In a recent interview with BusinessWeek, Lars Bak has spoken about his development role in Google’s Chrome web browser.

Google Chrome runs a JavaScript engine called V8, that Bak and his team build from open-source frameworks up to be the fastest JavaScript render out there. Google’s focus on JavaScript comes from the number of web applications that are now written in the language and designed specifically to run inside the user’s web browser – Google Mail and Google Maps are good examples of these.

V8 was designed from the ground up to support these applications. Some claim that Chrome can run JavaScript up to 56 times faster than Internet Explorer, but Bak is cautious as this depends on the benchmarks used. In the interviews, Bak admits that other browsers are catching up – Mozilla’s Minefield alpha browser is also using a new rendering engine – but raising the bar in the industry was what Google aimed to do, and it seems that they have managed just that.