Google Chrome: Performance and First Impressions

Performance

Chrome launches very quickly, bested only by IE7 in start time:

Measuring web page rendering performance was a bit more difficult to quantify, I tried loading web pages both locally and over the web and came up with the following table (the results are an average of 3 runs, the browser's cache was cleared each time):

Chrome varies from being the fastest of the four to being the slowest, depending on what you throw at it. Even rendering Google’s own application pages ranges from being unbelievably fast (3.12 seconds for my Google Spreadsheet test vs. ~5 seconds for the other browsers) to average (Google Docs).

Chrome never really feels slow, thankfully non-IE browsers are much better off today than they were several years ago (not to mention that even our slowest CPUs are significantly faster - farewell Pentium 4). The simple UI actually gives off the impression that the browser is faster than it actually is in many situations.

Performance is good, well done Google.