Chrome’s latest upgrade, Google claims, is faster than Safari

According to Google, the latest Chrome update, version M99, is breaking records on Apple’s Speedometer web benchmark and is faster and more responsive on Macs than Safari. An article on the Chromium Blog details the performance gains made to Chrome over the last year when compiling JavaScript and rendering graphics.

This all adds up to Google’s browser being the quickest on M1 Macs, benchmarking roughly 7% quicker than Safari. Google reports that its testing was conducted on a 14-inch MacBook Pro equipped with a 10-core M1 Max processor and 64 GB of RAM. When we repeated the test on a 13-inch M1-powered MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM, the performance difference was even greater: Chrome scored 252 runs per minute, plus or minus 8.6, while Safari scored 185 runs per minute, plus or minus 46. That’s almost a 30% difference on average, though there was obviously a lot of variety with Safari. With our computer’s slower processor and less RAM, we fell short of the 300 thresholds claimed by the Google team.

When it comes to normal web browsing, performance is critical – you don’t want to be waiting when utilizing a web app. For what it’s worth, the majority of complaints we’ve heard from coworkers and people on the internet are about how resource-intensive Chrome is, not how slow it is. While Chrome is not totally to blame for high RAM utilization (all the scripts it runs consume space and resources of their own, and measuring system resource usage may be tough), it does have a reputation for consuming a lot of memory.