Google Chrome smashes Speedometer 3 record with massive performance gains

Google is flexing its engineering muscles today by announcing a record-breaking score on the Speedometer 3 benchmark with its Chrome browser. If you’ve felt like the web got snappier lately, this could be why.

According to the search giant, Chrome’s latest performance improvements translate to real-world time savings. Believe it or not, that could potentially add up to 58 million hours saved annually for users. That’s the equivalent of about 83 human lifetimes not wasted waiting for web pages to load!

Speedometer 3 is no gimmick, folks. It’s a publicly available benchmark created in open collaboration between major browser makers. It mimics how real-world web apps behave by running through a variety of tasks. This includes things like HTML parsing, JavaScript processing, DOM interaction, CSS layout, and even font rendering.

Chrome’s engineering team claims to have improved the browser’s performance on this test by 10 percent since August 2024. That might sound small, but it’s not. When you consider Chrome’s massive user base and how often people browse the web, those small speed boosts stack up fast.

Google credits a long list of low-level technical upgrades for this bump in speed. The Chrome team reworked internal memory layouts in its Blink rendering engine, cutting down on memory churn and improving cache usage. Areas powered by Oilpan garbage collection saw expanded usage to avoid reliance on slower memory allocators like malloc. The browser also now uses “rapidhash” for faster string hashing and improved data structure probing - nerdy stuff, but clearly effective.

Rendering tasks that traditionally drag down performance, like CSS computation and font shaping, also got smarter. The browser’s caching logic was tightened up to retain only relevant data while hitting caches more frequently. And font shaping (a notoriously complex task thanks to technologies like Apple Advanced Typography) now performs faster too.

It’s a big deal because Speedometer 3 isn’t skewed to favor one browser over another. It’s a shared test suite, and Google achieving the highest score yet sets a new bar for the entire industry.

The benchmark result was measured on an Apple MacBook Pro with an M4 chip running macOS 15, which is one of the latest and most capable platforms. It’s safe to assume Chrome could run even faster on lower-tier systems thanks to these optimizations.

If Chrome keeps this up, the browser arms race could heat up again. And no, I’m not talking about silly AI features, but good old-fashioned speed. And honestly, isn’t that what matters more?