Google Chrome 2 benchmarked: World's fastest browser. Again.

By Nate Lanxon on 22 May 2009, 11:16am

While mercilessly devouring cake yesterday here at the office, Google was heard dropping the C bomb. Chrome, that is -- a whole new version of Chrome. Version 2 of Google's lightening-fast Web browser promises new features and even greater speed.

But are those promises being upheld, we ask? Well, yes and no, but mostly yes. Features like full-screen browsing and form auto-complete are new to Chrome, though a useful feature of many competing browsers already. But holy fudge: Google has really delivered on the speed front!

Chrome is, by our own benchmarking results, now the fastest browser on the planet at handling Javascript. It has knocked Safari 4 beta and the latest nightly alpha build of Firefox 3.6 (V3.6a1pre), and although not noticeably faster at rendering non-Javascript heavy Web pages, that still means it's the snappiest choice between Opera, IE 8 and Firefox on PC.

The new Chrome scored 709ms on the SunSpider Javascript benchmark, beating the last stable version's 1,177ms. In our last round of PC browser benchmarks, Safari 4 scored 910ms and Firefox's 3.2a1 Minefield build scored second place with 1,136ms, which put Chrome snugly in third place.

For those curious, the latest alpha release of Opera 10 (not pictured on the graph below) scored 3,584ms in our tests just now.

Chart

While for many people fast Javascript performance may seem like a trivial issue, sites like Google Reader, Gmail, Hotmail and many other popular sites rely heavily on it. Rendering Javascript this quickly, means your email is going to load a whole lot faster.

Give it a try. You can download it directly from Google's Chrome homepage, or if you've already got Chrome installed, you may have automatically been updated to the latest version. You can find out by choosing 'About Google Chrome' from the spanner menu icon, and looking for the version number.