Google highlights how Chrome for Android doubled its Speedometer benchmark score

After achieving stellar results on the Speedometer 3 browser benchmark on desktop earlier this year, Google Chrome has now achieved best-in-class scores on Android devices. Google announced this achievement in a recent blog post, highlighting the underlying improvements that helped Chrome more than double Speedometer scores on many Android phones.

Google claims Chrome’s Speedometer benchmark scores have increased significantly over the last year, with Chrome on Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered devices setting new records for Speedometer performance. The company has revealed three key changes that helped boost performance, including changes to the way Chrome is built, V8 and Blink improvements, and optimizations to how Chrome interacts with the operating system and SoCs.

Google released a separate higher-performance build with Chrome M113 last year to achieve higher scores on premium devices. The build incorporated several modern build optimizations that Google couldn’t include previously, as they resulted in much larger binaries that were not ideal for entry-level devices. Google says these optimizations “account for more than half of the overall Speedometer score improvements.”

Along with the build optimizations, Google improved the performance of Chrome’s JavaScript (V8) and web rendering (Blink) engines. The company also worked with Qualcomm to further optimize the browser’s performance and achieved a 60-80% performance boost on Snapdragon 8 Elite devices compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Google says that the higher Speedometer scores directly translate to real-world benefits, including faster page loads and interactions. For example, Google highlights that loading a Google Docs document on the Pixel Tablet took more than 50% longer on Chrome M112 than on the latest release.