Chrome Loads Webpages 10-20 Percent Faster on Average Than Last Year: Google

Google's Chrome browser has seen improvements over the years, and it is now claimed to have improved average page load time. Google claims that the V8 JavaScript engine has seen some improvements over the course of the past year which has helped Chrome to load pages 10-20 percent faster on average than it did a year ago.

In a blog post, Seth Thompson, V8 Track Commentator, explained that the team started measuring performance with higher fidelity by instrumenting snapshots of Chrome browser on popular webpages like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia. "This analysis revealed that while peak performance benefits certain types of large web applications, browsing typical websites relies more on startup performance, or the speed it takes to start running script," said Thompson.

The V8 team noticed that the optimisations implemented had improved mean page load between Chrome 49 and Chrome 56 by up to 10-20 percent, depending on CPU architecture. The V8 JavaScript engine last year received some important updates that reduced RAM requirements by as much as 50 percent over previous versions of the browser.

The team revealed that it used Speedometer benchmark to glean performance as the benchmark was an approximation of many sites due to its inclusion of real Web frameworks including React, Angular, Ember, and jQuery.

For those unaware, V8 is Google's open source JavaScript engine has been written in C++ and is used in Chromium and multiple other embedding applications.

"Going forward, we plan to ship more JavaScript performance improvements for new patterns of script appearing on the web, including modern libraries, frameworks, and ES2015+ language features," added Thompson.