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Chrome is Now Faster on Mac Than Safari – Here’s How…
Apple makes and designs its Macs in-house, so you’d think its Safari browser would be the fastest option, right? Wrong! Google’s latest Chrome browser is now faster on Mac than Safari…
Google’s Chrome browser is the most-used web browser on the planet, helped in no small way by the fact that it ships natively on Android phones. But even before the rise of Android phones, Google’s Chrome browser was massively popular.
Google is constantly evolving Chrome, making it more useful, adding in new features, and attempting to refine its backend to make it run quicker and more efficiently. Of course, the more you add to a browser, the heavier it becomes from a power perspective.
But this is what makes Google’s latest version of Chrome for Mac so special. Google has managed to refine and optimize Chrome for Mac to such a fine degree that it is now classed as being faster than Apple’s own Safari which is designed to run natively on macOS.
How Did Google Make Chrome Faster Than Safari?
Google employs a lot of people, some of the smartest people on planet earth. Its coders and developers work round the clock on projects in the open and projects that will one day see the light of day. Google’s Chrome team is a huge component of its workforce, and it is this department that has just scored The Big G a huge win.
According to Speedometer 2.0, an industry-leading web browser benchmarking tool, Google’s latest version of Chrome is now considerably faster than Apple’s native Safari browser. How much faster? Well, Google’s Chrome netted itself an 83% improvement on Apple’s new M1-powered Macs, scoring a massively impressive 300 – the highest score of any browser, including Safari.
For measuring browser performance, there has been a long history of various benchmarks that aim to provide test workloads for browsers to track their performance. Making these benchmarks both reflective of the real and ever changing world, while also being consistent, is a challenge. Chrome uses a combination of internal benchmarking infrastructure and public, industry-standard benchmarks, to continuously measure Chrome’s performance. For comparing browsers’ JavaScript performance, Apple’s Speedometer 2.0 benchmark is the most reflective of the real world, and most broadly used today.
Google
This is a huge boon for Google’s Chrome browser because, with Apple’s Intel-powered Macs, Chrome was always considered a much slower, heavier browser option compared to Safari. But Google’s optimizations, alongside Apple’s impressive new software and chipsets, appear to have worked wonders for Chrome’s performance on Mac.
Going forwards, this kind of result will almost certainly see plenty of current Safari users switching over to Chrome. I prefer Chrome to Safari, so much so that I’ll happily deal with performance issues on my Intel-powered iMac, rather than using the snappier Safari. Chrome has more features, it plugs into Drive better, and I find its UX much nicer to use on a day-to-day basis, especially when you’re dealing with tons of open tabs.
Plus, with Chrome, you have access to Chrome:flags as well, so you can test out new features and stuff that is currently not available for the official release version of the browser.
And check out How To Tell If An App Is Running Natively On Your M1 Mac! And be sure to check out How To Restore Deleted iPhone Safari Bookmarks!