A couple of years back, Google kick-started the speed race among browsers with Chrome’s superlative performance. The very first release of Chrome blew everyone away with its V8 JavaScript engine, which was miles ahead of the competition. Now that some of the other competitors like Opera have caught up (and perhaps surpassed Chrome), Google is doing it again.

A short while back, Sundar Pichai, VP of Product Management, unveiled Crankshaft – a new compilation infrastructure for V8. Judging from the benchmark results posted at the Chromium blog, it won’t be an understatement to say that Crankshaft dramatically improves Chrome’s JavaScript rendering speed.

Google used its own V8 benchmark, in which Chrome has traditionally done well. They didn’t disclose how Chrome with Crankshaft stands up to its competition. However, judging from the above graph, it should comfortably outperform everyone including Firefox 4, Opera 11 and Safari 5.

Chrome with Crankshaft is currently available from the bleeding edge repository and in canary releases. Try them if you are feeling adventurous.

Chrome started the latest round of speed wars, and Crankshaft will once again allow it to establish its supremacy. While Firefox and Internet Explorer are stills struggling to catch up with Chrome’s current performance, with Crankshaft, Chrome just took it to the next level. Well done Google!