New Version of Google Chrome is Much Faster

by Sam Dean - May. 21, 2009Comments (6)

There's a new version of Google's Chrome open source browser available, as the team behind it has announced. Google is citing up to 30 percent performance increases on JavaScript-heavy tasks. I've taken it for a spin, comparing it to Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, which also has very fast JavaScript performance thanks to its TraceMonkey technology. The new Chrome does work faster than the Firefox beta at this point, and the performance is another way that Google's browser is maturing and innovating.

Google is putting its money where its mouth is on the performance increases in the new Chrome. If you go to this web page, it will automatically start running a series of seven separate JavaScript-focused browser benchmark tests. You can paste the same URL into Firefox or another browser, and compare the results you get to Chrome's results. I got significantly higher numbers (higher is better) on all the tests with the new version of Chrome, as compared to Firefox 3.5 Beta 4.

The performance increases in Chrome come from an update to its V8 JavaScript engine, and a new version of the open source WebKit rendering engine. It is worth noting that Firefox 3.5 will be coming out in a Release Candidate version in early June, with the final version due shortly after that. The final version may outperform Chrome in JavaScript tasks, as both Mozilla and Google are targeting improvements there. As far as the latest beta of Firefox, goes, though, Chrome performs faster. It also continues to have the advantage of running tasks within tabs as separate applications, which means far fewer browser crashes. However, Chrome does not yet have anywhere near the ecosystem of useful extensions that Firefox has.

You can download the new version of Chrome here, and if you're already running Chrome, you'll automatically be updated to the new version.