Google Says Chrome’s Latest Update is Faster than Safari

Google has said that the latest Chrome update, version M99, is setting records on Apple’s own Speedometer web benchmark and is even faster and more responsive on Macs than Safari. A post breaks down the improvements made to Chrome’s speed over the past year or so when compiling JavaScript and rendering graphics.

According to Google, this all adds up to its browser being the fastest on M1 Macs, benchmarking around 7% faster than Safari. Chrome M99 also apparently set a speed record with a score of 300 on a benchmark created by Apple’s WebKit team, according to the blog post. The Speedometer benchmark is meant to simulate what it’s like to use a web app running using various technologies to see how responsive the experience is.

Google notes that it ran its tests on a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 10-core M1 Max chip and 64 GB of RAM. Repeating it on my 13-inch M1-powered MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM, I got an even bigger performance delta: Chrome scored 252 runs per minute, plus or minus 8.6, and Safari got 185, plus or minus 46. That’s around a 30 percent difference on average, though obviously, there was a high amount of variability with Safari.