So Is Chrome The Fastest Or What?

There have been a number of timed and anecdotal speed tests performed on Google Chrome over the last couple of days.

My personal testing: Chrome is the fastest browser I have ever used. More structured TechCrunch testing showed similar results: It’s fast. Here are what others came up with:

CNET agrees, but their approach was biased towards Google. Chrome came out way ahead in a suite of Javascript benchmark tests. The only problem is that Google hosts the tests and flat out says they tuned their V8 Javascript engine around them. The test does show Chrome coming out way ahead of other browsers (for me, Chrome had a score of 403 v. IE7′s 18). Try it out for yourself.

And also try the SunSpider Javascript benchmark test as well. Firefox’s new build, which runs the TraceMonkey engine, comes in marginally faster than Chrome there.

Today Yahoo’s Zimbra team also published their own test results based on how well different browsers ran the Javascript-heavy Zimbra web application. No surprise: Chrome beat the pants off of Firefox and (especially) IE8. But…Safari came in slightly ahead of Chrome.

So Is Chrome the fastest browser? Who knows. It clearly runs Javascript, at least, very well. But more important than these speed tests is Google’s build on Mac and Linux. A lot of users are still sitting on the sidelines, waiting to try it out.