Google recently claimed that the company’s latest browser, Chrome 5 Beta, is the fastest ever. Thanks to the V8 JavaScript engine, whose “tuning, testing, and polishing” has made the newest version run blazingly fast. Although Google did not benchmark/compare speed against other major browsers, the test data does indicate a significant increase in speed at least over all previous versions of Chrome. As per the V8 benchmark data, Chrome’s performance has increased by an astounding 305% over the first beta.

Google says, “new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpider  benchmarks over the previous beta channel  release.” The new version will also support new HTML 5 features like App Cache, web sockets, file drag-drop and Geo-location APIs. Also, this is the first Chrome beta that will feature the initial integration of Adobe Flash player plug-in. What this means is that the updates for Flash Player will be automatically taken care by Chrome’s “auto-update” mechanism.

[source: chrome.blogspot.com]