Google claims Chrome is now faster than ever – but I’m still worried that the browser remains a RAM hog
- Google has made a number of under-the-hood tweaks to Chrome
- It claims the browser is now 10% faster than it was a year ago
- That’s based on benchmarking with Speedometer 3.0, but we’re not shown comparative results with other popular web browsers
Google has boasted that Chrome is now faster than ever, outlining the improvements it’s made to its popular web browser to achieve this speed boost.
Neown flagged up the latest blog post from Google in a series entitled the ‘Fast and the Curious’ for those who are intrigued to see what tinkering Google has been doing.
We’re told that Chrome has recorded its highest score ever on Speedometer 3.0, a browser benchmarking tool, and that it’s now 10% faster than in August 2024 with the release of the latest version 139 (still in testing, in the Dev channel).
Google says these improvements have been possible due to the Chrome team working across all the main ‘rendering paths’ of the browser, referring to the fundamental mechanisms that convert the nuts-and-bolts of code for a website into a visible web page in Chrome.
With that work happening more swiftly across multiple fronts, you see web pages rendered in the browser a bit faster, and it should act more responsively overall.
Clearly, though, performance mileage depends not just on the browser, but on a lot of factors (including any given website itself, and how it’s implemented, alongside the spec of the PC and its current overall workload).
Analysis: faster than ever – but some RAM concerns remain
There’s a fair bit of techie detail provided in terms of the exact tweaks Google has applied here, but to summarize, they include memory-related optimizations, better use of caches, and work on refining data structures.
Fortunately, us mere non-programmer mortals don’t need to know those ins and outs. The simple takeaway is that, as mentioned, Chrome is now 10% faster – at least based on this run of benchmarking.
This is the latest in a series of boosts for Chrome, as Google showed us how much faster its browser was at around the same time last year, as Neowin pointed out.
The benchmarking tool employed, Speedometer, is a respected suite of tests for web browsers, generally acknowledged to reflect a real-world browsing experience with a commendable degree of accuracy. What we don’t see here, though, are any comparative results that show how fast Edge, or Firefox, or some of the other best web browsers are in relation to Chrome.
That said, a quick scan of recent independent testing with Speedometer does suggest that Chrome is no slouch, and it seems like it currently has the edge (no pun intended) over other browsers.
Google appears to be doing good work on the performance front, then, despite Chrome’s reputation as a RAM hog, an issue it has sought to address. There have been improvements in terms of streamlining memory usage with Chrome in the more recent past, though – and overall, Google’s browser seems nippy enough these days.
That said, concerns around RAM-related performance headwinds remain. How much of this is down to tainted perceptions is debatable, but complaints certainly persist on various online forums that Chrome doesn’t fare so well here, and overreaches with its demands on the system, particularly with lower-end PCs that aren’t well-equipped in the RAM department.
There’s more to web browsers than speed, too, and one of the thornier remaining issues for Chrome is one of trust – or rather a lack of it, regarding Google ‘spying’ on its users, which is a common theme in terms of accusations leveled online. Not that Google is alone in terms of tech giants in this respect – far from it.
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