Technology

Google, Apple and Mozilla team up to create a better browser benchmark

Google, Apple and Mozilla, creators of Chrome, Safari and Firefox, are teaming up to create the next-generation browser called Speedometer 3.

Three companies making a tool that will rate the effectiveness of their contending products sounds like a recipe for disaster. However, Speedometer’s governance policy includes a consent system that differs based on potential ramifications. For example, significant changes will require approval from the other two companies, while “non-trivial changes” will need consent from one of the other two parties. Meanwhile, “trivial changes” can be green-lit by a reviewer from any of the three browser makers. The policy’s aim is that “the working team should be able to move quickly for most changes, with a higher level of process and consensus expected based on the impact of the change.”

As for the “Apple” company’s “WebKit” team, it confirmed that the alliance “will help us improve the standard and improve the performance of the browser for users.”

Mozilla said in a statement “Working with Apple and Google gives us the opportunity to build the best version to help make the Internet faster for years to come”.

While “Google” explained that the team aims to “build a collaborative understanding of performance on the Web to help improve browser performance in ways that help users.”

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