Google Chrome version 99 is faster than Safari on a Mac—for now

Google on Monday announced that its latest version of its Chrome browser for Mac, version 99, has recorded the highest speed score of any browser in the Speedometer benchmark—an Apple-created speed test.

Google revealed that in their testing, Chrome 99’s Speedometer score of 300 was possible in part by implementing ThinLTO, a build optimization technique that prioritizes code focused on browser speed. This is on top of other optimizations Google has been doing, including a new V8 Sparkplug JavaScript compiler with short built-in calls that optimize the placement of generated code inside of the device’s memory.

According to Google, Chrome 99 is 7 percent faster than Safari. We ran Speedometer on both Safari 15.4 (using WebKit version 17613.1.14.1.7) and on Chrome 99.0.4844.51 on a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 10-core M1 Pro and 32GB of RAM. We also decided to throw in the Safari Technology Preview, a beta version of the browser that Apple uses to test new features. We used Release 141 of STP, which includes Safari 15.4 and WebKit 17614.1.3.8. Here’s what we got.

While we were able to replicate Chrome’s 300 score, we didn’t get the 7 percent boost reported by Google—our increase was over 4 percent. Interestingly, the Safari Technology Preview closed the gap tremendously with a score of 297.

We also ran Speedometer on Safari 15.4 and Chrome 99 on a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an 8-core M1 Pro and 16GB of RAM, and the two browsers essentially had the same performance: Chrome scored 269, while Safari scored 267.

We should note that Google’s results were achieved using Chrome version 99.0.4812.0 and Safari 15.4 (17612.3.6.1.6), and a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 10-core M1 Max and 64GB of RAM.

So, based on what we’ve seen, Chrome is the faster browser, but Safari could catch up in an upcoming release.