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Chrome’s improved performance is partly attributable to its being based on the very fast WebKit rendering engine—the same one used by Apple’s Safari—and partly to its new JavaScript engine, V8. JavaScript performance is one of the more touted features of Chrome, and in the well-regarded SunSpider performance test, it came in with a time of 3471ms, compared with IE8’s 12,866ms and Firefox 3’s 6,701ms—a marked and impressive improvement that gives a lot of credence to Google engineers’ claims that this will pave the path to far richer JavaScript-based Web applications.

Chrome’s process isolation takes that of IE8 a couple of welcome steps farther: It not only isolates tabs, but also plug-ins such as Flash, and it offers a Task Manager for your open tabs and add-ins. I haven’t seen either of these capabilities in a browser yet. Not only does Chrome isolate simultaneous tabs, but it even isolates individual tabs sequentially; when you navigate to a different domain, the tab process is thrown out and a new one started—just in case there were memory leaks resulting from the previous site. I wondered what effect this would have on the Back button (whether it would remember the session information from the earlier site) but I didn’t run into problems, and was able to check my Webmail using the Back button even after moving to another site.

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