Chrome's canary build is marked as version 10, while the dev and stable editions are versions 9 and 8, respectively. The canary edition is the only currently-available version of Chrome that incorporates Crankshaft.

Chrome canary also showed impressive speed improvements over earlier editions in Kraken, the JavaScript benchmark created by rival browser maker Mozilla. According to Kraken, Chrome canary was 55.3% faster at rendering JavaScript than the dev build, and 51.2% faster than the stable edition.

In a third benchmark suite, however, the Crankshaft-equipped canary build proved only marginally faster than other versions of Google's browser. SunSpider scores showed that the canary edition was just 2.2% faster than the dev build and only 3.5% faster than the stable version of Chrome.

SunSpider, created by the WebKit project -- the open-source foundation of both Chrome and Apple's Safari -- is the most widely-cited JavaScript benchmark.

Google's Millikin and Schneider explained the small gains in SunSpider in their blog post Tuesday.