According to Google, the latest Chrome update, version M99, has set records on Apple’s own Speedometer web benchmark and is even faster and more responsive on Macs than Safari. Improvements have been made to Chrome’s speed over the past year or so when compiling JavaScript and rendering graphics.
This makes it the fastest on M1 Macs, benchmarking around 7 percent faster than Safari. Chrome M99 has also, seemingly, set a speed record with a score of 300 on a benchmark created by Apple’s WebKit team. 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.
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Google executed its tests on a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 10-core M1 Max chip and 64 GB of RAM. They were repeated on the 13-inch M1-powered MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM. It was found out that Chrome scored 252 ran per minute, plus or minus 8.6, and Safari got 185, plus or minus 46. That’s around a 30 percent difference on average.
However, it has been said that Chrome is a ‘resource hog’. While Chrome isn’t entirely to blame for heavy RAM usage (all those scripts it’s so fast at running take up space and resources of their own, and it can be tricky to measure system resource usage), it does have a reputation for being taking up a lot of space in memory.
But on the flip side, if you’re perfectly happy with the features Chrome has, and it doesn’t make your computer slow, you should use it. You can even brag about its impressive benchmark scores occasionally.
