code-diesel

Google Chrome Beta for Windows is finally here. There are many factors that make this browser interesting; being open source and using the WebKit rendering engine is one of them. But one of the great things is the speed of the JavaScript engine. Chrome uses Google’s open source V8 JavaScript engine, and it is amazingly fast. I ran the SunSpider 0.9 benchmark and here are the results:

As you can see it is blazingly fast, being twice as fast as Firefox 3 and twenty times faster than Internet Explorer 6.  If you are using JavaScript heavy applications like Gmail or Javascript UI frameworks like Yahoo UI, extJS, jQuery etc. than you can really reap the benefits of a fast engine. If you like to see a visual comparison try running one of John Resig’s Processing.js demo in Firefox 3 and Chrome and you can see how fast Chrome can run JavaScript.

Some of the other interesting things Google Chrome offers can be read in a comic format here – designed by the brilliant Scott McCloud, a sample page is shown below.

You can download Google Chrome here.