Chrome 91 was recently rolled out by Google on stable channel. The update brought a slew of changes. It included default desktop mode support on large screen devices, revamped form controls, File System Access API improvements, and more. Moreover, it brought performance improvements as well. The company has now revealed that the new update has made Chrome up to 23% faster than the previous release.

According to a recent post on the Chromium blog, Chrome Product Manager Thomas Nattestad revealed that Chrome 91 “is now up to 23% faster with the launch of a new Sparkplug compiler and short builtin calls, saving over 17 years of our users’ CPU time each day!” 

As per the post (via XDA-Developers), Sparkplug is a new JavaScript compiler that “fills the gap between needing to start executing quickly and optimizing the code for maximum performance.”Short builtin calls, on the other hand, optimize “where in memory we put generated code to avoid indirect jumps when calling functions.” The new Sparkplug compiler balances the engine’s two-tier compiler system — Ignition and Turbofan. It generates native machine code without depending on the information received while executing the JavaScript code.

When V8 generates CPU-specific code from JavaScript, it lays that code out in memory. This generated code will frequently call builtin functions, which are small snippets of code for handling common routines –everything from basic operations like adding two variables, to full-fledged functions in the JavaScript standard library. For some CPUs, calling functions that are further away from your generated code can cause CPU-internal optimizations (such as branch prediction logic) to fail. The fix for this is to copy the builtin functions into the same memory region as the generated code,” the post adds. It also notes that this change should improve Chrome’s performance on the Apple M1 chip.