I did a very quick speed test to see how fast Chrome is. BTW I did notice instabilities with the Flash plugin.

I run three benchmarks (on the same machine, all browsers open, running the benchmark only in one at a time):

• the V8 Benchmark Suite
• a nice SVG & Canvas speed test
• Sebastien Gruhier’s PGF test page (used earlier in a previous test).

The first test is more JavaScript oriented, where the new V8 virtual machine can shine, the other two test graphical abilities.

And the results are…

The V8 Benchmark Suite results are:

• IE 7.0.5730.11: Score: 16 (Richards: 10; DeltaBlue: 8; Crypto: 23**; RayTrace: 20; EarleyBoyer: 31)
• Opera 9.52 (10108): Score: 102 (Richards: 57; DeltaBlue: 73; Crypto: 65; RayTrace: 142; EarleyBoyer: 290)
• Safari 3.1 (525.13): Score: 59 (Richards: 35; DeltaBlue: 45; Crypto: 50; RayTrace: 81; EarleyBoyer: 116)
• Firefox 3.0.1: Score: 77 (Richards: 78; DeltaBlue: 88; Crypto: 56; RayTrace: 65; EarleyBoyer: 111)
• Chrome 0.2.149.27: Score: 676 (Richards: 858; DeltaBlue: 777; Crypto: 650; RayTrace: 345; EarleyBoyer: 946)

There were significant (cca. 10%) fluctuations in each result, but it is obvious that in this (biased) benchmark Chrome is at least 6.7x faster than the next best, and 42x faster than IE.

The SVG & Canvas results:

• IE 7.0.5730.11: does not support SVG & Canvas, so did not complete
• Opera 9.52 (10108): SVG: 1.657s; Canvas: 1.75s (both beautiful)
• Safari 3.1 (525.13): SVG: 4.312s (edges clipped); Canvas: 1.5945s (beautiful)
• Firefox 3.0.1: SVG: 1.46s; Canvas: 1.095s (both beautiful)
• Chrome 0.2.149.27: SVG: 2.877s (line aliasing and clipping problems); Canvas: 0.993s (beautiful)

Again, there were some fluctuations, but we can conclude two things:

• Canvas is king in speed, and in Canvas Chrome seems to have a very slight edge over Firefox
• Canvas rendering quality is consistent and top notch among the browsers; SVG rendering quality is not consistent

The PGF test page results:

• E 7.0.5730.11: VML: 3390ms (both text and image are missing)
• Opera 9.52 (10108): SVG: 1282ms (image is missing on the right); Canvas: 485ms (both text and image are missing)
• Safari 3.1 (525.13): SVG: 625ms; Canvas: 328ms (text is missing)
• Firefox 3.0.1: SVG: 630ms; Canvas: 385ms (text is missing)
• Chrome 0.2.149.27: SVG: 593ms; Canvas: 281ms (text is missing)

Here Chrome seems to edge out the other browsers slightly, and IE is terribly slow (like it used to be). It is also plain that Canvas support is not complete yet in any of the browsers.

More later…