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Microsoft’s Live Search engine can provide what the company calls "instant answers" to various questions, and the company said on Wednesday it plans to expand the feature in the next month.

Current instant answers show up for some queries for encyclopedia facts, traffic, and horoscopes, according to a blog post from Live Search Product Manager Theo Vachovsky. He then offered a teaser for coming attractions: "Check this blog in a month to find out about other cool new instant answers on Live Search."

Microsoft declined to share details, but did confirm that "new instant answers features will be releasing in the next month."

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On the SunSpider JavaScript peformance test, the new Google Chrome beta edges closer to TraceMonkey-enhanced Firefox. But the cutting-edge ‘Minefield’ version of Firefox edges ahead, too.

(Credit: CNET News)

Google began updating Chrome users with the new beta version, and my performance tests show the company has ratcheted the browser’s speed up another notch.

Google Chrome’s latest version, 0.3.154.9, shows a 37 percent JavaScript performance improvement over the initial beta released two months ago.

JavaScript is a programming language used to add some pizazz to innumerable Web pages, but more importantly from Google’s perspective, to power sophisticated Web applications such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Gmail. JavaScript is also up against Adobe Systems’ Flash and Flex, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and HTML 5, in the competition for what’s the best foundation for Web applications.

Using Google’s JavaScript benchmark I pitted the newest Chrome beta, version 0.3.154.9, against both the initial beta from September and the more raw 0.3.154.3 developer release from mid-October. A higher number is better on this test, and the first beta scored 1,851, the 0.3.154.3 developer release 2,265, and the new 0.3.154.9 beta 2,546.

Google’s tests aren’t the only game in town; many use the SunSpider test. Here, too, the new Chrome got a notch faster, getting the test done in 2,546 milliseconds compared with 2,904 milliseconds for 0.3.154.3. (We couldn’t test the first version because the testing site was down at the time.)

The new Chrome score catches closer to the 2,250 millisecond score of Firefox 3.1 beta 1 with its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine enabled. (Tech-Recipes has useful instructions on how to enable TraceMonkey.)

On blogger Matt Asay’s advice, I tested Minefield, the cutting-edge version of Firefox that’s updated daily. (Minefield is downloadable from Mozilla’s FTP site for those willing to use very untested software).

It had the best SunSpider score so far on my machine, 2,147 milliseconds. However, Firefox still lags on Google’s speed test. Chrome’s latest score of 2,546 is miles ahead of the 215 score from Minefield.

The latest beta version of Google Chrome is a notch faster on Google’s JavaScript speed tests, where a larger number is better. The cutting-edge ‘Minefield’ version of Firefox takes a step back from the the 3.1 beta 1 of Firefox, without the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine enabled. All the Firefox versions trail Chrome on this test significantly.

(Credit: CNET News)

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