Google Chrome - first benchmarks. Summary: wow.
We've got the first comparative benchmarks of Google Chrome, which we downloaded around half an hour ago as the official launch podcast came to an end.
We'll be looking at Chrome very closely over the next few days: modern browsers are complex beasts, and there are a lot of things to test. But JavaScript performance benchmarks we can run right here, right now - so, we have. We took SunSpider 0.9 and ran it twice. Earlier today, in expectation of getting Chrome, we ran the same benchmarks on the same machine for a representative set of other current browsers.
We compared Google Chrome beta 1 running on Vista SP1, on a Lenovo T61 with 1GB of RAM, a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and GMA x3000 graphics, comparing it against IE 7, IE 8 beta 2, Opera 9.52, Safari 3.1.2, Firefox 3.0.1 and Firefox 3.1b1. We couldn't run it on Firefox 3.1 with TraceMonkey, because the nightly build failed to complete the benchmarks.
And it is fast, easily topping the chart. In particular, it's more than ten times faster than IE 7, and three times faster than IE8 b2. FF 3.1 comes closest.
Here are the figures.
There is no doubt that Chrome more than lives up to its performance claims: it is the fastest browser we've seen on standard platforms. That may not be too surprising - one of the people behind the V8 JavaScript compiler is Lars Bak, who was the lead developer on the high-performance Sun Java VM that became HotSpot.
We'll flesh out these tests over the coming days, and go into more detail about what they show and what they might mean for Google - and its competitors. Meanwhile, Chrome looks set to more than justify the initial excitement raised in the day between it being announced and becoming available.
[UPDATE] The latest TraceMonkey vs V8 benchmarks show the Monkey ahead on points. Be sure to read the comments - for their tone, as much as for their technical content.
[UPDATE 2]
We've now got much more comprehensive benchmarks, courtesy of ZDNet Germany. Chrome is maintaining its reputation as an interesting, speedy browser that gives the competiton a serious challenge