There was a lot of chatter yesterday about Google’s new web browser, called “Chrome” and its potential impact on the workings of the Web. Almost equally loud was some of the chatter amongst Mac users osut there about how Chrome is only shipping for installation on Windows right now.
Google Chrome for Mac, Right Now
As we’ve noted in the past, like with Photosynth for the Mac and Worldwide Telescope for the Mac, these apps already run on the Mac, with the help of VMware Fusion.
But people still have this misconception that running in a virtual machine will mean that an application won’t run quickly. This is why we’ve spent so much time making sure that VMware Fusion runs fast and light on your Mac.
Hot, Smokin’ Chrome
How does this relate to Chrome? Well, I got to play around with it yesterday on my demo MacBook Air, installing it in a Windows XP virtual machine with 512 MB of RAM assigned, running on VMware Fusion 2 Release Candidate 1.
And based on some of the blog posts that were flying around today about JavaScript rendering speeds—which is supposed to be one of the big innovations of Chrome—I thought I’d compare the results of Google Chrome for Windows, Safari 3.1.2 for Mac , and Firefox 3.0.1 for Mac on the widely used “SunSpider” Javascript rendering benchmark.
Now, keep in mind that this is only one type of benchmark, and browser performance depends a lot on what sites you visit, and what you’re doing. However, it was still pretty neat to see how smoking fast Chrome was, running on that XP VM in VMware Fusion 2.
The results, from slowest to fastest to run through all the tests: Safari for Mac, then Firefox for Mac, then Chrome for Windows, running in the VMware Fusion 2 RC1 VM.s
Safari 3.1.2:
Firefox for Mac 3.0.1:
Google Chrome Beta on VMware Fusion:
What’s even cooler, is that if you wanted to, using VMware Fusion 2’s Application Sharing features (you can watch a demo video here) means that you could make Google Chrome your default browser for *all* web links you click on in your Mac. That is, if you wanted to do some immersion testing yourself.
Pretty neat stuff!
