Google Chrome was created to make the web a better place. A short while ago Squirrel Fish Extreme, a Javascript engine even faster than Google’s freshly minted V8, landed on the WebKit repo. Google has set off a chain reaction, spurring the race to create the next generation of browsers.
From Summer of JavaScriptCore:
The three most competitive JavaScript engines are the SquirrelFish Extreme engine in WebKit, the V8 engine in Google’s Chrome browser, and the TraceMonkey engine that is slated to appear in Firefox 3.1. I used the latest development version of each, from the respective SVN or Mercurial repository. In particular, the version of V8 used here is the bleeding-edge branch, which is a bit faster than the version that shipped with Chrome. Here are some SunSpider numbers on my 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro, using 50 runs with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.1%:
SquirrelFish Extreme: 943.3 ms
V8: 1280.6 ms
TraceMonkey: 1464.6 ms
it's funny, the more i use Chrome (for windows), the more unstable it seems to get… crashes a lot more, can't handle sites with flash, hangs every time i close a tab… all that to say, i'm switching back to Firefox
My main browser is actually Firefox 3.0. I can't really use a browser without Adblock Plus. Also, I'm primarily a Mac user and Chrome isn't out for Mac.
I don't think Google is trying to take over the world with Chrome, just give the other browsers a kick in the pants in terms of technology. In that perspective, I think they've done well.