Google, Apple, and Mozilla are working together to make a better test for web browsers. Speedometer 3 will be made by Chrome, Safari, and Firefox working together to make a new model that balances how each company wants to measure responsiveness.
It sounds like a bad idea for three companies to make a tool that will rate how well their competing products work. But Speedometer’s governance policy has a consent system that is different depending on what might happen. For example, “non-trivial changes” will need approval from one of the other two companies. “Significant changes” will need approval from all three companies. Also, a reviewer from any of the three browser makers can give the go-ahead for “minor changes.” The goal of the policy 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.”
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The project will be based on Apple’s WebKit team’s Speedometer 2, which is the current de facto benchmark. Three of the four most popular browsers today are Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Microsoft Edge, the fourth browser, doesn’t have its own engine. Instead, it uses Google’s open-source Chromium with the Blink and V8 engines.
The Speedometer 3 project is still in its early stages, and its GitHub page says that it is “in active development and unstable.” The groups say to use Speedometer 2.1 until Speedometer 3 is further along in development, but we don’t know when that will be.
