How fast is Google Chrome, genuinely?

Three JavaScript benchmarks present wildly different results

Senior Newsperson, Computerworld |

Although Google's latest version of Chrome proved faster than earlier editions in some JavaScript benchmark tests, the browser barely exceeded its predecessors in another, according to Computerworld's tests.

Along Tuesday, Google touted a new optimization technology, dubbed "Crankshaft," that information technology added to Chrome's V8 JavaScript rendering locomotive, saying that the increase significantly boosted its browser's performance.

Google engineers claimed that Crankshaft embossed Chrome's scores in the V8 benchmark by 50%. "This is the biggest performance improvement since we launched Chrome in 2008," said Kevin Millikin and Florian Schneider, in a station to the Chromium blog Tuesday.

V8 is Google's own JavaScript benchmark suite.

Computerworld ran several versions of Chrome threefold each through V8 on a Windows Vista PC, and so averaged the three dozens.

Chrome's "canary" build -- the least stable and most advanced version of the browser -- was 40.5% faster than the "dev" variation and 43.5% faster than the current "stable" version.

Chrome's chromatic build is marked as version 10, while the dev and stable editions are versions 9 and 8, respectively. The canary edition is the only currently-available version of Chrome that incorporates Crankshaft.

Chrome canary also showed gallant speed improvements over earlier editions in Kraken, the JavaScript benchmark created by rival web browser maker Mozilla. According to Kraken, Chromium-plate canary was 55.3% faster at rendering JavaScript than the dev build, and 51.2% faster than the stable version.

In a third benchmark suite, however, the Crankshaft-equipped canary anatomy proved only marginally quicker than other versions of Google's web browser. SunSpider scores showed that the canary variant was just 2.2% faster than the dev build and only 3.5% faster than the constant version of Chrome.

SunSpider, created by the WebKit project -- the ASCII text file foundation of both Chromium-plate and Apple's Safari -- is the most widely-cited JavaScript benchmark.

Google's Millikin and Schneider explained the small gains in SunSpider in their blog post Tuesday.

"The idea [in Crankshaft] is to heavily optimize code that is oftentimes executed and not waste time optimizing codification that is not," the two engineers said. "Because of this, benchmarks that conclusion in just a few milliseconds, such as SunSpider, will show little betterment with Crankshaft. The more work an coating does, the larger the gains will be."

In the V8 tests, Chromium-plate's canary form was finished twice as fast as Firefox 4 current beta and Opera house Software's Opera 11 preview. When cellular against Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta, Chrome was more than five times faster.

Naturally, JavaScript benchmarks aren't the only measure of a browser's speed, a fact that Microsoft has repeatedly pointed proscribed even as IT's cited SunSpider results IE9.

Hold up month, Dean Hachamovitch, a Microsoft executive World Health Organization leads IE ontogeny, dismissed browser benchmarks as "at best, not very useful, and at worst, misleading. There's more to substantial world functioning than JavaScript."

Users hind end switch to Chrome canary, which is open only for Windows, aside downloading that edition from Google's site.

Chrome speed chart
Chromium-plate's "canary" build was 40.5% than the "dev" variant in Google's have V8 JavaScript benchmark tests. (In V8, higher scores are punter.)

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, protection issues, Orchard apple tree, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

Ranking Reporter Gregg Keizer covers Windows, Office, Orchard apple tree/go-ahead, net browsers and web apps for Computerworld.

Right of first publication © 2010 IDG Communications, Inc.