Google, Apple and Mozilla are working together on Speedometer 3 with a governance policy that should allow for rapid progress.
Google, Apple and Mozilla are all collaborating on the design of a better benchmark tool for web browsers. Speedometer 3 will be a “cross-industry collaborative effort” by the developers of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox to come up with a new model that will balance companies’ differing views for measuring browser responsiveness.
Google, Apple and Mozilla are working together on Speedometer 3
Three different companies working on a tool to gauge the efficiency and effectiveness of their competitors, that could be the perfect recipe for disaster. That being said, Speedometer’s governance policy includes a consent system that differs depending on the potential ramifications. For example, significant changes will need approval from two other companies, while “non-trivial” changes will only require approval from one of the other two parties. “Trivial changes”, on the other hand, can be authorized by only one of the three developers. The intent of this policy is that “the team should be able to move forward on the majority of changes quickly, with a high level of process and consensus based on the impact of the change in question.”
with a governance policy that should enable rapid progress
The project follows Speedometer 2, the current benchmark developed by Apple’s WebKit team. Chrome, Safari and Firefox are three of the four most popular browsers today. The fourth in this list being Microsoft Edge, which does not use its own rendering engine, but relies on Google’s open-source solution, Chromium, with Blink and V8 engines.
The Speedometer 3 project is still in its infancy, and its GitHub page logically warns that it is “in active and unstable development”. All three web giants recommend using Speedometer 2.1 until version 3 is further developed, but we don’t know when Speedometer 3 might be ready at this time.
Historically, benchmarks have not done a great job in this regard and have actively competed for attention with the needs of real sites.
Speedometer 2 was a leap forward when it was released in 2018, but it’s time for an update to test real-world user journeys of life online today.
— Mozilla Developer ??? (@mozhacks) December 15, 2022