Google Claims Chrome Is Now Faster Than Safari on Mac

BY Chandraveer Mathur

Published 7 Mar 2022

Google Chrome

Google claims that its Chrome browser is faster than before on Mac and Android. Version M99 of Chrome dropped last week and includes a bunch of performance tweaks that have helped Chrome score over 300 on the Speedometer benchmark that evaluates responsiveness.

In a Chromium blog about the version M99 update, Google says that the improvements made under the hood over the last few months help Chrome deliver a snappier experience overall. The company claims that Chrome is now the “fastest possible browser” since the improvements are seen across several operating systems.

Google boasts that the Chrome M99 version on Mac has scored higher than any other browser ever on the Speedometer benchmark developed by the WebKit team. Safari scored around 277 to 279 in the test that Chrome aced with 300 points. Google claims Chrome is now 7 percent faster than Safari and its graphics performance is 15 percent faster than Apple’s browser. For the test, Google pitted Safari 15.2 against Chrome M99 on a 14-inch MacBook Pro from 2021, packing an M1 Max chip. The MacBook Pro had 10 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores.

The search giant says the faster performance results from enabling a build optimization technique called ThinLTO. Since its launch as a browser for M1 Macs, Google says Chrome has become 43 percent faster. Meanwhile, Chrome for Android also received navigation optimizations that have helped it become 15 percent faster overall on the OS.

Do you prefer Chrome or Safari? Is Chrome noticeably faster than Safari on your Mac? Tell us in the comments section!

[Via Chromium Blog]