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Google Chrome, with several under-the-hood improvements, is getting a speed boost. Speed is an important factor in determining a user's experience while browsing the web. In the latest update of chrome, Google took every opportunity to increase the speed and efficiency of its popular web browser. This involves a range of tweaks from improved caching to better memory management.
The improved features collectively gave Chrome a 10 per cent increase in Apple’s Speedometer 2.1 browser benchmark over the course of three months, announced Google.
Google’s browser covers the large majority of the web browser market share, even after many complaints of it being sluggish. Chrome owns 64.8 per cent of global market share, followed by Safari with just 19.5 per cent across all platforms.
"We discovered some targeted optimisations for the highly used JS 'Object.prototype.toString' and 'Array.prototype.join' functions. We also implemented targeted improvements in CSS’s InterpolableColor", said Google in a blog post.
According to the company, 'innerHTML' is a very common way of updating the DOM via JavaScript so they added specialized fast paths for parsing. Some of the improvements will also benefit Webkit, the browser engine developed by Apple, which means the improvements will not be limited to the Chrome browser.
Google used pointer compression to save memory in both V8 and Oilpan, which is the garbage collector for DOM objects. It optimised compress and decompress pointers, and avoided compressing high-traffic fields. The blog also talked about the relocation of frequently accessed objects like JavaScript’s 'undefined' to the beginning of the memory bases, allowing them to be accessed using faster machine code.
To maximise the performance of Chrome on high-end devices, the company is now targeting them with a version of Chrome that uses compiler flags tuned for speed rather than binary size. For capable devices, these versions of Chrome run the Speedometer 2.1 benchmark 30 per cent faster.
