Google, Apple, Mozilla to Collaborate on Developing Speedometer 3

Inno Flores, Tech Times 16 December 2022, 11:12 pm

Apple, Google, and Mozilla are collaborating to create an improved browser benchmark that will help provide a "shared understanding of what matters." Speedometer 3 balances the visions of the three companies for measuring responsiveness.

(Photo : Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
MUNICH, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 06: In this photo illustration Google's Chrome browser shortcut, Google Inc.'s new Web browser, is displayed next to Mozilla Firefox shortcut and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser shortcut, on an laptop.

Developing Speedometer 3

Apple, Google, and Mozilla are set to develop Speedometer 3, an improved web browser benchmark. The Verge reported that this will be a "cross-industry collaborative effort" from the makers of well known browsers like Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

As per Mozilla, "We have lots of ideas on how to make things better. Many require collaboration across site authors, framework builders, browser vendors and standards groups, which requires a shared understanding of what matters."

Governance Policy

While this may lead to a disaster as it can be used to compare Safari's WebKit to Chrome's Blink or Google's V8 engine to Mozilla's SpiderMonkey, the companies have set up rules that should help them to avoid the three of them from trying to tip the results in their own favor.

According to Engadget, the browser benchmark will have a governance policy for the three browser makers, which includes a consent system that will depend on potential ramifications. This policy aims for their work to move faster when it comes to changes, but at the same time, will still undergo a higher level of process and consensus based on its impact.

Three changes were provided in the governance policy. These include (1) Trivial Change that does not affect the official benchmark, (2) Non-Trivial Change that has a small impact like bug fixes and appearance changes, and (3) Major Change that has major implications on the official benchmark like releasing a new version or revising policies and whole processes.

Speedometer's Primary Goal

Speedometer's primary goal is to have a reflection of the real-world Web as much as possible. When a certain browser obtained a higher score on the benchmark, it should also benefit the users. Mozilla's Github provided a list in order to achieve this goal.

Instead of testing specific features in a tight loop, end-to-end user journeys should be tested.
Web browsers should be adaptive to the current trends and have to evolve over time.
Accessibility to the users and useful to browser engineers are both important.

Currently, this project is still in the works and currently "inactive development and unstable." 9To5Google reported that the current de facto Speedometer 2 is recommended by the three browsers to use while waiting for the improved web browser benchmark. The previous version was mainly made by Apple' WebKit Team.

The three companies are making sure that this version will be at its best once it is released. They will be including representative modern workloads, hence why this might take a while before its launch. The companies added that more information regarding Speedometer 3 can be expected within a few months.