September 2nd, 2008

Chrome: Benchmarks & more

Google’s new web browser is here — why is it important, and how does it perform compared to the other browsers?

So, it seems our secret leaked a little early. The upside is that I get to talk about one of the projects that I’ve wanted to tell you about ever since I started working here at Google.

There are lots of reasons why Chrome is interesting — being a new open source browser using the WebKit rendering engine is one of them — but the main advantage it has over other browsers right now is the V8 Javascript engine. It uses several impressive virtual machine optimizations to make it the fastest Javascript engine out there.

So, what all us techies out there want to know is of course: How much faster is it? Here are the results of running the browser-neutral SunSpider 0.9 Javascript benchmark on Windows:

As you can see, it’s fast. Amazingly fast. Over twice as fast compared to Firefox 3, and not far from being twice as fast as Safari 4 too — or WebKit nightly, as the case is here.

The new Javascript engine in Firefox nightlies (TraceMonkey) seems to do well too, but Chrome still beats it if my setup is correct — I'm not 100% sure about whether it's enabled or not in the nightlies. When setting the javascript.options.jit.content variable, it crashes in the date format tests. I was using this build for my tests.

If you use Javascript-heavy apps like Gmail, it makes a world of difference.

I do know that for some reason, Safari is much slower running on Windows than on a Mac. The Sunspider benchmark running Firefox 3 against Safari 4 on a Mac shows Safari being much faster than Firefox, which is not the case on Windows. Oh, and I didn't bother running the tests on Internet Explorer — we all know it has the slowest Javascript engine in the business right now.

Other reasons why Chrome is interesting

Every tab and plugin is its own process
This means that a bad web page or a bad plugin (Flash, anyone?) can take down the entire browser. In the age of tabs and web apps, trust me — this is a killer feature.
It does really smart things to make browsing faster
Let me mention one: One of the things that makes browsing slow is that your computer has to ask the DNS every time you follow a link to a different site. Chrome starts doing these DNS lookups in the background while your page has loaded, making the next link you click on start loading instantly1. 1 Note that this is different from pre-fetching the page, and takes up a very minimal amount of bandwidth (DNS requests are very lightweight.
Offline Mode built-in
Chrome has Gears built-in, which means that several web apps from Google and others are capable of running even without an internet connection.
It will bring a new audience to the alternative browsers
Google has the ability to reach people that would never have installed Firefox — either because they don’t know that it exists, or because they want a browser that is more mainstream. Google is a name they trust, and thus more people will be running open source browsers.

Oh, and stay tuned for the Mac and Linux versions. They’re coming — I can’t wait to run Chrome natively on OS X. The Windows version is now live, you can download it here.

It’s all good.

Thanks to Juliana Tsang for helping me run some of the tests.

And this shouldn’t be necessary, but sometimes people seem to need it anyway: all opinions expressed on this site are mine, not Google’s. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Alexander Limi makes software easier to use. Founder of the open source project Plone, he currently lives in San Francisco, and previously worked at Jarn & Google. Right now, he’s busy making Firefox better at Mozilla.

“No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail.”
—Marion Levy

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