Chrome 1.0 is Superfast

I've been using Chrome for a while now, and while it was OK, I didn't find it particularly compelling --- it crashes on some web pages, and while the Javascript engine was supposedly faster, it didn't seem to make a difference to me --- until last night, when I upgraded to Chrome 1.0.

My first impression was: Holy crap this is fast! To make sure that it wasn't just my impression, I told my friend Peng-Toh about it. Peng-Toh ran the Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark on his Mac, and came up with:

OS/Browser	Time
osx firefox 3.0.4	3023ms
vmware xp firefox 3.0.4	3202ms
vmware xp chrome 1.0	1271ms
osx safari 3.2.1	3118ms

That's right, even running in a VM, Chrome on the same machine beats native Safari --- by a factor of 2.5X. That's despite both rendering engines being WebKit. Ok, just to make sure that it wasn't just the geeks thinking it's fast, I asked my girlfriend to upgrade on her machine. She too noticed the speed difference.

Bottom-line: Chrome just went from being my secondary browser to being my primary browser. If you haven't been using it for a while, now's the time to try it. Kudos to the Chrome development team!