According to StatCounter, as of March 2023, the Google’s Chrome browser for mobile has a worldwide market share of 64.62%, making it the most popular mobile browser in the world. Some of the reasons why it’s so popular is because it’s fast, easy to use, offers seamless syncing with the desktop version of Chrome, and has a large number of extensions and add-ons available, making it a versatile and powerful tool. With this latest update, the browser is getting a whole lot better.
Google announced yesterday that the Chrome team have optimised the latest version of the Chrome browser for speed and efficiency.
Google notes that while Chrome on Android has always been optimised to have a small footprint, the Chrome team decided to create a version specifically for high-end devices since the Android ecosystem is so diverse, with some devices having higher capabilities than others. The new version prioritizes speed over size and was designed to maximize performance.
To achieve this, the team targeted optimizations for the commonly used JS functions ‘Object.prototype.toString’ and ‘Array.prototype.join’, and created specialised fast paths for parsing to ‘innerHTML’. They also implemented pointer compression in both V8 and Oilpan to save memory.
After putting the browser through Apple’s Speedometer 2.1 benchmark, Google reported that the improved features and efficient pointer compression collectively resulted in a 10% increase over three months. Google said this version of the browser is now 30% faster when running on compatible devices. However, users should be aware that the app file will take up more space on their phone as a trade-off.
