The Javascript virtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split and handled by a separate team in Denmark. Existing implementations were designed for small programs, where the performance and interactivity of the system weren’t that important but web applications like Gmail are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOM manipulations and Javascript. The resulting V8 Javascript engine has features such as hidden class transitions, dynamic code generation, and precise garbage collection. Tests by Google show that V8 is about twice as fast as Firefox 3 and the Safari 4 beta.

Several websites have performed benchmark tests using the Sunspider Javascript Benchmark tool as well as Google’s own set of computationally intense benchmarks, which includes ray tracing and constraint solving. They unanimously report that it performs much faster than all competitors, including Safari, Firefox3, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer8. While Opera has not been compared to Chrome yet, in previous tests, it has been shown to perform a bit slower than Firefox 3, which in turn is slower than Chrome.