> It was significantly faster than any browser of its time
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.
Firefox and Chrome both do this. It is part of the memory caching, which many people disable without knowing the consequences. There were many news articles back around Chrome's release that advised "speed-ups" by disabling cache to free up memory.
And the speed people refer to is JavaScript execution. There is no doubt that V8 was much faster than competitors a few years back.
It is enabled for me, pages are served from memory (it doesn't request them from the network again). It's just that Chrome is slow at it, while Opera/FF are instant.
Maybe this is due to their infinite caching? There was a article on HN a while back about how it impacted performance after a while[1]. Turns out checking a large cache of files (apparently with a poor choice of data structure backing the search) for visited links ends up being non-negligible a year into browsing.
I thought I saw that being debunked by a Chrome developer, I remember him saying that this was changed a while ago, and now the cache has a maximum limit. Clearing the cache doesn't seem to do anything for this problem, though (the page still reflows). It doesn't take more than a few ms, but it's annoying when other browsers do it instantly.
javascript - exactly - before Chrome v1 no one was even talking about speeding up javascript in the browser space. Chrome v1 blew everything out of the water with that. And js speed has a big impact on everything these days, pretty much
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.
Speaking as a dev, but from a user's POV, the thing that made jump to Chrome on release day was the immediate recognition that a single bogged down tab did not impact the responsiveness of the chrome (heh) and other tabs noticeably.
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.
For me the speed-up I liked in Chrome was the UI responsiveness, and start-up time. And it seemed to just load pages faster. My current browser of choice is surf from suckless.org (although it's pretty limited) because it somehow just manages to load pages in a quarter the time of Chrome/Firefox (on my computer/internet connection, anyway). I'm sure it'd lose in js benchmarks though.
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.