Apple and Google team up to make Speedometer 3.0 benchmark faster and fairer

A collaboration of developers on Monday announced Speedometer 3.0, a new version of the online tool used to measure the speed of web browsers. Developed by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, Speedometer 3.0 claims to be “a better way to measure performance and a more representative set of tests that reflect the modern web.”

Speedometer was created by Apple 10 years ago, and reviews of the benchmark claimed it was optimized for Apple’s WebKit/JavaScriptCore browser engine, so its results would favor Safari over third-party browsers . This collaboration creates “a new governance model” that supports Blink/V8 (Google; Microsoft Edge also uses it) and Gecko/SpiderMonkey (Mozilla). The new benchmark involves many new tests that provide “a broader, representative cross-section of the engine, providing new opportunities to optimize JS, Layout, CSS, Graphics and DOM APIs to improve the user experience on the web” .

Additionally, Speedometer 3.0 offers new tests, including canvas and SVG graphics rendering, code editing, WYSIWYG editing, and reading news sites. Additionally, the test runner has been improved to better evaluate the response to user actions. The Speedometer 3.0 site has more details on its testing.

Speedometer 3.0 on the MacBook Air

Here’s a look at the Speedometer 3.0 results on the new MacBook Air M3. We ran the test on Safari 17.4 (19618.1.15.11.12), Google Chrome 122.0.6261.112, Microsoft Edge 122.0.2365.80 and Mozilla Firefox 123.0.1.

Although Safari has the fastest score, Chrome and Firefox aren’t far behind, they’re basically all the same speed, even if you don’t take into account the standard deviation (shown as +/- by the speed meter ). Edge browser’s lowest score is 7% lower than Safari.