Chrome on high-end Android devices is now optimized for speed over size

Abner Li | Apr 13 2023 - 10:30 am PT

Over the years, Google has been working to make Chrome faster, and the latest set of speed improvements are focused on Android and Mac.

On Android, Chrome has to work on many device types with varying technical specs, with Google previously optimizing for a small app footprint. Google is now improving performance by targeting high-end devices “with a version of Chrome that uses compiler flags tuned for speed rather than binary size.” As such, Chrome on those Android devices can “run the Speedometer 2.1 benchmark 30% faster.”

Speedometer from Apple’s WebKit team is Google’s preferred benchmark, previously noting how it’s the “most reflective of the real world” when it comes to comparing JavaScript performance.

Meanwhile, on Chrome for Mac, a series of improvements and optimizations have led to a 10% increase in Speedometer 2.1 over the course of three months:

We discovered some targeted optimizations for the highly used JS `Object.prototype.toString` and `Array.prototype.join`functions. We also implemented targeted improvements in CSS’s InterpolableColor.
`innerHTML` is a very common way of updating the DOM via JavaScript so we added specialized fast paths for parsing.
Pointer compression is used to save memory in both V8 and Oilpan (the garbage collector for DOM objects). We made optimizations to how we compress and decompress pointers, and we avoid compressing high-traffic fields. Given how frequently these operations are done, it has a widespread impact on performance. We also moved frequently accessed objects like JavaScript’s `undefined` to the beginning of the memory bases, allowing them to be accessed using faster machine code.