Google today released a new public Windows beta version of its Chrome web browser, which comes with a handful of new features. However, the true improvement happens deep under the hood as Chrome 5 is substantially faster that Chrome 4, Safari 4 and Microsoft IE9 Platform Preview. It is stunning to see how quickly the browser sails through current Javascript benchmarks.

The new beta with version number 5.0.342.8 adds just two new features – the ability to disable auto translations of websites as well as more flexible auto-fill forms. The actual progress seems to be happening under the hood as Chrome 5 beta is not only substantially faster than Chrome 4, but also about twice as fast as the current Microsoft IE9 PP.

It is unclear how the race will end, as Microsoft claims it hasn’t tweaked IE9 for Javascript performance yet. However, the performance of Chrome 5 is nothing short of impressive: In Google V8, the browser scored 4456 points on our system which compares to 3804 of Chrome 4 and 654 of IE9 PP. In SunSpider, Chrome 5 is the first browser to break the 400ms barrier with 387.8ms, compared to 783.6ms of IE9PP. In Celtic Kane, Chrome 5 came in at 503 points vs. 263 of IE9 PP.

Chrome’s nearest rival remains Safari 4.04, which, however, loses ground as well (more test results here). Kudos to the Chrome team. We are interested to see if Mozilla can surpass IE9 in performance with the release of Firefox 3.7 and if the two can gain some points on Google.

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