Google Chrome 5 WebKit - Firefox - Opera Comparisons - BusinessWeek - 0 views
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Gary Edwards on 23 Jun 10Chrome runs as close as any browser can to the bleeding edge of Web standards. Though it uses the same open source WebKit rendering engine as Safari, it doesn't reliably support the controversial, proprietary CSS3 transformation and animation tricks that Apple's built into Safari. However, like every browser I tested, it earned a perfect score in a compatibility test for CSS3 selectors, and it joined Safari and Opera with a flawless score of 100 in the Acid3 web standards benchmark. Chrome 5 also supports both Apple's H.264 codec and Mozilla's preferred open source Ogg Theora technology for plugin-free HTML5 video, and it beautifully played back HTML5 demo videos from YouTube and Brightcove. In XHTML and CSS tests, Chrome was surprisingly slower than Safari, despite their shared rendering engine -- but the race was close. Safari rendered a local XHTML test page in 0.58 seconds to Chrome's 0.78 seconds, and a local CSS test page in 33 milliseconds to Chrome's 51 milliseconds. Note that Chrome still rendered XHTML more than twice as fast as Opera (1.67 seconds) and left Firefox (12.42 seconds--no, that's not a typo) eating its dust. In CSS, it also beat the pants off Opera (193 milliseconds) and Firefox (342 milliseconds). But Chrome shines brightest when handling JavaScript. Its V8 engine zipped through the SunSpider Javascript benchmark in 448.6 milliseconds, narrowly beating Opera's 485.8 milliseconds, and absolutely plastering Firefox's 1,161.4 milliseconds. However, Safari 5's time of 376.3 miliseconds in the SunSpider test beat Chrome 5 handily.