Final Chrome Version Boosts Speed, Compatibility

PC Magazine has performed follow-up tests of Google Chrome to see how much progress the browser has made since coming out of beta. The results show that its already fast JavaScript performance on the respected Sunspider benchmark has gotten even faster and compatibility with popular sites such as Facebook has improved.

The retest shows a 24 percent speed improvement, bringing this released browser to the same level of performance as Firefox's second beta 3.1 version. The new numbers far outstrip what Microsoft's Internet Explorer was capable of, by a factor of nearly 100, and even bested the released version of Firefox 3.0's results more than threefold.

However, there are still sites that kick back an "unsupported browser" message when a user attempts to view them using Chrome, such as Microsoft's Office Live site. Chrome has added a separate bookmarks window, though it still lacks many capabilities found in the competition, such as bookmarking multiple sites at once (also known as tabbed groups) and tagging.

In memory usage, Chrome still holds up the rear, using somewhat more RAM than Internet Explorer, and more than double what Firefox consumed in testing with the same set of ten content rich sites. In standards support, Opera is still the leader, garnering 85 out of 100 possible points on the Acid3 Browser Compatibility test from the Web Standards Project.