Google has reportedly made the Chrome web browser significantly faster by using a feature of Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler:
Starting with the Chrome 53 release of 64-bit Chrome and version 54 of the 32-bit version, Google started using Microsoft's so-called Profile Guided Optimization technology to speed up startup times (by 17 percent), new tab page load times (by almost 15 percent), and overall page load times (by 6 percent) in Chrome.
Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) is a feature of Microsoft's Visual Studio developer tools that measures how users actually interact with an application. It then uses this training data and re-compiles the application with a focus on optimizing the most often used functions of the application.
Also at ZDNet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday November 02 2016, @06:13AM
Only the Windows version of Chrome browser has gotten this treatment, but other compilers have PGO capability (I don't know which one is best at it):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile-guided_optimization [wikipedia.org]
Here is Firefox with PGO using GCC 4:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Building_with_Profile-Guided_Optimization [mozilla.org]
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