Google Chrome is of course the most popular web browser but still faces fierce competition from Safari and Firefox. In a bid to know the best among them, Google, Apple, and Mozilla want to team up to make a new web browser benchmark. Speedometer 3 is expected to balance the visions of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
There are benchmark tools for almost everything. In this sense, Speedometer 3 will measure the responsiveness of web browsers. Other than that, the new tool will rate the effectiveness of the products mentioned above.
It will not be a third-party app that evaluates web browsers. Instead, Speedometer 3 will have strict rules. For instance, when making major changes in the policy, all three companies should give consent. But consent from one of the other two parties is sufficient for less vital changes.
Unlike some past benchmarks, Speedometer 3 is being started as a cross-industry collaborative effort.
Building this will be hard work, and working together gives us a chance to build the best version to help make the Web faster for years to come. https://t.co/lZyegpIAeW— Mozilla Developer 👩🏾‍💻 (@mozhacks) December 15, 2022
Plus, “trivial changes” can be approved by a reviewer from any of the three browser makers. Such a policy has the goal of making the working team move quickly for most changes. In other words, it is just an agile concept that will help the teams be more responsive to changes.
As the name of the web browser benchmark implies, it will be based on Speedometer 2. The latter is a special tool developed by Apple’s WebKit team.
We know that Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are the most popular web browsers. So it’s logical they are the initiators of the project. But where is Microsoft Edge? Its absence is due to the fact it doesn’t run its own engine. If you are unaware, this web browser relies on Google’s open-sourced Chromium with Blink and V8 engines.
We should point out that the Speedometer 3 project has not commenced yet. But its GitHub page reads that it is “in active development and is unstable.” So you can still use Speedometer 2.1 until the new version comes out.
