The article links to another article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b2, with Chrome still coming out ahead on performance. The JS engine is only one part of the equation. Chrome is faster than Firefox in a host of other things, like DOM manipulation and startup time, as well as the process-per-tab design makes it scale to multiple cores far more effectively.

Mozilla's lagging pretty hard on the innovation front. Everyone (except IE) has fast JS engines now. It's not really a differentiator. They aren't really doing anything notable long term, they're just gliding on their inertia. At least Google is actively working on Mac and Linux ports and extensions for Chrome, which are their two big catchup areas. Mozilla isn't even thinking about process-per-tab.

The faster JS is attractive if you use a lot of JS heavy sites,. I do not - in fact I mostly browse with JS off. Start up time is a once a day issue, it is not significant given all the other apps usually in my session, and will be even less so once I solve an issue with suspending to RAM.

I would like process per tab, but I like my Firefox extensions more (Scrapbook, Clear fields, No Script, Its All Text, Errorzilla, Download Helper, Add to Search Bar, Web Developer, No Squint, Search Status).

It'd be more interesting to see an article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b3, which recently came out. See https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/03/12/f.... You'll notice that one of the improvements in b3 is performance increase in the javascript engine.

You're right, though, when you say that it isn't just about the javascript engine's speed. So maybe we should wait until Chrome becomes a full-featured browser before we start touting its unbelievable performance. Remember when Firefox went 2.0 and one of the biggest complaints (that I remember) was how it had become bloated and wasn't as fast? Guaranteed the same will eventually happen to Chrome.

The b3 improvements are incremental, I doubt you'll see that big a difference in benchmarks.

There wasn't a whole lot of change from Firefox 1.5->2.0, Firefox 3.0 was the big refresh. I don't actually remember that much complaining about poor performance in Firefox 2.0 relative to 1.x.

What do you feel are missing features in Chrome that actually matter to people that you feel with materially impact performance significantly?

Yeah, and Chrome is ... well, it's a reasonable 80% solution for an alpha product from what people keep saying, but I still can't actually try the damn thing on my usual machine.

Because, once again, a bunch of software developers have forgotten to obey the %*&(ing theme. Chrome's URL bar successfully takes my foreground colours and completely ignores the background colour setting - so I get a white hostname and a light green path on a white background.

And Firefox 3's awesomebar and the way it handles self-signed SSL certs both make me incredibly happy - maybe chrome does these just as well, as I say I can't tell yet (FVO "can't" meaning "choose not to fill the prerequisites in order to be able to", of course :).

But it strikes me that there are probably a lot of issues like the one I'm complaining about that don't matter to most people but are a showstopper for -somebody- - and firefox has probably nailed almost all of those by now, either in core or in an addon.

Seems to me that the key point of chrome is to provide a decent amount of testing for the tech that's going to go into site-specific browsers for various google applications - really, truly going head to head with firefox doesn't really seem to me to achieve anything for google when -somebody- crushing IE is likely more important to them than specifically them doing it and firefox already has a head start.