Chrome may have impressed with its speedy rendering and JavaScript performance, but there’s more where that came from says a Google developer.

Kevin Millikin, one of the team which worked on the V8 JavaScript rendering engine that underpins Chrome, gave a talk at the Google Developers Conference today where he explained that although the code is already pretty unique, there are plenty more avenues they can explore to eke out more performance.

“The internet has changed. Inside of Google we do almost all our work, except engineering, in the browser,” said Millikin, explaining that the public aren’t the only ones waiting on Linux and Mac versions of the browser. “We’re looking for it too. We’ve all got MacBooks.”

The company decided early on that it did not want to create a new web platform, which would upset web developers worldwide. Instead they chose to base Chrome on WebKit and have it act just like Safari, almost to the exact pixel. “We even implemented bugs, as long as they weren’t security bugs,” said the developer proudly.

In a talk which was deeply technical to say the least, Millikin ran through the ways in which V8 manages to overtake its rivals. One important method is hidden classes, which takes the messy and loose way that JavaScript handles objects and tidies it up behind the scenes by trying to lay an object-oriented model over it. Add some just-in-time translation to machine code and you already have a speedier engine.

However, there are more tweaks to come. In order to speed up creating new processes V8 already caches the heap at the appropriate moment, but this could also be done with new pages under the same site, and even refreshes – certain JavaScript elements will remain from page to page, and these don’t necessarily have to be recompiled.

It seems that not only has Google nailed JavaScript rendering already, but that it has some excellent engineers with some decent plans for the future to make sure it stays on top. Perhaps Firefox would be wise to take a look at V8. In fact, it may well be unwise not to do so quickly, with news that it is losing market share to the new, faster kid on the block.

“We’ve now entered a new phase in an arms race on JavaScript performance,” said Millikin, diplomatically not naming names. He explained that Google would be keen to see the open source V8 taken into other browser products. With two years of engineering and research behind the project, I’d say that it was the plan from the very start. “When we started the project the JavaScript landscape was pretty grim,” admits Millikin.