Google has posted benchmarks from its own testing with its Chrome browser on the Mac, and the results show a nice speed improvement. In Speedometer 3.1 tests, Chrome posted a score of 61, which is a 5 percent improvement over results posted a year ago. Chrome also recorded a score of 469 in JetStream 3 tests, which is a 10 percent increase.
While a 5 to 10 percent increase doesn’t seem like much, consider that last year, Google reported a 22 percent Speedometer improvement from 2024 to 2025. So that’s a sizeable 30 percent boost over a two-year span. Faster is always better, especially when it comes to browsers, since web content and sites are becoming more and more complex.
Google states that it performed most of its optimizations on JavaScript. One optimization involves “fast paths” where the browser’s engine can skip unnecessary execution steps. The handling of async and generator functions has been improved, optimized BigInt handling, and more. Non-JavaScript optimizations include WebAssembly items, rendering engine style computations, page-loading and text-handling, and vector gaphics rendering.
Google’s report does not state what version of Chrome was tested, though the testing was done on macOS Tahoe 26.0.1. Google also did not provide any test results on Apple’s Safari browser for comparison. I wasn’t able to replicate Google’s results while running Speedometer or JetStream, but my testing conditions are not the same as Google’s, and Google did not define their test bed in their report.
The current version of Chrome is 149.0.7827.54. To update Chrome, launch the browser and then go to Chrome > About Google Chrome. In the main window, the top of the About Chrome will show the version you are using and whether an update is available. Chrome will need to relaunch to complete the update.
