iOS Crome finns nu till iPhone och iPad!

Well, right and wrong.

First, on a perceptual front, there’s no doubt that marketing does convince people of things. And there’s also no doubt that sometimes people come to bizarre conclusions on their own for inexplicable reasons. So I have no doubt that some people happy about Chrome’s performance (but also some set of people who have come to all other possible conclusions as well) are somewhere between “misled” and “smoking crack”.

Also, you’re right that by not being able to use V8 (or even Nitro), we’re a hell of a lot slower in executing JS on iOS than mobile Safari. Sunspider is a particular craptastic benchmark to use to make any kind of a point, but the point would stand regardless.

OTOH, as many other vendors have — rightly — argued at times when our marketing folks started emphasizing JS speed, JavaScript is not all things. In particular, Chrome for iOS does have a few tricks up its sleeve:

(1) We use our own network stack. AFAIK (I haven’t done any work on iOS Chrome directly), it supports SPDY and the numerous other things we’ve done to try and increase network speed (many of which, such as an increased number of parallel connections and DNS prefetching, have been done by other vendors as well, including Mozilla).
(2) We support aggressive prefetching, especially for the omnibox and top search results, which really does have truly enormous effects on actual usage that are harder to capture in a benchmark. (Omnibox prefetching on desktop, where typing is easier and faster than on a phone, already can save several seconds for a single page load.)
(3) The omnibox itself reduces cognitive load, and thus leads to both a perception and reality of a faster and easier UI.
(4) Inasmuch as people start doing tasks that Chrome provides good accommodation for — e.g. loading sites on their phones that they were last looking at on a synced desktop machine, or flipping over into incognito mode — having UI affordances for those tasks makes them faster and easier.

These aren’t just marketing, and you even note that we “did a great job” with our UI. But you don’t seem willing to credit that UI, let alone the other bits we still do have control of under-the-hood, with actually making people’s browsing truly faster. Chrome is not definitively slower than mobile Safari; it’s slower at Javascript, and it happens to be faster at some other things in some circumstances. An unfortunately vague and nuanced statement, but I’m an engineer, not a marketer, and I’m not going to lie for my company’s product. Or easily let misimpressions stand uncorrected.

(Postscript: I don’t think you’d find a person on the Chrome team who wouldn’t love to be able to actually ship the full-fledged, multiprocess, V8-using, way-the-heck-better-port-of-WebKit-than-the-iOS-team-uses Chrome on iOS, and make it definitively fast in the way that this release isn’t. But you won’t get me to lay odds on when Apple will ever allow such a thing.)