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If you're one of the legions of users who rely on Google's Chrome browser when you surf the web, we've got great news. As of the release of Chrome 91, it's about to get a whole lot faster.
The engineers behind Chrome's continued improvement have found a clever 'cheat' that makes the browser a whopping 23 percent faster.
At the root of the speed increase is the company's V8 JavaScript engine, called Sparkplug.
Thomas Nattestad, a Chrome product manager, had this to say about the recent update:
"An important component of delivering a fast browser is fast JavaScript execution. In Chrome, that job is done by the V8 engine which executes over 78 years worth of JavaScript code on a daily basis. In M91 Chrome is now up to 23 percent faster with the launch of a new Sparkplug compiler and short built in calls, saving over 17 years of our users' CPU time each day."
As to the 'cheat,' Nattlesad adds the following:
"First of all, it cheats; the functions it compiles have already been compiled to bytecode, and the bytecode compiler has already done most of the hard work... Sparkplug compiles from bytecode rather than from JavaScript source, and so doesn't have to worry about any of that.
Sparkplug strikes a balance between Ignition and Turbofan in that it does generate native machine code but does not depend on information gathered while executing the JavaScript code. This lets it start executing quickly while still generating relatively fast code."
Technical details aside, the end result is that users will enjoy a notably faster browsing experience. It's also great news for web developers because it means that they can create larger and more robust applications without worrying too much that it will slow a user's browsing experience to a crawl.
Kudos to Google for continuing to push the envelope. Chrome is the most popular browser on the planet for a reason, and this is it.
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