No other popular browser is larger in size than Google’s Chrome. The current nightly build of Chromium is exceeding a size of 80 MB.

Chromium 10.0.635.0 with Webkit 534.16 and V8 3.0.7 is now a 33.5 MB download and will consume 80.5 MB on your hard drive. Three months ago, on September 10, Chromium 8.0.550.0 (Webkit 534.10, V8 2.4.8) carried only 67.9 MB of weight. Since then Chrome has received quite a few upgrades, including Flash sandboxing as well as cloud and performance and upgrades, including the Crankshaft engine.

However, it is clear that especially cloud updates for Chrome OS as well as GPU acceleration support are impacting the size of Chrome. At its core, Chrome isn’t exactly the lightweight browser it appears to be . In comparison, the latest Firefox 4 Beta 9-pre trunk build has an unzipped size of 25.8 MB.

The developer versions of Chrome and Chromium can be customized with many features that aren’t available by default in the stable Chrome version, the user experience is essentially the same between Chrome 8 and Chromium 10. The latest nightly builds are, however much faster in certain JavaScript apps: We just clocked the V8 v5 benchmark at a new record score of 10,017 on our Dell XPS 7100 test system. The old 8.0.550.0 browser scores 6358 points. In the updated version 6 of V8, the newer browser comes in at 8038 points versus 4922.

However, Chromium 8 was clearly faster in Sunspider (0.9.1) – and won with 261.5 ms. Chromium 10 currently requires 274.6 ms on our test system.

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