[marmarama]

It's not just Chrome, it's everything, though apps that have a large number of dependencies (including Chrome and the myriad Electron apps most of us use these days) are for sure more noticeable.

My M4 MacBook Pro loads a wide range of apps - including many that have no Chromium code at all in them - noticeably slower than exactly the same app on a 4 year old Ryzen laptop running Linux, despite being approximately twice as fast at running single-threaded code, having a faster SSD, and maybe 5x the memory bandwidth.

Once they're loaded they're fine, so it's not a big deal for the day to day, but if you swap between systems regularly it does give macOS the impression of being slow and lumbering.

Disabling Gatekeeper helps but even then it's still slower. Is it APFS, the macOS I/O system, the dynamic linker, the virtual memory system, or something else? I dunno. One of these days it'll bother me enough to run some tests.