Apple, Google, and Mozilla are Teaming Up to Make a Next-Gen Browser Benchmark

According to tweets published by all three firms, Apple, Google, and Mozilla, the respective developers of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are working together to develop a next-generation browser benchmark that will be referred to as Speedometer 3. This indicates that the key companies in the web browser and rendering engine field will have a voice in a benchmark that is intended to assess how well their applications work with the most cutting-edge technology that websites may be adopting.

A benchmark that is being developed by a number of different online firms, according to a post on Mozilla's Twitter account, will assist to establish a "common understanding of what important." According to the business, this is crucial when attempting to coordinate amongst web developers, standards organizations, groups who construct the engines that parse code based on those standards, and businesses that manufacture browsers based on those engines. According to the Twitter account for Apple's Web Kit, the situation is summarized as follows: "working together will help us further enhance the benchmark and improve browser performance for our consumers."

This benchmark will certainly wind up being used to compare Safari's Web Kit to Chrome's Blink or Google's V8 engine to Mozilla's Spider Monkey, which depending on the findings, might be awkward for the firms involved. However, as Google points out in its Twitter thread, the firms have drawn up guidelines that should help prevent any of them from attempting to tilt the results in their favor by manipulating the algorithm. According to the governance policy, nontrivial modifications will need permission from "at least two of the participating browser projects" and cannot be implemented if there are substantial objections from others. Major changes will need a consensus from everyone who is engaged.

It is still very early days for Speedometer 3, as shown by the fact that its GitHub page states that it is "actively developing and is unstable." Instead, it is recommended that users make use of Speedometer 2.1. (The Web Kit team at Apple was primarily responsible for developing that version.) According to Google, the firms are working toward the goal of ensuring that the next version is "updated to incorporate representative current workloads, such as JavaScript frameworks." More information about the specifics of what this entails will be made available over the next several months.