On Tuesday, Google touted a new optimization technology, dubbed "Crankshaft," that it added to Chrome's V8 JavaScript rendering engine, saying that the addition significantly boosted its browser's performance.

Google engineers claimed that Crankshaft in the V8 benchmark by 50%. "This is the biggest performance improvement since we launched Chrome in 2008," said Kevin Millikin and Florian Schneider, in a post to the Tuesday.

V8 is Google's own JavaScript benchmark suite.

Computerworld ran several versions of Chrome three times each through V8 on a Windows Vista PC, then averaged the three scores.

Chrome's "canary" build -- the least stable and most advanced version of the browser -- was 40.5% faster than the "dev" edition and 43.5% faster than the current "stable" version.