Google Chrome Speed

The JavaScript virtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split off (as was Adobe/Mozilla's Tamarin) and handled by a separate team in Denmark. Existing implementations were designed "for small programs, where the performance and interactivity of the system weren't that important," but web applications such as Gmail "are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOM manipulations and Javascript." The resulting V8 JavaScript engine has features such as hidden class transitions, dynamic code generation, and precise garbage collection. Tests by Google show that V8 is about twice as fast as Firefox 3 and the Safari 4 beta.

Several websites have performed benchmark tests using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark tool as well as Google's own set of computationally intense benchmarks, which includes ray tracing and constraint solving. They unanimously report that Chrome performs much faster than all competitors against which it has been tested, including Safari, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8. While Opera has not been compared to Chrome yet, in previous tests, it has been shown to be slightly slower than Firefox 3, which in turn, is slower than Chrome.Another blog post by Mozilla developer Brendan Eich compared Chrome's V8 engine to his own TraceMonkey Javascript engine which is newly introduced in Firefox 3.1alpha, stating that some tests are faster in one engine and some are faster in the other, with Firefox 3.1a faster overall. John Resig, Mozilla's JavaScript evangelist, further commented on the performance of different browsers on Google's own suite, finding Chrome "decimating" other browsers, but he questions whether Google's suite is representative of real programs. He states that Firefox performs poorly on recursion intensive benchmarks, such as those of Google, because the Mozilla team has not implemented recursion-tracing yet.

Chrome also uses DNS prefetching to speed up website lookups

Google chrome built for Building a secure browser is a top priority for the Chromium team; it's why we spend a lot of time and effort keeping our code secure. But as you can imagine, code perfection is something almost impossible to achieve for a project of this size and complexity. To make things worse, a browser spends most of its time handling and executing untrusted and potentially malicious input data. In the event that something goes wrong, the team has developed a sandbox to help thwart any exploit in two of the most popular vectors of attack against browsers: HTML Rendering and JavaScript execution.