Two days ago, Google signed off on a stable version of series 3 of its Chrome Web browsers; and since that time, users everywhere are noticing two not-so-subtle changes: First, the New Tab panel has a different (and, we feel, better) layout. Second, it's noticeably faster.
Google promised speed increases of about 30% (often quoted as "one-third") for users who'll find themselves bumped up to Chrome 3 (Google's browser diligently updates itself). Last month, Betanews tested that claim, and projected speed increases of more like 24.5% -- still in Google's ballpark, just along the edge. But since that time, we noticed the company had made dramatic strides, with both beta and dev channel (Chrome 4) builds posting record speed numbers in our tests, for gains that could possibly break the 40% barrier.
But was Google able to deliver those numbers to stable, non-testing customers? We've been thoroughly testing our own tests in recent days, in response to an overwhelming number of mostly positive comments from readers that diligently point out that even "real-world" benchmarks tend to be error prone. So we have a project that's "under construction" at the moment, with regard to nailing down numbers that folks can trust, and that represents the actual speed differences that users experience as opposed to the artificial speed differences imposed by many tests under unrealistic circumstances.
While we've been hard at work on this, we have some early numbers for Google's speed increases. And the answer to that big question is actually a surprising no: On our physical test platform, version 3.0.195.21 -- the first officially stable release of Chrome 3 -- ended up 6.5% slower than the record numbers for Chrome 3's last beta version.
On our Windows XP SP3-based physical test platform (it's XP that Google appears to be targeting for its Chrome OS netbook-oriented project), the first stable Chrome 3 posted an index score of 18.68, which is near the results we were seeing when Google first made its 30% speed boost claim. We estimate that the new Chrome 3 will be 24.1% faster overall on Windows XP than the final stable Chrome 2. By comparison, the current stable Firefox 3.5.3 posted an index score of 9.97 on XP SP3, and the latest nightly developers' distribution of Firefox 3.6 Alpha 2 posted a record score for Mozilla of 11.53.
For those of you not familiar with our index scoring system, it's based on a scale where 1.0 is the assessed performance of the slowest browser in current use on the slowest updated platform it can be used on: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (not the most recent IE8, which is faster) on Windows Vista SP1, on the same physical hardware. We chose a slow browser on purpose as something against which all our faster browsers may be triangulated.
source:betanews
