Chrome 10 Beta Supercharges Performance - Chrome beta boasts 66% JavaScript speed boost

Just when it was looking like Google Chrome couldn't get any faster, a new beta shows up and shatters that impression. On Thursday, the search titan announced a new Chrome 10 beta that boosts JavaScript performance by a substantial 66 percent, as measured by Google's own V8 benchmark, and implements GPU-accelerated video playing. The beta also changes the way users set options, and lets them sync passwords.

In my own speed tests on a 2.6-GHz dual-core laptop, Chrome 10 beta showed significant improvements on Google's VE benchmark and Mozilla's Kraken, but on Webkit's SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, it was nearly identical, and still trailed Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate's 231ms. Here are my results, showing how Chrome 10 improves on 9:

Benchmark	Chrome 9	Chrome 10 Beta	Percent Change
Google V8 v6 (higher is better)	5164	8294	+61
Mozilla Kraken (ms—lower is better)	15657	8541	+45
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms—lower is better)	286	284	>1

Writing in a post entitled "Faster than a speeding rabbit: speed, sync, and settings" on the Google Chrome Blog, product manager Jeff Chang and product marketing manager Li Chan described the GPU video acceleration: "Users with capable graphics hardware should see a significant decrease in CPU usage. In full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%! This means better battery life so you can keep going and going like that pink bunny in the commercials."

Google is also keen to keep up with the competition and offer feature parity, so this beta also introduces GPU acceleration. It’s early days, but GPU use will kick in if you are watching video in full screen mode. Laptop users will be happy to hear this cuts your CPU workload by up to 80%.
While performance always seems to be a focus for new Chrome releases, Google has also been trying to improve the user experience and in particular the settings for its browser. With that in mind the options pane has had a major revamp.
Instead of opening in a separate window the options now pop up in a tab. You’ll see a search box on the left making it simple to just search for a setting, and Google has made it super-simple to share setting locations. Whenever you access a setting it has a corresponding URL displayed. Copy that and you can share a link with anyone trying to find setting X.