Google Chrome 8 is 36% faster than Chrome 7 in physical speed tests
We've moved our Web browser test platform from the virtual world to the real world, and Google Chrome 8 benefited most from the transition.
Recently, Google traded development track 1 of its Chrome Web browser for track 8, making the latter effectively the "stable" edition of the browser, even though it's still officially under development and not yet feature-complete. Many users of version 7 found themselves automatically upgraded to version 8, and may very well have noticed a subsequent speed increase from the JavaScript interpreter.

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine and application framework. It was first released as a beta version forMicrosoft Windows on 2 September 2008, and the public stable release was on 11 December 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers. As of September 2009, Chrome was the third most widely used browser, with 7.98% of worldwide usage share of web browsers, according to Net Applications.

In September 2008, Google released a large portion of Chrome's source code, including its V8 JavaScript engine, as an open source project entitled Chromium.This move enabled third-party developers to study the underlying source code and help port the browser to Mac OS X and Linux. A Google spokesperson also expressed hope that other browsers would adopt V8 to improve web application performance. The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the permissive BSD license, which allows portions to be incorporated into both open source and closed-source software programs. Other portions of the source code are subject to a variety of open-source licenses.Chromium implements the same feature set as Chrome, but lacks built in automatic updates and Google branding, and most notably has a blue-colored logo in place of the multicolored Google logo.

The JavaScript virtual machine used by Chrome, the V8 JavaScript engine, has features such as dynamic code generation, hidden class transitions, and precise garbage collection. Tests by Google in September 2008 showed that V8 was about twice as fast as Firefox 3.0 and the WebKit nightlies.

Several websites performed benchmark tests using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark tool as well as Google's own set of computationally intense benchmarks, which include ray tracing and constraint solving. They unanimously reported that Chrome performed much faster than all competitors against which it had been tested, including Safari (for Windows), Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and Internet Explorer 8.

On September 3, 2008, Mozilla responded by stating that their own TraceMonkey JavaScript engine (then in beta), was faster than Chrome's V8 engine in some tests. John Resig, Mozilla's JavaScript evangelist, further commented on the performance of different browsers on Google's own suite, finding Chrome "decimating" other browsers, but he questioned whether Google's suite was representative of real programs. He stated that Firefox 3.0 performed poorly on recursion intensive benchmarks, such as those of Google, because the Mozilla team had not implemented recursion-tracing yet.

Two weeks after Chrome's launch, the WebKit team announced a new JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, citing a 36% speed improvement over Chrome's V8 engine.

Chrome uses DNS prefetching to speed up website lookups, as do Firefox and Safari. This feature is available in Internet Explorer as an extension, and in Opera as a UserScript.

We'll be following the suddenly resurgent arena of competitive Web browser development on our physical platform from now on.

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