When I first heard about Google Chrome my reaction was “Huh? Another browser to support?” However, now that the browser has been released I’ve realized why they bothered. It’s simply the fastest and best looking browser for Windows right now. I love the look of it, but even more so I love the speed of it!
I am the developer and user of online accounting software for small businesses written using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). When I tried our software in Chrome out of curiousity I was astounded to see how fast it was – first, it loads regular web pages as fast or faster than Opera, my old favorite browser. Second, it loads and runs my accounting application much faster than I’ve ever seen before!
I was quite intrigued by this so I went and actually read the comic Google released about Chrome to find out more. Apparently they contracted a company to write a new javascript JIT engine to run javascript, which they’ve apparently done a great job of! And, it’s open source.
Hopefully Safari, Firefox, Opera, and (if we’re really lucky) Internet Explorer will take advantage of their Javascript engine so we can all enjoy faster Web 2.0 DHTML applications.
dobesland 
A team has already been working for a while on a new JavaScript runtime for Firefox. It should give Chrome some good competition. Just watch out for Chrome’s privacy and security issues (yeah, it’s still in beta).
Ah, I didn’t know about the Mozilla project. Are they doing JIT as well?
Firefox’s TraceMonkey, uses a new kind of JIT compiler, and is faster than Chrome’s V8.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/03/mozilla-fights-back-with-new-firefox-benchmarks/
Yep,
Firefox does it also in his dev version : tracemonkey.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_javascript_lightsp.html
Heya Dobes, I’m using GWT (and Ext-GWT) and did a light test on my app, it works faster/smoother than in FF2!
By the way, your app looks very nice. It’s nice to see fellow Vancouverites doing GWT development. I feel lonely before hehe.
@Sharfah, Tanguy: TraceMonkey, eh? Well, I look forward to the release. I’ve noticed Chrome is still a bit green in some areas, and it’s developer support is definitely not as good as Firebug
@ted: What are you working on? You didn’t leave a link!
Hi Dobes,
Sorry man, I’m an anonymous coward hehehe. As for the app I’m working on, I can’t really show anyone (management… sigh).
I really enjoyed the article. Its always nice when you read something that is not only informative but entertaining Familiarity breeds children