What you need to know
- Google shared that it managed to double Chrome’s score in Speedometer 2.1, a browser benchmark, on Android devices.
- The feat was achieved by optimizing Chrome for more premium devices and advanced Arm architectures, like Snapdragon 8 Elite.
- Google says these improvements will be noticeable in daily use, while doing things like loading a Google Doc on the Pixel Tablet.
If the Google Chrome on Android feels faster lately, especially on more premium Android phones and tablets, it’s not just you. Google says that Chrome for Android experienced significant increases in scores and overall performance in a popular browser benchmark Speedometer 2.1, since Chrome version M112 released last year. Now that Speedometer 3.0 is out, Google is reporting that devices with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset are crushing the new benchmark, according to a blog post.
From version M122 to the current version M129, Google is seeing Speedometer scores more than double on many Android devices. That’s due to build optimizations, improvements to the JavaScript engine and rendering engine, and optimization for OS versions and systems-on-a-chips (SoCs).
The improvements began with Chrome M113, when Google introduced a new version of Chrome for Android. For the first time, there was a separate build of Chrome available for high-end devices that maximized their performance capabilities. Google says that creating separate builds for high and low-performance devices allowed it to better optimize for flagship chips. For example, it built the new, high-performance build of Chrome for Arm64, making use of the efficiency of Arm’s 64-bit instruction set.
You can see these improvements when Chrome is paired with the latest silicon, such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, the first to use custom Oryon cores for mobile. In the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark shared by Google below, the difference between the same browser’s performance on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 versus Snapdragon 8 Elite is stark.
Google thinks these improvements will translate to daily use of Chrome on high-end Android phones and tablets, too. In the below test, provided by Google, Chrome M129 on the Pixel Tablet loaded a Google Doc webpage 50% faster than the older M112 version on the same device.
The new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip specifically resulted in a 60% to 80% improvement in Speedometer 3.0 improvement, and Google says it tweaked Chrome’s builds and engines to ensure that the browser wasn’t bottlenecking the chip’s performance.
As more phones are released with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, like the Samsung Galaxy S25 series, more people will be able to try out the faster version of Chrome for themselves. Even if you have an older devices, recent Chrome releases will likely result in a noticeable speed boost.
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