Chrome delivers 300% performance boost for cloud-based CRM software

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Chicago (IL) - When Google released its Chrome browser earlier this year, the company touted an entirely new Javascript engine as one of the software’s highlights. This particular feature is designed to increase the performance of web applications and make their interfaces much more responsive. Although Safari 4 and Firefox 3.1 betas offer similar optimizations, Chrome is generally believed to have the edge. However, most sites do not integrate Chrome-specific optimizations to take advantage of the browser engine, which is due to the tiny market share. However one company recently showed what Chrome may be capable of.

Avature, a provider of Enterprise 2.0 Human Capital Management solutions, announced the release of a new Chrome-optimized version of its Recruiting CRM software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, which recently made it into Human Resource Executive magazine’s top ten human resources applications. What is interesting in this new version is an optimized “Rules Engine” that delivers a 300% increase in the processing of complex Javascript programs in the Chrome browser, in addition to an improved user interface and better performance on IE7 and Firefox browsers.

The Rules Engine performs much of the heavy-lifting in the application. It enables business automation and allows users to build rules to manage lists, email communications and automate other tasks. For instance, using users can easily build up and tear down lists that provide a spreadsheet-like view of data records. These lists grow or shrink dynamically, based on a set of rules and a series of system events. Since cloud-based HR applications typically rely on a large number of records, the speed of performing data automation is directly related to the performance of the Javascript engine that executes data mining scripts.

To our knowledge, Recruiting CRM is the first commercial-grade web application that specifically takes advantage of Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine. Although a 4x performance jump compared to Firefox and IE7 is likely to drop once Mozilla and Microsoft have their new versions of their respective browsers in place, we doubt they will completely offset the 300% difference in speed. This actually shows there may be more to Chrome’s V8 than meets the eye or than Javascript benchmarks are showing. If Google manages to increase Chrome’s share of the market once the final version is released (and that usually can take quite some time at Google), other companies could possibly justify the cost of adding extra code to cater to the specific needs of the V8 engine.