Apple, Google & Mozilla team up to create next-gen browser benchmark

The three companies will get a say in a benchmark that will test how their apps perform with the latest techs that websites use.

Mozilla tweeted that a benchmark built by several web companies will provide a “shared understanding of what matters”. This is considered vital in coordinating with web developers’ standards bodies, the groups that build the engines interpreting code, and the companies building browsers around the engines.

Apple’s WebKit Twitter account said that “working together will help us further improve the benchmark and improve browser performance for our users”.

The benchmark will ultimately be used to compare Safari’s WebKit to Chrome’s Blink or Google’s V8 engine to Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey.

Google, however, stated in a Twitter thread that the three companies have worked on some ground rules that would prevent them from tipping the results in their favour.

The governance policy outlines regulations and procedures to be followed, where nontrivial changes will require approval from other partners and can’t be implemented if faced with strong objections.

The Speedometer 3 is “active development and is unstable” and recommends using Speedometer 2.1 instead of GitHub. The new version is expected to be “updated to include representative modern workloads, like JavaScript frameworks,”