Google Chrome is now faster: Octane score

Google shared today that is is constantly changing things under the hood for its Chrome browser, courtesy its auto-update feature. In an official blog post, it now goes on to introduce its Chrome Beta channel release. Google reveals that Chrome has become faster and to supplement this, Google has shared its Octane test scores. Elaborating on Octane, the post shares that an Octane is a JavaScript benchmark that Google has designed to measure performance of real-world applications on the modern web. “Stability sometimes takes higher priority, but we’re still manic about improving Chrome’s speed,” the post adds. Going by the Octane scores, one can view that there has been an overall improvement of more than 26 percent over the last year.

Google Chrome's now faster: Octane score

Regarding improvements on Chrome, Google shares that it has also been working on reducing the browser’s start-up time, and setting up automated tests to catch any code changes that would slow Chrome down. “Speed is one of our core principles, so rest assured we’ll continue to make Chrome faster in every way possible,” it adds.

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Google hosted its Pwnium 2 competition at Hack in the Box 2012 in Kuala Lumpur recently. The winner, Pinkie Pie, went home with a $60,000 prize and a free Chromebook. Pie, incidentally, had also won $60,000 in the first Pwnium competition held earlier this year. The bug that Pie had discovered relies on a WebKit Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) compromise to exploit the renderer process. This time, he found a bug in the IPC layer to escape the Chrome sandbox.

In an official blog post on the Chromium blog, software engineer, Chris Evans shares that Pie took home the prize since this exploit fell within the parameters of a "“full Chrome exploit,” - thereby deserving the prize comprising - $60,000 and a free Chromebook. A “full Chrome exploit”, as Evans explains in the post “depends entirely on bugs within Chrome to achieve code execution.”

Recently, Google rolled out the first post-beta update for its Chrome browser for the Android platform. The update addressed various security issues and brings improvements for Chrome’s sandboxing technology, besides fixing other moderate bugs. The update was for devices running Android v4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and later. Chrome is available only for devices running Android v4.0 or later.

Chrome’s sandbox technology helps ensure malicious mobile websites are contained and do not impact the entire browser. A post on the Google Chrome blog by software engineer Jay Civelli states that this is made possible by “the innovative multi-process architecture in Chrome for Android, in conjunction with Android’s User ID (UID) isolation technology”. He adds that Jelly Bean devices would automatically use this more in-depth sandboxing technology.