You're misinterpreting the results.

> operations per second (higher is better)

Using `new` is in red, while using `Object.create` is in blue, and the red bars are markedly larger than the blue in all but a few cases.

Thus, using `new` is, for the most part, much faster than the Crockford way. In Chrome, it's tons faster.

That's not actually what the Crockford link says [1] it talks about using array and object literals in place of `new Object()` or `new Array()`. Which does indeed seem faster [2].

[1] http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/11/13/javascript-we-hardly-new-... [2] http://jsperf.com/new-vs-object-literal