How was it faster than Opera? I have never seen another browser give you the previous page instantly when pressing the back button. Chrome needs to start its spinners for a few ms and then reflow the page, Opera just does it. I'm hoping that, with the move to WebKit, I can switch back to it.
EDIT: I just checked, Firefox does this too. It didn't, at the time that Chrome was released, though.
And the speed people refer to is JavaScript execution. There is no doubt that V8 was much faster than competitors a few years back.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5281540 Unfortunately, the original article looks to have been removed.
01 Sep 2008: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser...
TraceMonkey was in the works since late Spring 2008. Apple was also doing more advanced JS performance work before Chrome launched.
V8 had the world-class VM team and at least two years lead (Lars Bak went to Google in 2004; I met him in August 2006 when he was definitely working on V8), so it indeed was fastest at the usual benchmarks, but not by the sometimes-asserted 3x factor.
Maciej Stachowiak of Apple and I were both noting back then how V8's advantage seemed more like 1.3x at the time, but I don't have performance charts from Sep 2008 at hand. Perhaps someone reading does.
V8 got faster over time, as did other engines. Again, it's an excellent piece of work and tops by many measures, but not all -- see http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/17 for two large benchmarks of three where SpiderMonkey beats V8 currently.
/be
I remember, vividly, in Firefox: I would middle-click on a Slashdot link to load it in the background while reading the current one. My focused tab would begin to hesitate and sometimes altogether freeze for several seconds. In Chrome, only the spinning tab would be affected by their bloated DOM.
Try opera, there's a reason he's pointing out that it is different.
It took about one year and a half of JavaScript engine development for Chrome to surpass Opera in performance.
Since then, Opera has not been the faster browser anymore.