September 3rd, 2008
Chrome is 42x faster than IE7, 9x faster than FF3
I’ve been testing the new Google Chrome browser and one thing’s for sure: they weren’t kidding about great JavaScript performance in this beta. Check out these numbers I got from running Google’s V8 benchmark suite (higher is better):
- IE7: 30
- FF3.0.1: 131
- Chrome Beta 1: 1279.6
That’s a whopping 42.6 times improvement over IE7, and 9.7 times over FireFox 3. Keep in mind that these benchmarks were chosen by the team that wrote Chrome’s JavaScript engine (V8). Other benchmarks show a lesser, but still significant, improvement.
Unlike Adobe’s Tamarin engine, which is used in Flash and will appear in a future version of FireFox, V8 (see project page) does not rely on static typing to achieve its excellent performance. It dynamically figures out what data types you’re actually using as the code executes and optimizes for those types. Conventional wisdom says that dynamic types are slower than dynamic, but the V8 team in Denmark has demonstrated that’s not necessarily the case.
For more benchmark results see:
- Google Chrome - first benchmarks. Summary: wow.
- Google Chrome is insanely fast … faster than Firefox 3.0
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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