In its innovative comic-book, Google explained the motivation behind, and the essential technical details of, its new browser, Chrome. For Google's engineers, a big issue was the performance of current browsers: if the web is to develop further as a platform for applications, browser speed needs to improve.
Google Chrome is based on the Apple-inspired open-source WebKit browser engine, and also features a new JavaScript engine called V8. Chrome, of course, is a beta, and the developers state that there is still much work to be done.
For this performance test, we looked at Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Firefox 3.0.1, Opera 9.52, Safari 3.1.2, Safari 4.0 Developer Preview and Chrome. We used the popular SunSpider benchmark and Google's own V8 benchmarks. Additional measurements show how efficiently the browsers manage memory consumption.
