If you're using Google Chrome on an Mac mini M1 or MacBook Pro M1, then you're officially using the fastest browser around... according to Google. (Make sure it's fully patched, though.)
This achievement was declared in a Chromium Blog post written by Senior Director of Chrome Engineering Max Christoff. Running version M99 of Google Chrome on Macs fitted with Apple M1 chips resulted in the highest-ever results using the Apple-developed Speedometer 2.0 browser benchmark of 300 points.
This Chrome result even beat out Safari, macOS' native browser app, by a 7% overall margin and a 15% margin when it came to graphics performance. Cumulatively, the macOS Chrome app has increased its speed by 43% compared to how it performed when it launched on M1 Macs in October 2020.
Now bear in mind that Google achieved this record-breaking score by performing these tests on a fully specced 14-inch MacBook Pro, using an M1 Max chip and the range-topping 64GB RAM package. That's as powerful a MacBook as you're going to get right now, so trying these tests out on a more typical Mac like the Mac mini or MacBook Air may well produce lower scores. However, you should still do better with Chrome than on Safari, assuming the performance differences still scale with less powerful M1 chips and lower quantities of RAM.
Christoff had some good news to share for the Android version of Chrome too. He said that the browser was now 15% faster at loading pages, although he didn't give detail on the timeframe that this improvement was achieved over.
Chrome's well known for dominating your device's performance, although recent updates have gone some way to fixing that. Now at least it seems that you get speed to match that drain on your device's resources, although it's probably not worth swapping to Chrome from a browser you're already happy with.
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