How fast is fast?
Google (GOOG) advertised its new Crankshaft Javascript rendering engine as 50% faster than the current version of its browser yesterday. Computerworld did some testing and found out that Google was right…when tested on their own V8 testing platform.
Chrome’s “canary” build — the least stable and most advanced version of the browser — was 40.5% faster than the “dev” edition and 43.5% faster than the current “stable” version.
It also fared well in Firefox’s Javascript tester Kraken:
According to Kraken, Chrome canary was 55.3% faster at rendering JavaScript than the dev build, and 51.2% faster than the stable edition.
But Chrome barely registers any improvement in Webkit‘s Sunspider, the generally accepted Javascript testing app for Webkit browsers like Chrome and Apple’s (AAPL) Safari.
SunSpider scores showed that the canary edition was just 2.2% faster than the dev build and only 3.5% faster than the stable version of Chrome.
The reason for the discrepancy? Sunspider’s tests are many small tests where Chrome doesn’t have a chance to show its mettle. The real tests will start when Crankshaft starts hitting mainstream Chrome builds in the next month or so.