Is Google Chrome's V8 engine really that good?

Question

Did anyone have time to take a look at it?

I've read a bit and it promises a lot, if it's half what they say, it'll change web programming a lot

Answer 1

It's really speedy. Visibly so. I was pretty impressed with its performance compared with Firefox 3. Already made it my default browser.

Answer 2

Perhaps a bit anecdotal but comparing runs between Firefox and Chrome showed a significant difference in benchmarks.

http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html

Try for yourself.

Answer 3

The browser is incredibly fast in general, and Javascript is very fast in particular.

Edit: The benchmark showed Chrome to be 1.73x faster on average than FF3, and 14.8x faster on average than IE 7. String manipulation is IE 7's weak point, which I'm told has been improved greatly in IE 8.

Answer 4

Yes, V8 is extremely fast on Vista x86 -- up to 50 times as fast as IE 7 for most benchmarks I tried. More impressively, GMail running under Chrome had one-quarter the memory footprint of GMail running under IE 7. This can probably be attributed in large part to V8.

Answer 5

I am finding it visibly much faster on Vista x64 than IE8 and FF3.

Answer 6

Did anyone do a comparison against safari, which is also based on webkit,

Answer 7

It's two times faster than Firefox 3 on my Windows XP box. FWIW, the updates in Fx3.1 are supposed to make it an order of magnitude faster.

Answer 8

I've compared it to Firefox and Internet Explorer using this link: http://celtickane.com/2009/07/javascript-speed-test-2009-browsers/ (was http://celtickane.com/webdesign/jsspeed.php)

The difference is impressive.

212ms in Chrome, 341ms in Firefox 3, and 2188ms for Internet Explorer 7.

Answer 9

The speed initially seemed substantially improved. One interesting thing is that it keeps locking up the Google REader tab, it's gotten the sad-face at least 5 times over this morning...

Answer 10

I ran the aformentioned sunspider javascript benchmark on FF3 and Chrome and got over a 2x speed increase moving from FF3 to Chrome (on a Vista 64 system - Core 2 duo 6600 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM).

The links above show you my results - I'm very interested to see what, if any, difference the underlying OS makes.

That being said, I agree with Google that Javascript is becoming more and more important, and that the other browser makers should spend some time on optimizing it.

I love being able to drag and drop tabs - that's something I've needed for over 2 years now...

Answer 11

It's definitely fast. Gmail, Google Reader and Yahoo mail all load instantly. Can't say that for FF or Opera.

Answer 12

While in Microsoft:

Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft's latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself, research firm Devil Mountain Software found in performance tests. According to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network, IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of RAM and spawned 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations

Slashdot

I imagine how @rjrapson came with that conclusion. Every blog post I see, calims it's faster.

Answer 13

I have compared Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 and Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 on SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark with the following results:

• Firefox - total: 2900.0ms +/- 1.8%
• Chrome - total: 1549.2ms +/- 1.7%

and on V8 Benchmark Suite with the following results (higher score is better):

• Firefox - score: 212
• Chrome - score: 1842

and on Web Browser Javascript Benchmark with the following results:

• Firefox - total duration: 362 ms
• Chrome - total duration: 349 ms

Machine: Windows XP SP2, Intel Core2 DUO T7500 @ 2.2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM

All blog posts and articles that I've read so far also claim that V8 is clearly the fastest JavaScript engine out there. See for example - V8, TraceMonkey, SquirrelFish, IE8 BenchMarks

"... Needless to say, Chrome’s V8 blows away all the current builds of the next-generation of JavaScript VMs. Just to be clear, WebKit and FireFox engines haven’t even hit beta, but it looks like the performance bar has just been set to an astronomical height by the V8 Team."

Answer 14

Yes I have seen the bench marks and V8 does appear to be objectively faster but as for

it'll change web programming a lot

I personally do not think the bottleneck is currently in javascript, but rather in bandwidth