New Chrome Beta Proves Seriously Speedy

From PC World: The new beta of Chrome for Windows is nearly a fifth faster than its more stable sibling, but still lags behind speed leader Opera, benchmark tests show.

According to tests run by Computerworld , the Chrome beta, which Google launched yesterday, is the second fastest of the major Windows browsers . Chrome 5.0.375.29 also renders JavaScript about 17% faster than Chrome 4.1.249.1064, the current "stable" edition. Google simultaneously supports three lines of Chrome, ranked in descending order of stability as its stable, beta and dev channels.

But Opera Software's Opera 10.53 remains the king of JavaScript, with benchmark scores about 16% faster than those by the newest Chrome beta. The Norwegian browser first took the crown last February, when the browser debuted a new JavaScript engine dubbed Carakan, and surged past Apple 's Safari for Windows and Chrome, the former No. 1 and No. 2 browsers.

Other browsers held their usual spots in the latest round of tests. Safari 4.0.5 was only slightly slower than the stable edition of Chrome, and so held down the No. 3 spot, while Mozilla's Firefox 3.6.3 was just over half as fast as Safari and Chrome. Microsoft 's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), as usual, brought up the rear as the slowest of the five browsers in JavaScript rendering: IE8 was more than 12 times slower than Opera 10.53.

Computerworld ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite in Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (SP3) three times for each browser, then averaged the scores to arrive at the final rankings.

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