Chrome Fast for Android

The Chrome Beta for Android is solid Chrome. That means it inherits my favorite speed features from its older desktop siblings. Some of them are novel to mobile browsers. For all of them, the absolute performance benefit is usually greater than on more powerful desktops.

In no particular order, here are ten I'm most excited to see together in the mobile world.

1. Remote debugging Probably the most important thing a browser can do to make the web fast is to provide developer tools which make it easy for web developers to build fast sites. While there have been some cutting edge projects to bring parts of DevTools to mobile, the full suite hasn't been available until now. Use the Timeline, Profiles and Network panels to find the trickiest bottlenecks.
2. SPDY Also supported in the stock Android Browser on Honeycomb systems and newer, SPDY significantly reduces the number of costly RTTs that are incurred during a web page load. Keep in mind it only works with servers that speak SPDY. Apache users may be interested in following the progress of mod_spdy.
3. Hardware accelerated graphics Getting this right was one of the largest efforts in bringing Chrome to Android. As a result, scrolling is buttery smooth on most reasonably efficient web sites. If your site isn't as smooth as you want it to be, take a profile in the Timeline panel to see where time is being spent. Often there are patterns for avoiding layouts or style recalculations to get back into the fast zone. A notable exception is CSS animations. While Chrome's framerate is similar to other mobile browsers, they aren't nearly as smooth as they need to be. Improving them is an area of focus at the moment.
4. V8 Crankshaft Incorporating the largest performance improvement in V8's history allows a mobile browser to hold its own against even JavaScript heavy web sites designed for the desktop.
5. Navigation Timing Also newly available in the stock Android Browser on Ice Cream Sandwich, support for the Navigation Timing API allows developers to understand real users' page load times. This further increases the coverage of the API which is already supported in the lastest versions of desktop Chrome, Firefox and IE.
6. Large persistent cache As brought to note by Guy Podjarny, most mobile browsers have very tiny disk caches. Chrome's logic is based on the amount of disk space available, which means devices with plenty of free space are able to have significantly larger caches.
7. requestAnimationFrame Support for this API is critical for building efficient JavaScript animations. UPDATE: Henri Sivonen points out that this was unclear. In Chrome, this API is vendor prefixed as webkitRequestAnimationFrame while it is being standardized.
8. Preloading Searches in the omnibox trigger the preloading of high confidence results. In many cases this results in a near instant page load. By default this is enabled only when on WiFi, and that is customizable.
9. SSL FalseStart This relatively recent improvement in the Chrome network stack avoids a costly RTT during the establishment of SSL connections. The commonly high RTT on mobile networks and increasing use of HTTPS on the web make this a nice win.
10. HTML5 APIs Support for newer HTML5 APIs like Web Sockets, Web Workers and Indexed Database provide the building blocks for building high performance web apps.

Getting Chrome running on Android is only the first step. Now the really fun stuff can begin.