Google has automatically upgraded some users of its Chrome browser to a new version that is more stable and significantly faster than its predecessor. Chrome 2.0 also now includes several new features that were noticeably absent from the previous browser release, including full screen mode, form auto-fill, and the ability to remove thumbnails from the browser’s most-visited New Tab page.
“Making the Web faster continues to be our main area of focus,” said Darin Fisher, a member of the Google Chrome team. “Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, JavaScript-heavy Web pages will now run about 30 percent faster.”
Under the Hood
The scalability designed into Chrome’s V8 engine is important, noted Google Chrome software engineers Mads Ager and Kasper Lund. The growing complexity of Web applications means that the browser must handle an ever-growing amount of JavaScript code and objects, they observed.
“An increased number of objects puts additional stress on the memory-management system of the JavaScript engine, which has to scale to deal efficiently with object allocation and reclamation,” Ager and Lund explained. “If engines do not scale to handle large object heaps, performance will suffer when running large Web applications.”
To keep track of how well V8 scales to handle large object heaps, the Google Chrome team has developed a new Splay scalability benchmark based on a JavaScript log-processing module used by the V8 profiler.
“It effectively measures how fast the JavaScript engine can allocate nodes and reclaim unused memory” and “shows that V8 scales well to large object heaps,” Ager and Lund said. Even when “increasing the working set by more than a factor of seven,” the performance drop “is less than 17 percent,” they added.
The Google Chrome team also said it has devoted a significant amount of work to make the…