This evening I had the chance to download Google’s newly-released (and by “released” I mean “beta”… hey, it’s Google) web browser, Chrome, and give it a try. They weren’t kidding when they said V8, the new JavaScript virtual machine in Chrome, should raise the bar for next-generation JavaScript implementations: it’s fast. How fast?

The above results are from Mozilla’s Dromaeo JavaScript performance test suite, so there’s little worry of this test being intentionally biased in Chrome’s favor. The scores above are the averages of five test executions on each web browser, running in the same Windows XP virtual machine on the same computer. Some notes:

• Each run of the test was performed in a fresh browser instance.
• IE 7 was unable to complete the test suite without crashing, although I am using a special, standalone version of IE 7 so this may be particular to my installation.
• In order to prevent IE 8 from complaining about the long JavaScript execution time, I set set the registry value MaxScriptStatements = (DWORD) 0xffffffff in the key \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Styles.

So yes, Chrome does in fact have a much faster JavaScript engine than any …

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I finally got around to trying the Linux version of Opera 9.50, the newest version of the Opera web browser. Here’s what I think of it after a couple weeks of using Opera 9.50 as my main web browser, particularly how it compares to Firefox 3.0.

Things I like in the latest Opera:

• Tab management, particularly the “Create Follower Tab” feature: You can make a new tab in which any links from the current tab will be automatically opened. This can be great for reading the news.
• Site preferences: Manage cookie, JavaScript, and other preferences on a site-by-site basis from a single location.
• The new rendering engine has better CSS compliance than Firefox, and it seems to handle poorly-designed sites with much greater grace than in previous versions of Opera.
• Plugins such as Adobe Flash appear to be handled using a child process and IPC, making the browser resilient against Flash crashes. This can be done with Firefox too, but it requires the separate nspluginwrapper program, which isn’t installed by default on 32-bit versions of Ubuntu.

Things that I still prefer about Firefox 3.0:

• I initially loathed it, but the Awesome Bar has really …

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