Google Chrome was for a while the fastest web browser on Windows, but now Google claims that version 99 of Chrome is even faster than Apple Safari on Mac, with significant speed gains since Apple released released its first non-Intel M1 Macs in 2020.

To test Chrome, Google used Speedometer 2.0, a benchmark from Apple’s own WebKit team that measures the responsiveness of JavaScript-based web applications. The higher the score, the better the browser’s performance in handling JavaScript.

Google discovered that Chrome 99 on Mac achieved a score of 300 in the speedometer, making it the highest score of any browser on macOS, including WebKit-based Safari and also other browsers based on Chromium, from Brave to Microsoft Edge and on Vivaldi.

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Chrome 99 was released this week ahead of the big stable Chrome 100 release coming in late March.

The improvements highlighted by Google are particularly important for the performance of Chrome on Apple’s M1 Macs. He compared Chrome 99 with Safari 15.2 17612.3.6.1.6 on a 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro model with the Apple M1 Max chip with 10 cores, 32 GPU cores and 64 GB of RAM connected to the power supply.

Google credits Chrome’s faster speeds to its ThinLTO build optimization technique in Chrome 99 for making it now 7% faster than current versions of Safari. Chrome’s graphics performance was also 15% faster than Safari’s due to recent graphics optimizations.

“Overall, since Chrome launched on M1-based Macs in late 2020, Chrome is now 43% faster than it was just 17 months ago,” Google notes in a blog post.

Other major contributors to Chrome’s latest speeds are the V8 Sparkplug compiler and “short built-in calls”. Sparkplug is the new mid-level JavaScript compiler for Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and sits between the Ignition bytecode interpreter and the Turbofan optimization compiler in Chrome.

Google announced last year that version 91 of Chrome was 23% faster thanks to Sparkplug and short integrated calls. This last feature was very important for the performance of Chrome on M1 Macs.

Short inline calls optimize placement of generated code in device memory, Google says. It made a “substantial difference” to Apple’s Arm-based M1 Macs, Google says.

Google’s V8 team at the time explained that short embedded calls would make a big difference on M1 chips in response to design changes made by Apple as part of industry-wide mitigations. against Ghost attacks.

“While on ARM64 the architectural call range limitation for direct calls is 128 MiB, it turns out that Apple’s M1 chip has the same microarchitectural range limitation of 4 GiB for indirect call prediction. [as Intel recommended]”, explained a V8 developer.

“Indirect calls to a call target further away than 4 GiB always seem to be poorly predicted. Due to the particularly large reorganization buffer of the M1, the CPU component that allows future predicted instructions to be speculatively executed in clutter, frequent prediction errors result in an exceptionally large performance penalty.”