Google Chrome is available as a native Apple M1 app today



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Chrome is not available in the App Store.  You will need to download it using Safari.  When you do, Google will ask you which version you want to download.
Enlarge / Chrome is not available in the App Store. You will need to download it using Safari. When you do, Google will ask you which version you want to download.

Jim salter

Google Chrome browser is now available as a native Apple M1 app, for those of you lucky enough to have M1 Mac Mini, Macbook Air, or Macbook Pro systems. (If you’ve been living under a rock in recent weeks, the M1 is Apple’s newest in-house-designed ARM silicon, which the company started selling in traditional laptops and Mac Minis for the first time this week.)

Google is presenting Chrome as a download as an x86_64 package or as a native M1 option, which seems a little odd, as the native M1 version is actually a universal binary, which works on M1 or traditional Intel Macs. . Presumably, Google offers separate downloads due to the much smaller file size needed for the x86_64 package only – the universal binary contains both x86_64 and ARM apps, and weighs 165MB compared to 96MB for the Intel package only.

Performance

In our previous testing, we said the previous version of Google Chrome, which was only available as an x86_64 binary and needed to be run with Rosetta 2, was a good fit. It was and still is a true statement; we find it hard to believe that anyone using the non-native binary for Chrome on an M1 machine would find this “slow”. That said, Google’s new native ARM .dmg is available today, and as expected, it’s significantly faster if you do something complicated enough in your browser to notice it.

The first benchmark in our gallery above, Speedometer, is the most prosaic – the only thing it does is populate lists of menu items over and over again, using a different web application framework each time. times. This is probably the most relevant reference of the three for the “regular web page”, if such a thing exists. The speedometer shows a huge advantage for the M1 silicon running natively, whether Safari or Chrome; Chrome x86_64 running through Rosetta2 is inconsequentially slower than Chrome running on a brand new HP EliteBook with the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U processor.

Jetstream2 is the largest of the three benchmarks and includes workloads for data sorting, regular expression parsing, graphical ray tracing, and more. This is the closest thing to a “traditional” benchmark outside of the browser and is most relevant for general web applications of all kinds – especially heavy office applications such as spreadsheets with tons. of columns, rows and formulas, but also graphic editors with local processing rather than cloud. Chrome x86_64 under Rosetta2 takes a significant backseat compared to everything else here – although we again want to stress that it does. do not feel at all slow and would work pretty well compared to almost any other system.

Finally, MotionMark 1.1 measures complex motion graphics techniques in the browser and nothing else. Safari has an absolutely overwhelming advantage on this test, even doubling the performance of native Chrome M1. The GPU prowess of the Apple M1 also has a disproportionate impact on these test results, with Chrome both native and x86_64 reflected on the M1 overtaking Chrome on the HP EliteBook powered by the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U.

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