8 ms·

A new speed milestone for Chrome

184 points by twapi 5y ago

underyx 5y ago
My Speedometer results on an M1 Mac are: - Chrome v99: 204 - Safari: 266 How come I fall so far short of the post's advertised fastest-of-any-browser 300? Edit: Running in incognito got me a 251, so some of the slowdown must be from extensions. Edit 2: Seems like 1password and uBlock Origin decrease the score by around 30 each, I got a 276 with both disabled.
- notRobot 5y ago
  Can you maybe also do a test for Firefox on your machine? I'm very interested in seeing how it holds up.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    I get sub-150 on an M1 Pro in Firefox.
    - daemoens 5y ago
      Do you know why you're Mac getting low results? Other users are getting 200+
      - selectodude 5y ago
        I'm sure it has something to do with using ad blockers and other extensions. I don't use Firefox for its cutting edge speed so I didn't really think too much of it.
  - fabrice_d 5y ago
    I get 240 with Firefox nightly (no addons) on a Mac Air M1.
  - minedwiz 5y ago
    207 on my M1 Max, v98.0 stable.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I get ~304 (all extensions disabled) but that's on an M1 Max. Other differences might be the amount of background apps/tasks - I usually keep mine pretty slim.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Saw about the same impact of 1p and uBO in Firefox.
- thatwasunusual 5y ago
  On my i9 2.4GHz 8-core, 64GB RAM, 2019 Mac, and with no extensions: - Chrome v99: 168 - Firefox v97: 132 - Safari v15: 139 Of course I forgot to benchmark Chrome _before_ I updated it. :(
  - ihateolives 5y ago
    Not directly comparable, but on my Ryzen 2600X 32GB desktop that I built in early 2019 update didn't do anything. - Chrome 98: 157 - Chrome 99: 157 - Firefox 97: 104 - Edge 99: 146 Oh well.
    - hkt 5y ago
      Call me immature but the version numbers are making me wonder if there's going to be a Firefox ME or Chrome 2000 released soon..
- pronlover723 5y ago
  I got Chrome v99: 290, Safari v15.3: 279 on M1Max MPB I suspect it might go faster if I turn off scaling.
- nevi-me 5y ago
  M1Pro Chrome v98: 290 Chrome v99: 316 Safari : 278 All were with incognito/private browsing to remove the effect of extensions
- pg_bot 5y ago
  Hmm on my m1 air (16GB) I get a score of 300 ± 15 in incognito.
- BoardsOfCanada 5y ago
  Chrome starts with different options for different users to try out new features. They state which features they ran the benchmarks with in the fine print below the article: "Data source for Mac statistics: Speedometer 2.0 comparing Chrome 99.0.4812.0 --enable-features=CanvasOopRasterization --use-cmd-decoder=passthrough "
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- eole666 5y ago
  Maybe because Safari runs exclusively on MacOS and so can have a lot of OS specific optimizations ?
- mtreis86 5y ago
  On my old fx8350 (overclocked) I get 60 in windows but 70 on linux with the same browser, Vivaldi. I wonder what the difference is.
etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
I'm guessing there was renewed urgency for responsiveness due to 120fps displays on M1 mac's - which made lower frame rates compared to Safari more noticeable.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Seems like an unlikely driver in it's own, especially considering those didn't show up until near the end of this time period. Meanwhile Chrome has been needing to run more power efficiently at similar refresh rates and pixel counts on Android devices all the same. Of course ARM Android devices don't have Safari to compare to nor are they a new platform ripe with as many low hanging fruit optimizations so it's not going to be the lead topic here. The truth is this is the same kind of stuff Chrome (and any browser) has been working on since the software launched. Regardless of which devices come out nobody has ever said "I like that this browser is slower and less efficient than the other".
rado 5y ago
Former champion Safari has been dog slow since v15. My benchmark https://youtu.be/5yCXPCVvUBY https://youtu.be/5yCXPCVvUBY
- rektide 5y ago
  apple's long defended their anti-choice stance under the pretense that they have the best, fastest, lowest resource usage browser. it's long been a tiring, self-aggrandizing, & dominionist perspective- of fantastically limited consideration given how constrained & limited the platform support Safari opts for. now that even that braggadocio is crumbling, i'm wondering what's left for Apple's pompous claims about rejecting alternatives. i confess, i don't think it matters a lot for most users how fast the system is. safari, chrome, whatever, they're close. but it's still pretty revolting that apple insists on their own reality distortion field, that they cannot engage in a healthy & honest discussion about how and why they block off choice.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    > i don't think it matters a lot for most users how fast the system is This is why we had months of people raving about M1, of course.
    - rektide 5y ago
      techies arent people. :p i kid... but there is a vocal group which doesn't necessarily reflect the common experience. i joke. but also, i think where we're hearing these reports from are only semi-important. even with far far far far far superior hardware- 200/400GBps memory- a vast gain- plus other architectural wins- my temptation would still be to call this an incremental (but sizable) win, not revolutionary.
jmpeax 5y ago
greggman3 5y ago
There are certainly lots of situations where one browser beats another For example in this microbenchmark, Chrome is 10x slower than both FF and Safari at one method. https://jsbenchit.org/?src=cfcb916dd03df45952183e6484a14344 https://jsbenchit.org/?src=cfcb916dd03df45952183e6484a14344 Here's another where in one case Firefox is 54x faster than Chrome https://jsbenchit.org/?src=beb26575ad78caa99a2a8c45ce2b780f https://jsbenchit.org/?src=beb26575ad78caa99a2a8c45ce2b780f
- pictur 5y ago
  the color palette on the site is really weird. it took me 5 minutes to see the browser names :D
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jart 5y ago
  Here's a conundrum. Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS engine takes 3 minutes to run the test262 ECMAScript conformance suite. d8 takes 37 minutes to run test262 according to https://medium.com/compilers/testing-the-v8-javascript-engine-cbda7d9272e6 https://medium.com/compilers/testing-the-v8-javascript-engin... and it crashes for me in Chrome https://v8.github.io/test262/website/default.html https://v8.github.io/test262/website/default.html Has anyone else observed this performance disparity? Could it really be possible that a JavaScript engine written by one guy is 10x faster for everyday code than the flagship product of a flagship company? Because if that's the case it'd make Fabrice Bellard the Han Solo of programmers.
  - stock_toaster 5y ago
    I think Fabrice Bellard (ffmpeg, qemu, Bellard's formula, quickjs, tinygl, tinycc), could _already_ be considered the Han Solo of programmers.
    - pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
eyelidlessness 5y ago
I’m glad perf is still a focus for the Chrome team. That said… > We know that benchmarks are just one of many ways of measuring the speed of a browser. This is very true, and with a few notable exceptions my experience is that Safari feels faster across the board even where it has consistently benched slower. This likely has less to do with runtime performance and more to do with process isolation models. I feel confident about that because Safari tends to be more liberal with spawning new processes, and that’s where I experience its pathological edge cases. (Chrome starts to pool processes by domain sooner than Safari, which puts less pressure on the OS but more on operations within a given domain; Safari creates processes per tab more consistently but ultimately degrades overall app performance and eventually system performance too.)
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Can you explain why the process isolation model would matter here? It seems at best uncorrelated and my experience has been that aggressive process pooling improves, rather than degrades, system performance.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Chrome's pooling model seems to improve system performance as you say (and as I was trying to express), at high pressure. Safari’s model seems to optimize for low system pressure by favoring spawning more processes. Individually they perform better, but overall it degrades as process count increases.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      Lowering system pressure is basically the same as improving system performance, so I guess I'm still not understanding what you're trying to say.
      - Talanes 5y ago
        I believe pressure here is referring to the workload being asked of the machine, rather than the result of how it is processing that workload. Basically: More Tabs = Pooling is more performant, less tabs individual process is more performant. I don't know how true that is, but I'm fairly certain that is what GP is trying to get across.
bardan 5y ago
Harvesting my data at unprecedented speeds.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Unfortunately, doesn't really matter what browser you use. The JS APIs to harvest data are part of all major browsers now.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    To which API are you referring? Mozilla, so far as I know, tries to protect the user.
    - maattdd 5y ago
      Almost all web APIs can be used to fingerprint user (but Mozilla is reluctant to add new ones indeed when the ratio benefit/risk is too low). https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/
      - encryptluks2 5y ago
        Lots of APIs are used to track users, but for example the Canvas API. Firefox also enables quite a few telemetry options by default.
robbrown451 5y ago
Am I so wrong to stop reading after a grammatical error on the very first word in the article? https://www.google.com/search?q=everyday+two+words+or+one https://www.google.com/search?q=everyday+two+words+or+one
- staticassertion 5y ago
  Yes
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jansan 5y ago
  You couldn't be wronger.
- bool3max 5y ago
  Yes you are?
ksec 5y ago
Off Topic: Chrome is likely a very good benchmark for comparing between Intel x86 chip and Apple M1. Where Google spend enough time to optimise on both platform. I wonder if they could work on Memory usage next. Compared to Safari, getting jank from Address bar, bookmark, history, show all tabs, SafariBookMarkSyncAgent is leaking memory. It seems every release Safari added more features and bug fix for compatibility while performance has been in steady decline.
vincentriemer 5y ago
In the case of the MotionMark benchmark (more graphics/rendering focused), I have Safari beating Chrome's score by more than double (2703 vs 1152) on my M1 Max machine. Now I don't think Safari is 2x as fast as Chrome per se but it does explain how these speedometer tests can be so "close" yet Safari still feels faster. EDIT: Firefox gets a 1336
freediver 5y ago
Congrats to Chrome team, this is impressive.
azinman2 5y ago
Be curious to try Chrome again, but for a long time it’s felt bloated and slow. Been very happy with Safari, and particularly love the 2FA integration. My biggest gripe is the lack of shared bookmarks and passwords between browsers. There are 3rd party extensions and what not to do some of this (eg 1password), but nothing beats the UX of true browser integration. I wish there was a single standard with pluggable backends so I had no switching costs. Quite frankly I’m surprised Firefox doesn’t just use the Mac keychain and share bookmarks with Safari in order to gain market share.
aaronbrethorst 5y ago
Cool to hear that Chrome is faster than Safari, but that's not why I'm going to stick with Safari. I use Safari because of Chrome's memory bloat, Safari's text message MFA auto-fill features, and Safari's cross-platform (iOS/macOS) password manager.
- codewiz 5y ago
  Not sure whether it is allowed to work on iOS, but Chrome also has cross-platform sync of passwords, tabs, history and other settings.
  - msh 5y ago
    It does work on iOS. It can do system wide password management.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Also Chrome is the worst, most pervasive spyware ever developed.
- ulimn 5y ago
  Also, I think it's the only browser with Apple Pay on macOS.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > I use Safari because of Chrome's memory bloat, Safari's text message MFA auto-fill features, and Safari's cross-platform (iOS/macOS) password manager. What do you think of Firefox? :)
  - dt2m 5y ago
    Not OP but I have exclusively used Safari since the first version and recently switched to Firefox, and the password manager not being able to use iCloud Keychain is really a major bummer. For such a long time Firefox didn't take being a native Mac OS citizen seriously, with scrolling not being natively implemented, form fields feeling "off" and in general just feeling like a Windows app in a Cocoa window. Luckily those days are long gone now, and Firefox now feels much more like a native app, save for a couple of dialog boxes here and there. But having used iCloud Keychain for such a long time, and there being no option to import my 500+ passwords, it really has been a pain in the ass to switch browsers.
spullara 5y ago
The Chromium blog shouldn't refer to Chrome. There are many browsers based on Chromium and all would have the benefit from any changes to the core. If this is really just Chrome only then what is it doing on this blog in the first place?
CyberRabbi 5y ago
IMO Chrome desperately needs to minimize its memory usage.
- dopa42365 5y ago
  Memory is like $3-4/GB (decently fast DDR4). And you've been fine with 16GB for a decade without upgrading. If you're stuck on some un-upgradable old budget device, it's unlikely the memory holding you back either.
  - swah 5y ago
    OTOH - new, entry level Macbook M1s come with 8Gb RAM. Those are the ones I could afford (= full monthly salary) but I'm reluctant to buy because of Chrome.
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    Chrome with only about a dozen tabs open can take up to 16GB of memory. There is no defense for this. It only gets worse as time goes on and as more tabs are opened. I have 64GB of memory total and about 16-32 of it is in use for virtual machines, which is reasonable. How much total memory do you expect the average computer to have?
Traster 5y ago
I'm a little confused as to what the actual milestone is here? "We got 13% faster vs our last build" is just... well.. every day. I thought there was going to be some specific metric that they beat. It's good that browsers get faster at specific benchmarks, but what we basically always see is that the web gets more complex whilst browsers get faster (this is just an extension of the effect where software gets more complex as hardware gets faster and therefore the software you're using at any given time basically stays the same speed). However, and I think this is important to bring up, browsers are basically the same speed and the reason to use one over the other is largely down to ergonomics and larger concerns. On the "larger concerns" side, Chrome is a failure. Chrome exists so the advertising company Google can track you and sell you targetted ads. It can do this in reasonable ways and it can do this in unreasonable ways, and with attacks on privacy like FLoC. Chrome is doing exactly what Internet Explorer was doing for microsoft in the 2000s and I think it's appropriate to call out that fact.
- austincheney 5y ago
  It’s more subtle and monumental than that. Before this JS was already executing at the same speed as Java except for in arithmetic. At this rate of improvement eventually JS will execute much faster than Java in all areas except arithmetic where it will achieve near parity. I am not seeing any other programming language continuously improve their execution speed this much.
codedokode 5y ago
I think that browser developers are optimizing the wrong thing. Specifically: they optimize for execution speed while they better optimize for minimum memory usage instead. Let me explain why this is more important. Let's say I am visiting a properly made website and it takes 10% of CPU to render. Even if browser devs make their browser twice faster, it will only save 5% of CPU time - and that would be completely unnoticeable. You might ask, what about modern websites, built with D*t compiled to webassembly, GPU acceleration, reactive frameworks, material design and capable to load the multi-core CPU at 100%? I am not using such sites so I don't care. Now let's look at memory usage. Optimizing for speed usually causes increased memory consumption, and this increases the chance of invoking swapping. If the system starts swapping, it becomes orders of magnitude slower. No speed optimizations will matter in this case. Therefore if you are targeting wide audience, and not only mac users, then you should be optimizing for memory usage. If the browser could use two times less memory while using twice amount of CPU time that would be perfect. Just think how many laptops with 2 or 4 Gb of RAM would become usable again.
- wwtrv 5y ago
  The laptops with 2 or 4 Gb of RAM (e.g. Chromebooks) are also likely to have Celeron or MediaTek CPUs which might struggle much more than that, also unless you have multiple tabs open 4GB of RAM might not be that bad. And given a choice between being able to open several tabs all of which are barely functional and being stuck on a single website at at time which runs smoothly I'd definitely choose the later (of course the tradeoff is probably not as straightforward, then again it's not completely obvious to me that optimizing for speed would necessarily result in higher memory consumption). IMO even if they are optimizing for Macs, I'm not sure this approach would make sense (assuming the tradeoff between CPU performance and RAM usage exists) since they are much more likely to have less memory and better CPUs than PC laptops (e.g. you can probably easily get a Windows laptops with 32GB for $1000 or less).
- omnimike 5y ago
  The reason for the focus on CPU time is that it has the larger impact on battery life.
morelisp 5y ago
Oh goodie, more headroom for inducing advertiser demands.
emrex 5y ago
Why is it chrome specifically on chromium blog ? Does this not mean chromium and chromium based browsers also ?
- jefftk 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, none of these changes are in code that is specific to Chrome, so yes, I would expect these improvements to also apply to Chromium-based browsers.
nathias 5y ago
Lighthouse now deducts best practices score if you don't show adds, truly a milestone.
- justshowpost 5y ago
  Source?
  - nathias 5y ago
    just run lighthouse on any website without adds
jansan 5y ago
V8 is an absolute marvel of engineering. The performance gains are very impressive. But Chrome still has some work to do on rendering performance. The switch to hardware acceleration was actually a deceleration for quite a few cases. For example rendering very large concave SVG paths is probably 10x faster on Firefox compared to Chrome. I hope to see some effort in future to improve this, too.
kinix 5y ago
"Nothing is more frustrating than having a slow experience while browsing the web" ^ I stopped reading at this point, because I realised that this is something that only someone on a marketing team would write. A perfect combination of incorrect and disingenuous.
- mda 5y ago
  Why? I find slow and janky websites insufferable.
  - laszlokorte 5y ago
    Having an account banned and not being able to restore it or having to watch countless of ads slowing down my computer or not searching what I am looking for because of new ranking algorithms seems worse that a little bit of loading time :)
    - mda 5y ago
      Use adblockers, Use different search engine if you don't like it. Can't comment about account being banned.
      - infinityio 5y ago
        > Use adblockers To be fair, this is the same company pushing Manifest V3, which might kill adblocking as we know it
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Nice try, Chrome, but I'll stay on Firefox.
bambax 5y ago
> Nothing is more frustrating than having a slow experience while browsing the web. Really? I think many people "around the world" have more pressing issues than saving a couple of milliseconds while "shopping for a new pair of headphones". Especially when everyone knows the real speed bump across all browsers, devices and OSes is to aggressively filter out ads, something Chrome is actively fighting with Manifest V3.
- criddell 5y ago
  It would be interesting to hear from somebody in the Chrome group how they deal with this conflict of interest.
throwaway47292 5y ago
I have a friend who says: "when you invent more efficient lightbulbs, people do not consume less energy, they just get more light" Every time we did a milestone performance improvement in our infrastructure, e.g. search used to take few seconds, we reduced it to few milliseconds. One year later our colleagues were doing machinegun-like queries and the search was back to take 1 second, and it is just a matter of time to go back to few seconds. One thing that helped a lot was hard limits, e.g. InternetExplorer9 having hard cap on css size was literally the only thing that forced people not to push megabytes of css. I wish Chrome does something similar, like 'you cant have more than 500kb of js code evaluated per page' or 'no more than 200kb css', it will do miracles in just one year, and I am willing to bet that we will have the same features we would without the limit. EDIT: I did not mean to undervalue Chrome's 49% improvement in one year, which is just extraordinary work!
- lelandfe 5y ago
  Relevantly, here's the HTTP Archive's chart of page weights over time: https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight#bytesTotal https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight#bytesTotal The median is around 2MB, up from 1.5MB 5 years ago.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    Does it include multimedia content or page itself
- stocknoob 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
shadyfroyo 5y ago
Chrome needs to fix the Mac Keystone WindowServer lag issue: Details here: Chromeisbad.com Keystone globally slows down UI and drains battery life, especially notable on older machines. Completely uninstalling chrome felt like upgrading to a new CPU on my 2013 MacBook.
pbw 5y ago
> Nothing is more frustrating than having a slow experience while browsing the web. This seems a bit tone deaf with a war going on?
- debesyla 5y ago
  I'm not sure... 1) "while browsing the web", not "in life"; 2) This is an article about a web browser and the article isn't trying to compare browsers to real life scenarios, let alone wars...
gibspaulding 5y ago
Does anyone else find that they can't ever tell a difference in browser speed in day to day use? I switched to FireFox for my personal use a few years before the "Quanutm" update when it was theoretically much worse than Chrome and didn't notice a difference. For the last few years, I've been using Chrome and FireFox side by side with Chrome for work and FireFox for my own stuff and switching back and forth feels pretty seamless. (With the exception of Gmail which is abysmal on FireFox, but I somehow doubt that's Mozilla's fault)
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  Chrome feels a little faster to me, but I stick with Firefox because it doesn’t give me the same creepy big brother feeling as chrome and I can spare a few milliseconds per page load. Come to think of it, I primarily use chrome to double check UI changes on a page served from my local computer. That’s probably the main reason it feels faster.
jeffbee 5y ago
I think the takeaway from this article is that LTO is very difficult to use, if a company with dozens of full-time language platform engineers was not able to use it until the project's 15th year.
The_rationalist 5y ago
Why is it so difficut to find the average page load time for the most popular websites AKA wpt6 ?? Enough of those asbtract synthetic benchmarks..

184 points by twapi 5y ago

My Speedometer results on an M1 Mac are: - Chrome v99: 204 - Safari: 266 How come I fall so far short of the post's advertised fastest-of-any-browser 300? Edit: Running in incognito got me a 251, so some of the slowdown must be from extensions. Edit 2: Seems like 1password and uBlock Origin decrease the score by around 30 each, I got a 276 with both disabled.

notRobot 5y ago
Can you maybe also do a test for Firefox on your machine? I'm very interested in seeing how it holds up.
- selectodude 5y ago
  I get sub-150 on an M1 Pro in Firefox.
  - daemoens 5y ago
    Do you know why you're Mac getting low results? Other users are getting 200+
    - selectodude 5y ago
      I'm sure it has something to do with using ad blockers and other extensions. I don't use Firefox for its cutting edge speed so I didn't really think too much of it.
- fabrice_d 5y ago
  I get 240 with Firefox nightly (no addons) on a Mac Air M1.
- minedwiz 5y ago
  207 on my M1 Max, v98.0 stable.
zamadatix 5y ago
I get ~304 (all extensions disabled) but that's on an M1 Max. Other differences might be the amount of background apps/tasks - I usually keep mine pretty slim.
ziml77 5y ago
Saw about the same impact of 1p and uBO in Firefox.
thatwasunusual 5y ago
On my i9 2.4GHz 8-core, 64GB RAM, 2019 Mac, and with no extensions: - Chrome v99: 168 - Firefox v97: 132 - Safari v15: 139 Of course I forgot to benchmark Chrome _before_ I updated it. :(
- ihateolives 5y ago
  Not directly comparable, but on my Ryzen 2600X 32GB desktop that I built in early 2019 update didn't do anything. - Chrome 98: 157 - Chrome 99: 157 - Firefox 97: 104 - Edge 99: 146 Oh well.
  - hkt 5y ago
    Call me immature but the version numbers are making me wonder if there's going to be a Firefox ME or Chrome 2000 released soon..
pronlover723 5y ago
I got Chrome v99: 290, Safari v15.3: 279 on M1Max MPB I suspect it might go faster if I turn off scaling.
nevi-me 5y ago
M1Pro Chrome v98: 290 Chrome v99: 316 Safari : 278 All were with incognito/private browsing to remove the effect of extensions
pg_bot 5y ago
Hmm on my m1 air (16GB) I get a score of 300 ± 15 in incognito.
BoardsOfCanada 5y ago
Chrome starts with different options for different users to try out new features. They state which features they ran the benchmarks with in the fine print below the article: "Data source for Mac statistics: Speedometer 2.0 comparing Chrome 99.0.4812.0 --enable-features=CanvasOopRasterization --use-cmd-decoder=passthrough "
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eole666 5y ago
Maybe because Safari runs exclusively on MacOS and so can have a lot of OS specific optimizations ?
mtreis86 5y ago
On my old fx8350 (overclocked) I get 60 in windows but 70 on linux with the same browser, Vivaldi. I wonder what the difference is.

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago

I'm guessing there was renewed urgency for responsiveness due to 120fps displays on M1 mac's - which made lower frame rates compared to Safari more noticeable.

zamadatix 5y ago
Seems like an unlikely driver in it's own, especially considering those didn't show up until near the end of this time period. Meanwhile Chrome has been needing to run more power efficiently at similar refresh rates and pixel counts on Android devices all the same. Of course ARM Android devices don't have Safari to compare to nor are they a new platform ripe with as many low hanging fruit optimizations so it's not going to be the lead topic here. The truth is this is the same kind of stuff Chrome (and any browser) has been working on since the software launched. Regardless of which devices come out nobody has ever said "I like that this browser is slower and less efficient than the other".

rado 5y ago

Former champion Safari has been dog slow since v15. My benchmark https://youtu.be/5yCXPCVvUBY https://youtu.be/5yCXPCVvUBY

rektide 5y ago
apple's long defended their anti-choice stance under the pretense that they have the best, fastest, lowest resource usage browser. it's long been a tiring, self-aggrandizing, & dominionist perspective- of fantastically limited consideration given how constrained & limited the platform support Safari opts for. now that even that braggadocio is crumbling, i'm wondering what's left for Apple's pompous claims about rejecting alternatives. i confess, i don't think it matters a lot for most users how fast the system is. safari, chrome, whatever, they're close. but it's still pretty revolting that apple insists on their own reality distortion field, that they cannot engage in a healthy & honest discussion about how and why they block off choice.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  > i don't think it matters a lot for most users how fast the system is This is why we had months of people raving about M1, of course.
  - rektide 5y ago
    techies arent people. :p i kid... but there is a vocal group which doesn't necessarily reflect the common experience. i joke. but also, i think where we're hearing these reports from are only semi-important. even with far far far far far superior hardware- 200/400GBps memory- a vast gain- plus other architectural wins- my temptation would still be to call this an incremental (but sizable) win, not revolutionary.

jmpeax 5y ago

greggman3 5y ago

There are certainly lots of situations where one browser beats another For example in this microbenchmark, Chrome is 10x slower than both FF and Safari at one method. https://jsbenchit.org/?src=cfcb916dd03df45952183e6484a14344 https://jsbenchit.org/?src=cfcb916dd03df45952183e6484a14344 Here's another where in one case Firefox is 54x faster than Chrome https://jsbenchit.org/?src=beb26575ad78caa99a2a8c45ce2b780f https://jsbenchit.org/?src=beb26575ad78caa99a2a8c45ce2b780f

pictur 5y ago
the color palette on the site is really weird. it took me 5 minutes to see the browser names :D
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jart 5y ago
Here's a conundrum. Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS engine takes 3 minutes to run the test262 ECMAScript conformance suite. d8 takes 37 minutes to run test262 according to https://medium.com/compilers/testing-the-v8-javascript-engine-cbda7d9272e6 https://medium.com/compilers/testing-the-v8-javascript-engin... and it crashes for me in Chrome https://v8.github.io/test262/website/default.html https://v8.github.io/test262/website/default.html Has anyone else observed this performance disparity? Could it really be possible that a JavaScript engine written by one guy is 10x faster for everyday code than the flagship product of a flagship company? Because if that's the case it'd make Fabrice Bellard the Han Solo of programmers.
- stock_toaster 5y ago
  I think Fabrice Bellard (ffmpeg, qemu, Bellard's formula, quickjs, tinygl, tinycc), could _already_ be considered the Han Solo of programmers.
  - pwdisswordfish9 5y ago

eyelidlessness 5y ago

I’m glad perf is still a focus for the Chrome team. That said… > We know that benchmarks are just one of many ways of measuring the speed of a browser. This is very true, and with a few notable exceptions my experience is that Safari feels faster across the board even where it has consistently benched slower. This likely has less to do with runtime performance and more to do with process isolation models. I feel confident about that because Safari tends to be more liberal with spawning new processes, and that’s where I experience its pathological edge cases. (Chrome starts to pool processes by domain sooner than Safari, which puts less pressure on the OS but more on operations within a given domain; Safari creates processes per tab more consistently but ultimately degrades overall app performance and eventually system performance too.)

saagarjha 5y ago
Can you explain why the process isolation model would matter here? It seems at best uncorrelated and my experience has been that aggressive process pooling improves, rather than degrades, system performance.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Chrome's pooling model seems to improve system performance as you say (and as I was trying to express), at high pressure. Safari’s model seems to optimize for low system pressure by favoring spawning more processes. Individually they perform better, but overall it degrades as process count increases.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Lowering system pressure is basically the same as improving system performance, so I guess I'm still not understanding what you're trying to say.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      I believe pressure here is referring to the workload being asked of the machine, rather than the result of how it is processing that workload. Basically: More Tabs = Pooling is more performant, less tabs individual process is more performant. I don't know how true that is, but I'm fairly certain that is what GP is trying to get across.

bardan 5y ago

Harvesting my data at unprecedented speeds.

encryptluks2 5y ago
Unfortunately, doesn't really matter what browser you use. The JS APIs to harvest data are part of all major browsers now.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  To which API are you referring? Mozilla, so far as I know, tries to protect the user.
  - maattdd 5y ago
    Almost all web APIs can be used to fingerprint user (but Mozilla is reluctant to add new ones indeed when the ratio benefit/risk is too low). https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      Lots of APIs are used to track users, but for example the Canvas API. Firefox also enables quite a few telemetry options by default.

robbrown451 5y ago

Am I so wrong to stop reading after a grammatical error on the very first word in the article? https://www.google.com/search?q=everyday+two+words+or+one https://www.google.com/search?q=everyday+two+words+or+one

staticassertion 5y ago
Yes
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jansan 5y ago
You couldn't be wronger.
bool3max 5y ago
Yes you are?

ksec 5y ago

Off Topic: Chrome is likely a very good benchmark for comparing between Intel x86 chip and Apple M1. Where Google spend enough time to optimise on both platform. I wonder if they could work on Memory usage next. Compared to Safari, getting jank from Address bar, bookmark, history, show all tabs, SafariBookMarkSyncAgent is leaking memory. It seems every release Safari added more features and bug fix for compatibility while performance has been in steady decline.

vincentriemer 5y ago

In the case of the MotionMark benchmark (more graphics/rendering focused), I have Safari beating Chrome's score by more than double (2703 vs 1152) on my M1 Max machine. Now I don't think Safari is 2x as fast as Chrome per se but it does explain how these speedometer tests can be so "close" yet Safari still feels faster. EDIT: Firefox gets a 1336

freediver 5y ago

Congrats to Chrome team, this is impressive.

azinman2 5y ago

Be curious to try Chrome again, but for a long time it’s felt bloated and slow. Been very happy with Safari, and particularly love the 2FA integration. My biggest gripe is the lack of shared bookmarks and passwords between browsers. There are 3rd party extensions and what not to do some of this (eg 1password), but nothing beats the UX of true browser integration. I wish there was a single standard with pluggable backends so I had no switching costs. Quite frankly I’m surprised Firefox doesn’t just use the Mac keychain and share bookmarks with Safari in order to gain market share.

aaronbrethorst 5y ago

Cool to hear that Chrome is faster than Safari, but that's not why I'm going to stick with Safari. I use Safari because of Chrome's memory bloat, Safari's text message MFA auto-fill features, and Safari's cross-platform (iOS/macOS) password manager.

codewiz 5y ago
Not sure whether it is allowed to work on iOS, but Chrome also has cross-platform sync of passwords, tabs, history and other settings.
- msh 5y ago
  It does work on iOS. It can do system wide password management.
fartcannon 5y ago
Also Chrome is the worst, most pervasive spyware ever developed.
ulimn 5y ago
Also, I think it's the only browser with Apple Pay on macOS.
throw_m239339 5y ago
> I use Safari because of Chrome's memory bloat, Safari's text message MFA auto-fill features, and Safari's cross-platform (iOS/macOS) password manager. What do you think of Firefox? :)
- dt2m 5y ago
  Not OP but I have exclusively used Safari since the first version and recently switched to Firefox, and the password manager not being able to use iCloud Keychain is really a major bummer. For such a long time Firefox didn't take being a native Mac OS citizen seriously, with scrolling not being natively implemented, form fields feeling "off" and in general just feeling like a Windows app in a Cocoa window. Luckily those days are long gone now, and Firefox now feels much more like a native app, save for a couple of dialog boxes here and there. But having used iCloud Keychain for such a long time, and there being no option to import my 500+ passwords, it really has been a pain in the ass to switch browsers.

spullara 5y ago

The Chromium blog shouldn't refer to Chrome. There are many browsers based on Chromium and all would have the benefit from any changes to the core. If this is really just Chrome only then what is it doing on this blog in the first place?

CyberRabbi 5y ago

IMO Chrome desperately needs to minimize its memory usage.

dopa42365 5y ago
Memory is like $3-4/GB (decently fast DDR4). And you've been fine with 16GB for a decade without upgrading. If you're stuck on some un-upgradable old budget device, it's unlikely the memory holding you back either.
- swah 5y ago
  OTOH - new, entry level Macbook M1s come with 8Gb RAM. Those are the ones I could afford (= full monthly salary) but I'm reluctant to buy because of Chrome.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  Chrome with only about a dozen tabs open can take up to 16GB of memory. There is no defense for this. It only gets worse as time goes on and as more tabs are opened. I have 64GB of memory total and about 16-32 of it is in use for virtual machines, which is reasonable. How much total memory do you expect the average computer to have?

Traster 5y ago

I'm a little confused as to what the actual milestone is here? "We got 13% faster vs our last build" is just... well.. every day. I thought there was going to be some specific metric that they beat. It's good that browsers get faster at specific benchmarks, but what we basically always see is that the web gets more complex whilst browsers get faster (this is just an extension of the effect where software gets more complex as hardware gets faster and therefore the software you're using at any given time basically stays the same speed). However, and I think this is important to bring up, browsers are basically the same speed and the reason to use one over the other is largely down to ergonomics and larger concerns. On the "larger concerns" side, Chrome is a failure. Chrome exists so the advertising company Google can track you and sell you targetted ads. It can do this in reasonable ways and it can do this in unreasonable ways, and with attacks on privacy like FLoC. Chrome is doing exactly what Internet Explorer was doing for microsoft in the 2000s and I think it's appropriate to call out that fact.

austincheney 5y ago
It’s more subtle and monumental than that. Before this JS was already executing at the same speed as Java except for in arithmetic. At this rate of improvement eventually JS will execute much faster than Java in all areas except arithmetic where it will achieve near parity. I am not seeing any other programming language continuously improve their execution speed this much.

codedokode 5y ago

I think that browser developers are optimizing the wrong thing. Specifically: they optimize for execution speed while they better optimize for minimum memory usage instead. Let me explain why this is more important. Let's say I am visiting a properly made website and it takes 10% of CPU to render. Even if browser devs make their browser twice faster, it will only save 5% of CPU time - and that would be completely unnoticeable. You might ask, what about modern websites, built with D*t compiled to webassembly, GPU acceleration, reactive frameworks, material design and capable to load the multi-core CPU at 100%? I am not using such sites so I don't care. Now let's look at memory usage. Optimizing for speed usually causes increased memory consumption, and this increases the chance of invoking swapping. If the system starts swapping, it becomes orders of magnitude slower. No speed optimizations will matter in this case. Therefore if you are targeting wide audience, and not only mac users, then you should be optimizing for memory usage. If the browser could use two times less memory while using twice amount of CPU time that would be perfect. Just think how many laptops with 2 or 4 Gb of RAM would become usable again.

wwtrv 5y ago
The laptops with 2 or 4 Gb of RAM (e.g. Chromebooks) are also likely to have Celeron or MediaTek CPUs which might struggle much more than that, also unless you have multiple tabs open 4GB of RAM might not be that bad. And given a choice between being able to open several tabs all of which are barely functional and being stuck on a single website at at time which runs smoothly I'd definitely choose the later (of course the tradeoff is probably not as straightforward, then again it's not completely obvious to me that optimizing for speed would necessarily result in higher memory consumption). IMO even if they are optimizing for Macs, I'm not sure this approach would make sense (assuming the tradeoff between CPU performance and RAM usage exists) since they are much more likely to have less memory and better CPUs than PC laptops (e.g. you can probably easily get a Windows laptops with 32GB for $1000 or less).
omnimike 5y ago
The reason for the focus on CPU time is that it has the larger impact on battery life.

morelisp 5y ago

Oh goodie, more headroom for inducing advertiser demands.

emrex 5y ago

Why is it chrome specifically on chromium blog ? Does this not mean chromium and chromium based browsers also ?

jefftk 5y ago
As far as I can tell, none of these changes are in code that is specific to Chrome, so yes, I would expect these improvements to also apply to Chromium-based browsers.

nathias 5y ago

Lighthouse now deducts best practices score if you don't show adds, truly a milestone.

justshowpost 5y ago
Source?
- nathias 5y ago
  just run lighthouse on any website without adds

jansan 5y ago

V8 is an absolute marvel of engineering. The performance gains are very impressive. But Chrome still has some work to do on rendering performance. The switch to hardware acceleration was actually a deceleration for quite a few cases. For example rendering very large concave SVG paths is probably 10x faster on Firefox compared to Chrome. I hope to see some effort in future to improve this, too.

kinix 5y ago

"Nothing is more frustrating than having a slow experience while browsing the web" ^ I stopped reading at this point, because I realised that this is something that only someone on a marketing team would write. A perfect combination of incorrect and disingenuous.

mda 5y ago
Why? I find slow and janky websites insufferable.
- laszlokorte 5y ago
  Having an account banned and not being able to restore it or having to watch countless of ads slowing down my computer or not searching what I am looking for because of new ranking algorithms seems worse that a little bit of loading time :)
  - mda 5y ago
    Use adblockers, Use different search engine if you don't like it. Can't comment about account being banned.
    - infinityio 5y ago
      > Use adblockers To be fair, this is the same company pushing Manifest V3, which might kill adblocking as we know it

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Nice try, Chrome, but I'll stay on Firefox.

bambax 5y ago

> Nothing is more frustrating than having a slow experience while browsing the web. Really? I think many people "around the world" have more pressing issues than saving a couple of milliseconds while "shopping for a new pair of headphones". Especially when everyone knows the real speed bump across all browsers, devices and OSes is to aggressively filter out ads, something Chrome is actively fighting with Manifest V3.

criddell 5y ago
It would be interesting to hear from somebody in the Chrome group how they deal with this conflict of interest.

throwaway47292 5y ago

I have a friend who says: "when you invent more efficient lightbulbs, people do not consume less energy, they just get more light" Every time we did a milestone performance improvement in our infrastructure, e.g. search used to take few seconds, we reduced it to few milliseconds. One year later our colleagues were doing machinegun-like queries and the search was back to take 1 second, and it is just a matter of time to go back to few seconds. One thing that helped a lot was hard limits, e.g. InternetExplorer9 having hard cap on css size was literally the only thing that forced people not to push megabytes of css. I wish Chrome does something similar, like 'you cant have more than 500kb of js code evaluated per page' or 'no more than 200kb css', it will do miracles in just one year, and I am willing to bet that we will have the same features we would without the limit. EDIT: I did not mean to undervalue Chrome's 49% improvement in one year, which is just extraordinary work!

lelandfe 5y ago
Relevantly, here's the HTTP Archive's chart of page weights over time: https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight#bytesTotal https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight#bytesTotal The median is around 2MB, up from 1.5MB 5 years ago.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Does it include multimedia content or page itself
stocknoob 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

shadyfroyo 5y ago

Chrome needs to fix the Mac Keystone WindowServer lag issue: Details here: Chromeisbad.com Keystone globally slows down UI and drains battery life, especially notable on older machines. Completely uninstalling chrome felt like upgrading to a new CPU on my 2013 MacBook.

pbw 5y ago

> Nothing is more frustrating than having a slow experience while browsing the web. This seems a bit tone deaf with a war going on?

debesyla 5y ago
I'm not sure... 1) "while browsing the web", not "in life"; 2) This is an article about a web browser and the article isn't trying to compare browsers to real life scenarios, let alone wars...

gibspaulding 5y ago

Does anyone else find that they can't ever tell a difference in browser speed in day to day use? I switched to FireFox for my personal use a few years before the "Quanutm" update when it was theoretically much worse than Chrome and didn't notice a difference. For the last few years, I've been using Chrome and FireFox side by side with Chrome for work and FireFox for my own stuff and switching back and forth feels pretty seamless. (With the exception of Gmail which is abysmal on FireFox, but I somehow doubt that's Mozilla's fault)

onionisafruit 5y ago
Chrome feels a little faster to me, but I stick with Firefox because it doesn’t give me the same creepy big brother feeling as chrome and I can spare a few milliseconds per page load. Come to think of it, I primarily use chrome to double check UI changes on a page served from my local computer. That’s probably the main reason it feels faster.

jeffbee 5y ago

I think the takeaway from this article is that LTO is very difficult to use, if a company with dozens of full-time language platform engineers was not able to use it until the project's 15th year.

The_rationalist 5y ago

Why is it so difficut to find the average page load time for the most popular websites AKA wpt6 ?? Enough of those asbtract synthetic benchmarks..