Chrome M85 could rewrite what it means to have a fast browser, if the latest announcement from Google is anything to go by. That’s because the search giant appears prepared to return its focus to overall performance. Or at least more visibly, since it says it has always quietly been focused on that.
Now, the company has returned to a focus on performance more visibly. And it’s even shared a throwback ad spot from 2010, highlighting just how serious it is about that. The ad itself, of course, offers an optimistic look at just what a browser can be. It’s definitely worth a watch. But, the real focus arrives in terms of partitioning out resources to make the browser run more smoothly and faster.
There are much bigger changes shipping now and over the next few weeks that will dramatically improve things further.
So what kind of speed increases are we looking at in Chrome M85?
The biggest of the changes arrives in the form of Profile Guided Optimization (PGO). PGO was actually launched initially as part of Windows Chrome way back with Chrome M53. Then, it utilized Microsoft Visual C++. According to Google, PGO is a compiler optimization technique. In layman’s terms, it optimize workflow in favor of performance at the code level. Specifically using real-world scenarios that match real-world workflows.
So the code needed most often will be the most optimized as well.
With the latest change, PGO is arriving on Mac and Windows using Clang. And the differences couldn’t be more apparent, Google says. Testing consistently shows load times up to 10-percent faster. That’s at the median. And that’s with increasing returns as more tasks, tabs, or programs are running.
What that means will vary from platform to platform. On Mac, Chrome’s responsiveness — that’s how long the browser takes to respond to interactions, is improved by 3.9-percent. The time it takes to first draw up text or the first images, known as the “First Contentful Paint” is 2.3-percent faster. Overall speed is 7.7-percent faster.
On Windows, those figures are even more dramatic. Respectively, responsiveness, first contentful paint, and overall speed are up by 7.3-percent, 3.5-percent, and 11.4-percent.
Google’s got even bigger plans to look forward to
Chrome isn’t just going to be fast in the foreground or via PGO when it comes to resource management in M85 either. It’s also now rolling out Chrome tab throttling in beta. The change will, in effect, restore resources that would typically be used by pages left in the background. Or at least those left there for extended periods of time. Google hasn’t offered up a timeline for that change to arrive in Stable for everybody just yet.