Google Chrome faster than Firefox, IE, Safari

By Stephen Shankland on 03 September 2008

Google introduced Chrome in part because it wants faster browsing and the richer Web applications that speed will unlock. So how does Chrome actually stack up?

Google's Chrome overpowers the other browsers on the five subtests by which Google measures its browser's JavaScript performance.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, said at the launch event Tuesday he's confident Chrome is "many times faster" than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers Google Docs, Gmail, and many other Web applications.

But when pressed for specifics, he told us to try them out. So we did.

Google offers a site with five JavaScript benchmarks. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition. We hoped benchmarking experts and developers will weigh in with comments about how well these tests represent true JavaScript performance on the Web — either for ordinary sites or for rich Web apps.

Here's the site description of the speed tests:

  • Richards: OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).
  • DeltaBlue: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).
  • Crypto: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1,689 lines).
  • RayTrace: Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister (3,418 lines).
  • EarleyBoyer: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch's Scheme2Js compiler (4,682 lines).

Google's overall score is head and shoulders above the competition for executing JavaScript. (Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

A few notes: first, your mileage may vary; we ran these tests on a dual-core Windows XP machine.

Second, we apologise to Opera, whose browser we didn't have installed.

Third, we tried to run the SunSpider benchmark tests as well, but perhaps because a lot of other curious people had the same idea on the day Chrome launched, we couldn't get to the site.

Topics: browsers, chrome, firefox, google, ie, internet explorer, safari, internet, search, benchmark

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Comments (6)

  • oreodoh commented on 10/12/2008 01:22 Report abuse

    rojesh: "where is opera??????"

    article quote: "...we apologise to Opera, whose browser we didn't have installed."

  • rojesh commented on 21/11/2008 14:20 Report abuse

    hey guys em fan of all browser except IE(Microsoft)....guys i feel something missing there. where is opera??????

  • baalpeteor commented on 20/09/2008 06:24 Report abuse

    msproductions.. who cares about 35mb? We are in a world that everyone should have at least 2 mb in their computers.. if not 3 or 4 mb. If not then just get a slower browser like iexplorer or netscape.

  • msproductions commented on 05/09/2008 18:08 Report abuse

    I don't like Chrome due to the fact that it is a RAM hog.

    I opened up 5 tabs in Chrome - Mint.com, youtube.com, woot.com, argentina.msbaylor.com, & evernote.com

    I also opened up the same amount of tabs in Firefox.

    The Results:

    Firefox used nearly 35MB of less RAM than Chrome

    Firefox:116MB

    Chrome:153MB

  • Blah commented on 03/09/2008 13:46 Report abuse

    yea it's noticeably heaps faster than ff3. the only thing is that it needs a native rss viewer. little kinks in loading pages as well.

    funny when i went to facebook and it came up with a page which said they're not cool enough to support chrome. lol.

  • Dean commented on 03/09/2008 13:39 Report abuse

    I had no trouble running SunSpider. Here's my results:

    Chrome: 2098ms Safari: 4474ms FF3: 3622ms IE8b2: 9863

    So while Chrome is much faster than the other browsers, it's not the orders of magnitude faster that these graphs imply (it's maybe 2x faster; except for IE8 anyway). Funny how benchmarks created by Google show their own browser faaaar out on top of all the others...

    Having said that, Chrome is a decent browser, I like the UI but there's nothing particularly innovative about it. Separate processes per tab was in the first beta of IE8 and that comic book thing has a whole page dedicated to the process isolation feature in Windows Vista (that's the "low", "medium" and "high" integrity processes) -- nothing at all to do with Chrome and certainly a feature that even IE7 had.

    This whole thing just seems like much ado about nothing.

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