Why is Chrome so fast?
To enhance experience for webbrowser users Google Chrome has set as one of it goals to speed up browsing. To accomplish this, two interesting things can be mentioned : the DNS prefetching and the new Javascript engine, V8.
DNS prefetching
about:dns
Chrome does this by scanning links, domain names and allready translating them into IP-addresses.
According to the Chromium Blog visiting a site is “on average about 250ms faster than traditional browsing, and the occasional but painful 1-second-plus delays are almost never experienced.”
DNS prefetching just resolves domain names before a user tries to navigate, so that there will be no effective user delay due to DNS resolution.
The most obvious example where prefetching can help is when a user is looking at a page with many links to various unexplored domains, such as a search results page. Google Chrome automatically scans the content of each rendered page looking for links, extracting the domain name from each link, and resolving each domain to an IP address.
You can see what time is saved by typing “about:dns” in the address bar.
And “about:histograms/DNS.PrefetchFoundName” gives details of the DNS resolution times.
about:histograms/DNS.PrefetchFoundName
V8 JavaScript Engine
The Javascript engine is a very important part of each browser. Very much websites have web applications and the responsiveness depends on the Javascript engine. Chrome has in it a new Javascript engine, called V8 and it’s fast and reliable. For those tech nerds who want to dive into this, read all about it on the Google Code pages and watch this video from Google engineer Lars Bak.
More info :
Google Code’s page on the V8 Javascript Engine
DNS Prefetching (or Pre-Resolving)
