Benchmarks are not completely representative to "real world" performance. There are always some areas which work very well in particular browsers and areas in which some browsers are absolutely terrible.

You can get practically arbitrary order of browser performance by mixing "do-good" and "do-bad" tasks.

Subjectively, since recently Opera often feels faster than Chrome [1].

Not always, it's maybe 50/50 split, sometimes Chrome is faster, but in overall subjective experience Opera feels better (by a tiny bit).

I suspect it's because Chrome excels mainly at "behind-the-scene" more numerical type of tasks, while Opera is faster at more tangible "in-your-face" things like DOM manipulation / rendering / canvas.

Also, again subjectively, Opera's performance feels better "balanced". Chrome is crazy fast in some areas (see V8 benchmark), but slow/average in others. Opera is fast almost everywhere, so it has less bottlenecks.

-----

[1] More objectively, from my stuff which has numerically comparable performance:

http://alteredqualia.com/canvasmol/#DNA_crystal

On my notebook, this makes:

- 29 FPS in Chrome 7.0.517.0 dev

- 42 FPS in Opera 10.62 (45% faster)

Though for some simpler molecules, Chrome is sometimes much faster. Go figure.

-----

Another test:

http://alteredqualia.com/attractor/#TPsP2jWzkUx22cuNN5XToJNV...

- 525 ms Chrome

- 483 ms Opera (9% faster)

[1 math unit, 1 rendering unit]

-----

Case for "Chrome-has-faster-math", above example with "high detail" (which does more calculations compared to rendering):

- 1611 ms Chrome

- 2152 ms Opera (34% slower)

[10 math units, 1 rendering unit]

-----

Above with "wallpaper" settings (much more math, but also significant rendering):

- 4304 ms Chrome

- 5116 ms Opera (19% slower)

[20 math units, 4 rendering units]

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/opera-10-6-tops-performanc...