Thursday, September 04, 2008

Speed up with Chrome

There is much buzz around the new Google Chrome browser. I suppose most of you have (like me) downloaded it, played around with it and then continued to use Firefox for everyday use. After all, the shiny clean look is impressive at first and the page preview look is fun, but the lack of (visible) UI elements and the fact you have to do without all your usefull plugins like Adblock, Foxmarks ,FireBug and Webdeveloper soon makes you return to Firefox.
And this is intentional. Chrome is not (yet) for everyday browsing. It's created as a platform for web-based apps. The importance of chrome is mainly in what you see in the image below.




These are the results of the V8 Javascript benchmark. The higher the score, the better. So yes, the Javascript V8 engine as used in Chrome performs roughly 30 times better than the engine in IE6. And this is really important these days, since Javascript is the engine that powers all these popular AJAX based web applications like Basecamp, Google docs, Flickr or Twitter. So, as predicted by Jeff Atwood in his article about Javascript, the speed of Javascript is going to be more important. And when you believe (as Google does) that the future of computing is in the browser, Chrome is the logical platform. What really surprised me though is that it lacks a 'full screen' function. After all that is what you'd really expect from a browser that is supposed to replace your desktop ?
And yet you still cannot launch any browser without having an operating system. And right now Chrome only runs on Windows...