A calendar month ago , we told you about the release ofSpeedometer 3.0 , a new web performance examination bench mark that aims to provide a more mediocre and representative measuring of how a web internet browser performs at New entanglement chore . Unlike earlier version of Speedometer , which were made more or less by Apple ’s WebKit team , translation 3.0 is made in a quislingism between Apple , Google , Microsoft , and Mozilla with a new governance simulation to agree upon what tests are important internal representation of the modern web .
In other words , it ’s probably the most “ fair ” and up - to - date measure of vane internet browser performance we have right now .
WebKit is the rendering engine used by Safari and provided to Apple developer who wish well to use vane rendition within their apps . It ’s postulate to be used by every web browser on iOS or iPadOS except for those inside the EU . Apple ’s WebKit ontogenesis team published a blog post detailing how they used Speedometer 3.0 as a pathfinder to optimize performance from Safari 17 ( exhaust in September 2023 ) and Safari 17.4 ( released in March 2024 ) .
Over those six months , a lot of small incremental improvement made a big difference . As the blog place summarize :
With all these optimizations and oodles more , we were capable to improve the overall Speedometer 3.0 score by ~60 % between Safari 17.0 and Safari 17.4 . Even though single progressions were often less than 1 % , over time , they all stacked up together to make a bountiful difference of opinion . Because some of these optimizations also benefit Speedometer 2.1 , Safari 17.4 is also ~13 % faster than Safari 17.0 on Speedometer 2.1 .
Some of those improvements include thing like batching compositing bed update , increase memory cache size on macOS , improving inline and SVG layout , and more . Many of these improvements are minor , resulting in just a few percentage points here or there , or targeting very specific parts of web carrying into action . But multiple small improvements compound over time made for a much faster browser app .
This does n’t mean Safari is much faster than other Mac browsers , though . When wetested Speedomenter 3.0 last month , we were go Safari 17.4 and found it to be the fast web internet browser but only by a very small margin . Edge still had some hitch up to do , but Chrome and Firefox are bothjustbehind Safari ’s Speedometer musical score .
