Chrome Benchmarks Show Major Year-Over-Year Speed Gains
Chrome achieved a score of 61 on Speedometer 3.1, a 5% improvement from the previous year. On JetStream 3, it scored 469, a 10% improvement since the beginning of 2026.
Google’s latest benchmark results reveal significant performance improvements for Chrome. The tests were conducted on an M5 MacBook Pro running macOS 26.0.1, and according to Google, Chrome now holds the highest scores among all browsers on those platforms.
The Engine Room: Why Chrome Is Faster
Google attributes the substantial gains to a major rework of JavaScript handling. The company identifies three key optimizations:
- Skipping unnecessary execution steps to streamline processing.
- Inlining asynchronous operations to reduce overhead.
- Optimizing fast paths for common operations, making everyday tasks more efficient.
Beyond JavaScript, improvements were also made to WebAssembly workloads and the Blink rendering engine, further contributing to the performance uplift.
What This Means for Users
The company states that these benchmark results reflect a "meaningfully faster" browsing experience for users.
While benchmarks are an imperfect measure of real-world performance, the double-digit percentage gains in JetStream 3 suggest noticeable improvements, particularly for complex web applications and content-rich pages.