Taking the web by surprise (didn’t they have a partnership with Mozilla?), Google has made another step towards a better web (or towards world domination, some may argue ) by releasing its browser, Google Chrome, yesterday.

Based on the WebKit rendering engine (the one powering Konqueror and Safari), but otherwise designed from the ground-up, Chrome promises web developers something they have being begging for since the (re)discovery of AJAX: blazing fast javascript performance and a multi-threaded browsing experience.

The performance gains come from the V8 javascript engine, that compiles javascript code down to bytecode, instead of just interpreting it.

Also, in Chrome, every tab is hosted in a separate (and sandboxed) process, which means that the javascript execution in one tab won’t impact negatively on the execution of other tabs.

You can read more on the online cartoon/book:

In the end, what does Chrome mean for us web developers?

In my opinion, it means that soon we will have better browsers.

The release of Chrome comes after two very important announcements: TraceMonkey, the new javascript engine that will power Firefox 3.1 and SquirrelFish, the new javascript engine that will power Safari 4.0, both of which promise tremendous peformance gains over SpiderMonkey (the engine powering Firefox 3.0, which should also be the fastest one at the moment).

The only browser left behind is, sadly, Internet Explorer, as shown by the benchmarks. Sure, IE8 is much faster than IE7, but it’s still way slower than any of its competitors.

The browser war has just got a bit more intense and Microsoft will have to do much better if they want to remain competitive.