Comments on: Microsoft Does Its Own Browser Benchmarking

By: Microsoft Previews the Revamped Internet Explorer 9 Platform

Microsoft Previews the Revamped Internet Explorer 9 Platform — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:00:23 +0000

[...] been busy souping up their JavaScript engines to run Web apps as fast as possible, Microsoft has contended that JavaScript performance isn’t that important. That position may stem in part from the fact that IE8 runs JavaScript at a crawl compared to the [...]

By: Chrome: Faster Than Safari? | Technologizer

Chrome: Faster Than Safari? | Technologizer — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:10:29 +0000

[...] slower). The test only tells you so much about browser performance. And maybe Google, like Microsoft, is saying that “fast” is about more than traditional speed [...]

By: Victor Ellis

Victor Ellis — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:58:51 +0000

As an aged user, I would like to say that having installed IE 8, I find it very slow to start up (Firefox starts up much faster). Any ideas how I can get rid of 8 and revert to 7 ??

V Ellis

By: Stilgar

Stilgar — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:06:21 +0000

As someone who’s a developer on a Web service, I just want to chime in and say that everyone on my team hates IE. It’s slow (at javascript) and horribly compliant with standards compared to the other browsers. There are some who believe that Microsoft deliberately keeps IE crappy because MS has yet to develop a strong Web service on their own (they bought Hotmail).

They also do other things that make it a PITA to develop Web apps, like having different versions of IIS for their desktop OSes than their server OSes. The IIS connection limits imposed by XP and Vista are also real fun when you’re running a copy of your code on your dev machine and you hit the connection limit after testing in two or three browsers. I could go on, but I don’t want to sound too much like John Dvorak. :)

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:49:11 +0000

Let Microsoft spin this all they want. The fact is that based on my experience, it’s the slowest browser I’ve tried. It’s amazing to me how much faster Chrome is than IE.

By: larryv

larryv — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:28:34 +0000

tom b: Chrome is at 1.0.154.48, by the way. While a newcomer it may be, beta it isn’t.

By: larryv

larryv — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:25:18 +0000

jdg: Last I checked, Firefox runs on Mac OS X and Linux. That makes more or less 100%.

Also, if your website doesn’t run on Safari or Camino, which are standards-compliant browsers, you’ve probably messed up something pretty badly.

By: jdg

jdg — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:00:02 +0000

huh? Limit their audience? You’re funny. FF, IE and Chrome run on 94% of the computer audience. Mac’s only account for 6% (or less) of computers so it’s not worth developing for it. To bad for you fanboy.

By: Marc

Marc — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:57:32 +0000

tom b: You mean IE and Chrome limited their audience to 95% of PC users? Er… yeah…

By: Marc

Marc — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:55:03 +0000

Of course it will be skewed to Microsoft’s benefit, just like the Firefox one is skewed to theirs, and the same for Google and Apple. Microsoft could have included a few extensions for Firefox, just to emulate what the average user is running.

Of course speed doesn’t matter. Perceived speed does. IE8 shows a half painted tab that doesn’t respond to any mouse tabs, just for a split second while loading a new tab. Chrome hides the entire tab creation process, and shows the new tab in a smooth manner once all the background work is done, and so appears quicker. Which one actually is I don’t know, but if Chrome, which its limited feature set, isn’t significantly quicker, then I’d be disappointed.

Even if IE8 is quicker, will users want to sacrifice their favourite extensions for a few milliseconds? Browser extensions may slow Firefox down, but they also make certain things quicker.