If I had to rank-order the various humiliations I've seen, this comes near the top.

Microsoft: "here's our best stab at what a great browser looks like - and it took us 14 years to get here".

Google: "we've been working on a codebase for 2 years. We decided to release it as a patch to your browser. Our brief foray into this area has improved your best effort by 10x".

Ouch!

On one hand, I think this is pretty funny.

On the other, I think it's a stunning display of just how much muscle Google really has to flex (and perhaps more importantly, how much they're willing to flex).

It will be interesting to see how Google continues to treat companies it considers competitors over the next few years. The big guys like Microsoft will be able to handle it; but the smaller guys might have to start getting a little worried.

Anyone have real-life applications of this benchmark? Similar to 3D-gaming and CPU/GPU benchmarking in general the results (and winners) depend highly on the parameters of the test. Although at the end of the day nothing matters except real world performance.

Can someone point to an application where this performance improvement can be demonstrated?

It's only logical to conclude that Chrome standalone must run at least 8 times faster than Internet Explorer 8? Otherwise their gui would be much slower.

Why wasn't there a post about this before? This post must be complete bullshit.

Using Moore's law does that mean Google's development is approximately 6 years ahead of MS?

(8 times faster code doubles the speed once, doubles the speed twice, and doubles the speed a third time.)

Not really very relevant. Anyone who knows what a benchmark is is already running something other than IE. And who would install a Chrome plugin for IE when they could just as easily use Chrome?

there needs to be a way to force the rendering agent to be used, this would make the plugin agent much more viable instead of having to call cf: in front of a web address. I can see this being a good thing but also could be a bad thing, this doesn't fix the browser vulnerabilities that are still out there, merely your rendering engine. I would hate for people to be misled into thinking their version of internet explorer 6 is the latest and greatest because of the chrome rendering agent.

This is not good news. IE is going to stick around a lot longer now -- sigh!

~~~cold hearted~~~

I didn't think anyone would have the patience to make this comparison.

Without knowing what site was used in the testing and in what manner (rendering speed, javascript speed, xml parsing speed ??) is the chrome plugin 8 times faster, I would rather keep my fingers crossed.