With all the Chrome OS and Chrome Web Store hoopla today, a post over at the Chromium blog went mostly unnoticed -- and it's definitely noteworthy. Freshly baked in the Chromium snapshot builds and Google Chrome Canary is Crankshaft, an enhancement to Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine that has yielded some impressive gains.

Crankshaft is made up of four components:

• a runtime profiler for identifying code that uses a significant number of CPU cycles
• a base compiler for generating code more quickly
• an optimizing compiler which re-compiles code pinpointed by the profiler
• deoptimization mechanism that allows Crankshaft to recover from overly-optimistic code optimizations

Crankshaft offers improvements in both startup time and maximum performance, with Google noting gains of up to 12% on JavaScript-heavy pages. On Google's own V8 benchmark, Crankshaft helps Chrome post scores which are almost 50% higher than previous versions with V8 alone.

...And for those of you wondering when Chrome was going to hit version ten, you've got your answer. It's already happened to the Canary build -- so hit your wrench menu > About Google Chrome and restart to update yourself to Chrome X! There's not much new that you'll notice right off the bat, with the exception of a selectable Instant option and experimental geolocation features in about:flags.

Google Chrome Canary hits v10, Crankshaft turbocharges V8 JavaScript engine originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:46:00 EST.