The heat is on: Latest Google Chrome closes the gap with Safari 4, Firefox 3.1

Based on our current virtual obstacle course scores, we can say that the new Google Chrome beta fared about 10.6% better overall than the previous production build. The new Chrome's performance improvement in the HowToCreate test was easily within the 25% to 35% zone that Google promised if not better, with a 25.9% improvement in average render time and a doubling of the load time, for an index score of 2.98 for Chrome 2 versus 1.81 for Chrome 1 on that suite. But the cumulative Celtic Kane scores were almost dead even: 256 for Chrome 2 versus 257 for Chrome 1. Since our index averages the eight scores in the Kane suite, Chrome 2 actually better in the average, having bested Chrome 1 in its handling of string objects in that test. So Chrome 2 scored an index of 4.73 versus Chrome 1's 4.88.

In the SunSpider suite, Chrome 2 was generally faster across the board, except for control flow which slipped a couple of microseconds, giving Chrome 1 the edge there. The huge improvement there was in the handling of RegEx expressions -- textual pattern matching. Chrome 1 had an index score of just 1.29, while Chrome 2 turned in a 13.41 -- the best score of any browser to date in that test. Safari 4 Beta's score there is only 11.25, and Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 scored a 1.68.

After our article last week that first tested the five major development browsers, we received some requests from readers that we include the latest production version of Firefox 3.0.7 in the mix, just for comparison. In today's tests, Firefox 3.0.7 received a total score of 4.68, versus a score for the latest Firefox 3.1 beta -- what will eventually become Firefox 3.5 -- of 7.85. It is not an order-of-magnitude improvement for the latest Mozilla Firefox Web browser beta -- at least, not the one that Mozilla's engineers had hinted about -- but it's a big improvement nonetheless.