Chromium Blog: April 2023

More ways we’re making Chrome faster

Thursday, April 13, 2023

The Fast and the Curious post shares how recent technical improvements to Chrome have helped us reach a new performance milestone on the Speedometer browser benchmark across platforms.

Speed is a critical factor in determining your experience while browsing the Web. The faster the browser, the more enjoyable your browsing experience will be. With the latest release of Chrome, we went deep under the hood of Chrome’s engine to look for every opportunity to increase the speed and efficiency, from improved caching to better memory management.

Improved HTML Parsing & optimizing specific features

We discovered some targeted optimizations for the highly used JS `Object.prototype.toString` and `Array.prototype.join`functions. We also implemented targeted improvements in CSS’s InterpolableColor.

`innerHTML` is a very common way of updating the DOM via JavaScript so we added specialized fast paths for parsing. To our happy surprise, it seems some of this work will also be benefitting WebKit, which will Speedometer 2.1 browser benchmark over the course of three months.

Getting the Most out of High-End Mobile Devices

Chrome on Android has always been optimized for a small footprint, but the Android ecosystem is diverse and contains devices with varying levels of capabilities. To maximize the performance of Chrome on high-end devices, we are now targeting them with a version of Chrome that uses compiler flags tuned for speed rather than binary size.

For capable devices, these versions of Chrome run the Speedometer 2.1 benchmark 30% faster.

Posted by Thomas Nattestad, Senior Product Manager, and Andrew Grieve, Software Engineer

Google

Labels: the fast and the curious

How WebAssembly is accelerating new web functionality

Monday, April 3, 2023

WebAssembly is fundamentally changing how new developer capabilities and functionality can be created on the web. In order to maintain browser interoperability, new web capabilities need to go through a rigorous standardization process and cross browser implementations. Decades of major investment has pushed the browser functionality to astonishing heights, but this process can take time and the web doesn’t need to have every capability built in. After years of investing in lower level capabilities that act as building blocks for higher level functionality, we are seeing a new dawn of expanded functionality at a dramatically expanded pace.

WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a portable bytecode format compiled from other languages to offer maximized performance. By leveraging WebAssembly, developers can take libraries and functionality from other platforms and performantly bring them to the web, without requiring any reimplementation. WebAssembly also offers advanced computation primitives like parallelizable FFMPEG on Wasm is enabling web apps to work effectively with videos. eventually be removed from Chrome.

the most important thing for a good user experience. As a result, developers should think carefully before ballooning their bundle size with this functionality, and it may be more relevant for larger web apps than smaller ecommerce or blog sites. This has long been an issue for JavaScript-heavy frameworks and is something where more solutions could be possible to improve the situation. 

Another potential mitigation here is to look at the popular functionality being shipped in userland and use that as an input about what functionality should be standardized to ship with the browser itself. By being battle-hardened in userland, browsers will have higher confidence and validation on what they should ship, dramatically simplifying the standards and implementation work. WebCodecs replacing wasm compiled FFMPEG or the wasm compiled option are perfect examples of this. 
Device capability access WebAssembly and other primitives are largely computation mechanisms and don't give any kind of root system access to the OS or device itself. Functionality like hardware access (USB or Bluetooth), screen or window management, input controls, file system, clipboard, and much more still require platform level APIs to access. Chromium’s Fugu project is specifically aiming to enable all of these cases for Chromium-based browsers, but implementations across other browsers would still be needed here. 
Conclusion WebAssembly is already enabling new functionality in the browser, but more than that it represents a fundamentally new approach to how functionality gets developed. The best way to improve a thing is to improve how you improve it and then basking in second order growth. As with any new paradigm there are advantages and disadvantages, but overall this is a powerful new approach for browsers and developers everywhere. I can’t wait to see what we all build together with it. 


By Thomas Nattestad, Product Manager - WebAssembly