, scoring over 360,” Google said in a tweet (opens in new tab).
Chrome’s new gains mark a significant increase from its previous milestone in March, when it picked up a speed increase of 7% over Safari. In that benchmark test, Apple tested and compared 300 browsers. Chrome topped all other browsers and even outmatched Safari by 15% in terms of graphics performance.
The browser’s improvements are due to a few changes to ThinLTO, a build optimization approach that aligns code base elements critical to improving speed. This is in addition to a number of general JavaScript optimizations introduced by Google last year (opens in new tab).
As a result, Chrome is now 43 percent faster on M1-based Macs than it was when it was first released on these machines in late 2020.
Google didn’t leave Android users out in the cold. Chrome is also up to 15% faster thanks to improved navigation technology within the browser user interface thread.
MacBook Air with M1
By foregoing Intel in favor of a proprietary SoC that integrates the CPU, graphics, and memory into a single chip, Apple significantly improved the Air’s performance over previous models while also improving battery life. This MacBook feels new because it is light and lacks a fan.
