Arm Has Been Working To Boost The Chrome/Chromium Browser Performance

Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too.

Arm has been focusing on Chromium optimizations not only for the Chromium/Chrome browsers itself but also for software leveraging the likes of CEF and Electron that rely upon Chromium code for rendering.

Some of their work has included optimizing bundled components like Zlib and libjpeg-turbo, hashing improvements for Arm, changes to the Harfbuzz text layout code to help out the performance by several percent, GIF decoding enhancements, and more. They have also been working in modern ARMv8 features into the Chromium code base around pointer authentication, memory tagging, BTI, and other instruction set extensions to offer better security.

More details on the Arm work to boost the Chromium performance can be found via the video presentation above and the PDF slide deck from last month's Web Engines Hackfest.

There are also other interesting presentations from this year's conference in Spain at WebEnginesHackfest.org.