Google Chrome may be the world’s most popular web browser, but that doesn’t mean it’s the world’s fastest, anymore. Chrome has become bloated and is much slower than it used to be, especially in the early days. This is largely due to all of the features that have been added to Chrome over the years. Users have been asking Google to speed up their web browser, and it looks like the search giant has finally listened to them. Chrome 53 is already available in the developer channel, on all platforms. And some users have taken the liberty to running Motion Mark, which is a benchmark for WebKit, and the improvements versus Chrome 51, are pretty incredible.
The tables below show the tests being run on MacBook Pro 15 and the Google Pixel C (running on Android Marshmallow). The differences on the MacBook Pro 15 are pretty insane. The Animometer score changed by +46.90%, while the HTML suite is +161.16%, Canvas Suite +7.14%, SVG Suite +151.04%, and 3D Graphics +94.21%. When it comes to Chrome 53 on the Google Pixel C, the differences are magnified. The Animometer score changed by +209.87%, the HTML Suite by +589.39%, Canvas Suite -6.35%, SVG Suite +1087.20%, and 3D Graphics +128.81%. It’s currently unclear whether these optimizations will be making their way over to Linux and Windows versions of Chrome, but it is pretty likely.
Chrome 53 is slated to hit the stable channel in September. By that time, these scores will likely change. Hopefully they’ll get even better, which will definitely make for a great experience for users that use Chrome on a daily basis. If you’d like to give Chrome Canary (aka Chrome Dev) a try, you can download it on the Google Play Store, and also on the desktop. Beware that this is a developer version of Google Chrome. So while you’ll have all of the optimizations that Google has put forth in Chrome, you may also encounter some bugs and stability issues. This is why Chrome goes through the developer channel first, then moves onto beta and finally stable. If you don’t want to mess with any stability issues, then it’s best to stick to the stable build of Chrome for now.