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Microsoft Says IE Faster Than Chrome and Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "According to its own speed tests, Microsoft's Internet Explorer loads most websites faster than both Chrome and Firefox when looking at the top 25 websites on the Internet. 'As you can see, IE8 outperforms Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0 in loading 12 websites, Chrome 1.0 places second by loading nine sites first, and Firefox brings up the rear by loading four sites faster than the other two browsers. Also, in case you missed it, IE loads mozilla.com faster than Firefox, and Firefox loads microsoft.com faster than IE, just for kicks.'"
I'll believe it when I see it for myself.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ofcourse IE loads mozilla.com faster, that's the only site you'd ever need to open with IE...
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I don't care if page loads faster if it doesn' show correctly. I bet lynx can load it faster than IE, but that doesn't make it the best browser.
IE8 doesn't even have full CSS3 support. No corner-radius? What the heck is MS thinking?
A more useful test would perhaps be testing firefox 3.5 vs ie8 and chrome 2.0? Firefox 3 is already getting "old".
How is this "good" they test 25 sites (who only views 25 sites?) and IE is faster 12/25. This doesn't seem very compelling at all. They don't even have a simple majority on their side.
I believe you.
Honest! I do!
Yea, right
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- Douglas Adams
...Microsoft tests its own release candidate software on its release candidate operating system and finds it faster than existing tried-and-tested software.
Very fair.
This doesn't mean a thing because while IE7 is fast; I use it at work everyday, it also breaks many web standards and does things in non standard ways. Speed isn't the issue here.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
...it's faster than the soon-to-be-old version of Firefox, and the soon-to-be-old version of Chrome. Way to stay ahead of the pack, there.
Though, to be honest, that's actually not to bad for IE.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Sure it loads up sites faster, that's because microsoft left out all the code that renders the web pages properly . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Now, how much more standards compliant is it?
How many websites does it load more correctly than the other browsers? How much more secure is it too?
"Loads most malware faster?" See, corrected it. It is IE after all ;)
Requiem
So, where can I download the FreeBSD version to test it myself?
Upcoming version of browser outperforms current version of competitors is not remarkable. A most relevant comparison would include Firefox 3.1 (already in Beta) and Safari 4 (also in Beta).
IE always has been faster. And I'm a firefox fanboy. Even with the bulk of add-ons stripped out, FF is still sluggish. IE is practically part of the OS, and that's a competitive advantage that FF can't beat. It just beats IE in every category other than speed.
I use IE 8. And it really is much better and right on par with Firefox ... EXCEPT I can't do online banking with Wachovia, and SLASHDOT corrcetly. I have to open a new tab to reply, or read a hidden comment.
And to comment I have to use Firefox. Which is what I am using now.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
Next time I'll write up an article claiming I run faster than Usian Bolt in 100 meters and submit it to /. I guess CmdrTaco would post it to the front page ;)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
that..Microsoft can no longer ignore Firefox, and has to come up with some such FUD. A healthy sign about status of Firefox.
hilarious
My [unreleased Microsoft software] runs [x] faster than your [available and fully released software].
What B$ from M$.
If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by statistical methods.
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
Yup, IE sure is as fast as you like. It can download, install and start running 90% of known internet malware in under 30 seconds.
As another bonus feature it does this mostly without requiring user interaction !
Open internet explorer, type address. Address get's removed and replaced with about:blank and I get some sort of weird error about the site not being available.
Open a new tab get a "Connecting..." message and my browser locking up for a few seconds.
Even if it were faster at rendering the actual page, if it takes that much more time and effort to begin typing the url they already lost.
I prefer Firefox, but even I know Opera is amazingly quick.
Regardless, since when is the speed of loading a website the measure of a good browser?
Also, it's worth pointing out that this test shows IE is faster at loading cached pages, not uncached websites. From their paper:
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
It would be interesting to know what exactly those sites send to the browsers (many sites check your user agent and serve up different files depending on your browser, mainly because of ie behaving differently to every other browser out there)...
It would also make more sense to load local caches of the sites, or network conditions could affect things (especially things like dns caching etc)...
IE is massively behind other browsers when it comes to things like CSS, so i would imagine it has a lot less processing to do (Seeing as it ignores big parts of the spec), lynx also ignores big parts of the html/css specs and it subsequently loads sites very quickly.
Also, comparing IE8 (in beta) Chrome (in beta) against firefox 3.05 (production and fairly old) seems a rather unfair and pointless test... And where were Opera and Safari in these tests?
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Just added up all the columns and found the following: Chrome: 88.32 s Firefox: 95.62 s IE: 88.30 s So if you visit those sites equally then you save 0.02% of your time by using IE over Chrome. But then you also have to be using a windows machine so you are wasting 100% more time dealing with a crashing OS.
IE always has been faster. And I'm a firefox fanboy. Even with the bulk of add-ons stripped out, FF is still sluggish. IE is practically part of the OS, and that's a competitive advantage that FF can't beat. It just beats IE in every category other than speed.
No. On Windows, IE starts faster than Firefox, much the same way Safari starts faster on Mac OS X (big surprise). However, even on Windows, the latest versions of Firefox beat IE in rendering and Javascript performance benchmarks.
Sounds like Microsoft has been taking lessons from the NVidia and ATI/AMD School of Benchmarking. Lesson one at that school: pick some subset of data and "optimize" your benchmarks until they make your product look faster.
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Seriously, these speed comparisons are getting stupid and pointless. The major delay in loading websites is waiting for the server to send it, and waiting for the thing to download. There aren't very many websites where the browser actually creates noticable delays on its own.
Can we please have a browser vendor focus on usability and security over "hey I can display this page 0.1 seconds faster then you!"
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
And what about Javascript ?
Frankly, GMail is super slow on IE7, not because of page loading, but because any Javascript in IE is super slow.
In TFA, there is no site with Javascript !
It's true that IE8 loads pages blindingly fast.
What MS is missing, however, is that not all pages are supposed to be all blue background + some white text at the top.
Kudos on the improvement MS. I only care which browser loads /. the fastest.
are the benchmarks done on OS X, linux & Windows?
I didn't RTFA, but it would be fair to run all applications on different platforms and see if it makes a difference. I bet they didn't do that.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
I can't agree. The startup time of IE on my work Windows PC is atrocious. Firefox beats it every time. And I use IE extensively every day.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
MS said "any list of websites to be used for benchmarking must contain a variety of websites, including international websites, to help ensure a complete picture of performance as users would experience on the Internet."
I wonder: did their test machine also include all the DRM, WGA, etc. that is bundled with Win/IE platform?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Well, it's a darn good thing that IE left it's standards at the curb and decided to make a faster browser. With all the hundredths of a second I am saving by switching to IE, I can afford to stop web designing (aka 'getting standards to work in a browser that doesn't care) and focus more on curing cancer.
Chromes Average load time of the top 25 sites was 3.5328.
Firefoxes Average load time of the top 25 sites was 3.8248.
IE8 average load time of the top 25 sites was 3.532.
Not a big different between Chrome and IE8 using Averages. I bet that difference is covered in the error margin of the test they concluded also. I wonder what ways we can come up with to prove that Firefox is faster or chrome is faster by just using numbers we want to.
Well, I'd have to access what version of IE you're using on what version of Windows and what's the rest of your config look like. Because in my experience, with no plugins or other addons installed on either browser and starting from a clean start, with the default configs for each browser, IE6 starts faster on Windows XP. IE8 seems atrociously slow to start on XP, although I've not measured its performance on a tuned Vista configuration.
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...IE loads some sites quicker?
Because it does not even understand half of the features of the site (some CSS stuff, much DOM stuff), and just ignores them. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
How long does it take using IE 8 to connect to www.mozilla.org and download firefox ?
Having whacked the figures into excel and totalled them up.
The results are...
IE8 88.3 Secs
Chrome 88.32 Secs
Firefox 95.62 Secs
Way to go IE8 you are 2 hundredths of a second faster than Chrome overall...
Nothing to see here move along...
This is a stupid thing for Microsoft to do, because:
(a) if an independent source verifies the test, then nothing will be reported (because there is nothing to report)
(b) if an independent source refutes the test, then Microsoft are liars.
(c) if no independent source tests the test, then no one will believe Microsoft, except those that want justify their existing use of IE.
The smart thing to do would have been to get a completely independent and respected source to run the original test - or to destroy the reputations of IE6 and IE7 by comparing them with a vastly improved IE8 (which would have been trusted results from Microsoft).
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
... it has not a single add-in running too...
I stay with my AdBlock Plus, Firebug, BetterSearch,DownloadHelper, FireGestures, Greasmonkey/Greasefire, Venkman, Resurrect Pages, SmoothWheel, TabMix Plus, TagSifter, Web Developer bar, and clean interpretation of the standards. TYVM.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
... though which 10 you never can tell.
Take a closer look and you will see that a lot of the tested websites are mostly used as search engines and few are Chinese. Others like mozilla.com, adobe.com, microsoft.com are not exactly sites that normal users visit very often.
For searches there is a search box in Mozilla Firefox and chrome which is a lot easier to use and change at will than IE8's.
BTW a lot of sites don't load well on IE8 no such problem with chrome or firefox.
Plus I can't install IE8, no windows.
I don't use IE or Chrome or Opera or any other browser because Firefox is the only one that works the way I want to work. Remember the days when software worked for you instead of you working for it? FF lets me customize every last bit and piece and as long as it is comparable (ie 3 seconds instead of 1) then I am more than happy and will be unlikely to switch.
I am sure there are plenty of users who take all the defaults and learn to work within the constraints of IE or etc. but I betcha a majority of \. readers like to set things just so.
-Joe
It's basically one of those when they prove that Windows is more ${YourMostImportantFeatureOfOs} than ${SomeOtherOsUsuallyGnuLinux}. News -1 redundant.
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
as most of us would admit, it's usually the fastest in real world useage...
How about if I did a supercar test, and only included Fords and GM, but missed out Lambos, Ferarris and Maseraris...
Since IE is the "Default" browser it is the most exploited, as such it costs any organization the most money to secure. (if you have 10K workstations and new IE bugs pop up all the time, your patch cycle becomes hell even if it's automated). If you want to save your company tons of money; switch to Fire Fox with NoScript and AdBlock+ Opera is still wikked fast; and chrome is pretty neat but I "Like" firefox because of the module, Stumble Upon alleviate soo much bordem that it's worth it's weight in gold.
The load time of IE6 is irrelevant. It's a nearly 8-year old browser, service packs notwithstanding. Lynx starts up faster than just about anything, but you don't see people bringing it up, because it doesn't belong in this discussion.
Good point, and Firefox can't touch IE in terms of damage caused by becoming infected with a trojan.
Seriously.
Hmm, so GM, Ford and Chrysler set the standard for cars in North America?
Preponderance alone does not set the standard. If it did, what exactly would that standard be today?
MS IE 5 or 6?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
After reading the original report I tried to reproduce a simple test for the adobe home page. I used Firefox 3.0.7 and pre-loaded the adobe home page (as suggested in the report), I closed the tab and opened a new one and reloaded the adobe home page. It loaded in 2 or 3 seconds instead of the 9 seconds in the report. I am not sure what to make of this report if a simple experiment to reproduce the measurements fails on the first try. I ran the test on Windows XP Professional SP3.
Wait, wait, who cares about startup times. You mean, like, you actually close your browser?
Now, don't tell me you also reboot your system.
Let's be fair here. For the longest time, the argument of Linux booting slowly has been rebuked with a tongue-in-cheek "I see where you come from, but real systems needn't be rebooted every other hour to remain stable". For me it's the same with browsers, I close them once every couple days.
Yet, sadly, I have to agree that FF has a problem here. It becomes really, really sluggish (and a mem hog) after a few days...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I *have* noticed that IE7 handles one very specific thing MUCH faster than Firefox - copying large amounts of tabular data. If I load up a table with ~5 columns and ~2000 rows, it takes FF3 much longer just to highlight all of those rows, and attempting to copy that data to the clipboard usually kills the browser entirely. IE7 just plains handles it, usually in a matter of seconds. Not a common use case at all, and don't ask me why I'm even trying to do this, but as an FF fan I'd prefer it do EVERYTHING better than IE, and here's one instance where it doesn't.
IE sluggishness is so bad, that even though we aren't allowed to have any other browser on our computers, I use Firefox. That's right, IE is so bad, I risk disciplinary action to avoid having to use IE. The best part about the "You will use IE7 or higher only" mantra of our idiot IT department is that our time card website doesn't work with anything beyond IE6, so we all have to run a stupid little script that fools IE7 into thinking it is IE6.
There are little similarites between Safari on MacOSX and IE on WinDOS
Companies have always made comparisons between their products and competitors' products. Sometimes they even skew the comparison so their product is shown as better. MS is no different. First they use their unreleased future product IE8 against their competitors' current products. Second they use a somewhat meaningless metric: Speed to load. The main complaints about IE in general is that is unwieldy, doesn't follow standards, and it is slow. Ironically this test only proves that. I'm not an expert in web browser engines but it seems to me that an engine performs faster when it does not have to render. Coming across a webpage with things it can't render, it will perform faster as it ignores those elements. Mozilla.com is probably a lot more web standards compliant than Microsoft.com. So IE will load mozilla.com faster as it will ignore many things. The reverse is true for Firefox on microsoft.com as it will ignore all the nonstandard elements. In the end the comparison is rather meaningless until they change the conditions.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Comparing in-development software to old releases of software is not really a fair test, I would like to see a fair comparison against gecko's new javascript engine.
Just saw one from the VA this week, stating it cannot be used on their networks.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When you say WinDOS, are you referring to Windows ME or Windows 98? Windows XP and Vista are based on the NT kernel, and only have DOS emulation.
And I say that I am better looking than clooney, doesn't make it so.
In other news, Intel reports that its new chip is faster than chips from AMD, Kellogg reports that Frosted Flakes are tastier than any other breakfast cereal, Marlboro has verified that unfiltered cigarettes extend your life by decades, and a scientific study by U2 indicates that commercial Irish pop is superior to all other forms of music.
Sheesh...
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
Quite frankly, support for protocols and languages is more important than a 1 second change in speed. One of the reason the Flash plague has become so common is that the web environment has not kept up with the needs of web developers. SVG has come long after the need for such arose. There is still a lack however of advanced graphics programming. If web developers dont get what they need from the open spec AJAX environment, they will use a proprietary Flash plugin.
Notice that the number one website, Google.com, requires only about 0.2-0.3 of a second to load, which is significantly faster than most of the rest of the sites on the list. Seems reasonable that has something to do with it being number one.
Live.com, on the other hand, takes about 3.4 seconds to load. According to those numbers, I could pull up Google.com, enter a query, and get results before I could even load Live.com's home page.
I'm back. All right chums, let's do this.
When I say ahy ee it takes significantly more time then when I say chrome. Now Firefox is really slow by comparison.
I wonder what these 25 sites are? Wouldn't that be the 25 most-IE-optimized sites out there, perchance?
Yes, but what they forgot to say is that IE is faster than Chrome and Firefox, combined!
You think that's bad? I can't install Fire Fox on my work computer (I've tried), and USB ports are blocked from thumbdrives (so no portable FF). The worst part? We're still actually using IE6.
I never thought I'd long for IE7 so bad.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist" -I guess I should leave then
Does anyone take Micro$oft press releases seriously? I know they have the 'Wow' and all that, but I thought most of the world was waking up to what a seriously flawed product Microsoft has spewed these many years. Maybe 'Windows 7' will wise them up.
The Tea Party is just the GOP with a bag over its head.
So, apparently IE's overall performance isn't too bad even if their rendering accuracy and Javascript performance are not too great. I can believe that.
However: they didn't benchmark IE vs. Firefox with Adblock for overall page draw speed. For obvious reasons, I should think: it's incredible how slow to load many ads are. I can't imagine any version of IE without an ad blocker would ever be able to beat FF + Adblock Plus on a typical web page for load speed!
It's a shame they don't mention average loading times:
Having too much time on my hands did it for them: Chrome loads these sites on average in 3,5328 s. Fx needs 3,8248 seconds. IE needs 3,532 s.
Be aware that we are talking about outdated versions of Fx and Chrome, though Chome is just marginally slower.
they didn't stuff the ISO committees, or bribe Nigerian distributors, nor sabotage the OLPC, hide illegal agreements violating the GPL behind NDAs.... and the list goes on and on and on...
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
There's more than one way to analyse that table, and the one MS have chosen is not the most obvious one. On a simple total of the time to render all 25, it's a tie: IE at 88.30 seconds and Chrome at 88.32 seconds have a difference well within measurement error, so clearly the competitive advantage isn't as great as you think. Firefox definitely trails, but at 95.62 seconds it's only 8% behind.
You can run portable firefox from any drive. You probably just need to configure your proxy settings which you can get from IE.
That's right, IE is so bad, I risk disciplinary action to avoid having to use IE.
Stewbacca, please report to my office, and bring everything in your desk with you.
--the boss
For me it's the same with browsers, I close them once every couple days.
Pffft. Amateur. I run FF typically for a week or more at a time. Sometimes with hundreds of pages open.
Yet, sadly, I have to agree that FF has a problem here. It becomes really, really sluggish (and a mem hog) after a few days...
This I agree with. It's weird, too, because it doesn't use a lot of CPU time, or give any indication what's causing its sluggishness. It just becomes slower to respond. Bizarre.
Although I think it's got more to do with plugins and extensions than FF itself. If I leave a page to YouTube, or something else with a significant flash component, it becomes sluggish a lot quicker.
I've disabled a pile of extensions recently to troubleshoot another problem I was having, too, and it seems to be much better overall, now, regardless of pages loaded. I've only got NoScript, Web Spy, Unplug, Download Helper, and Distrust enabled at the moment.
I'm going to start re-enabling extensions a couple at a time, then use it for a month, and see if I can figure out what one's doing it.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
You are smoking something. I've put them side by side - IE6/7 and Firefox and hit enter at the same time on identical fresh install hardware.
Firefox has trounced IE 6/7 in my independent tests.
I bet we'll find that the specific sites in question use Microsoft technology and somehow specifically are designed for things that are faster in IE8. It wouldn't surprise me with how much development money MS pushes around.
No joke. I wrote a web application for a group of our users that displays a dynamically generated complex hierarchy of data and allows for line by line editing and updating using JS and AJAX for a smooth user experience.
Since the page is dynamically generated, depending on the users search criteria, they could load 10 objects, or 10,000.
With really small queries, all three of the browsers (IE6, IE7, FF3) render in about the same amount of time. With moderately sized results, say like up to 500, IE6 and FF are almost identical and IE7 trails by just a second. Once you get up above 6,000 objects, IE6 renders incredibly fast (45 seconds).
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
And the emulation is so good, that accessing a floppy drive freezes all activity on the entire machine, simply because the original circa 1980 IBM PC power supply was only capable of supplying 87.5 Watts.
There's a limit to how far you should go with backwards compatibility.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
You leave your browser open while playing games? Doesn't that eat up memory and cause slowdown?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
After multiple tests microsoft discovers wine runs IE faster than its own OS;
How does IE 8 stack up against Safari 4.0? [grin]
Differences of less than a tenth of a second aren't generally noticeable to users, so it makes no sense to measure down to the nearest 0.01 seconds. If all of the numbers are rounded to the nearest tenth of a second, then 4 sites are a dead heat, and Chrome is the overall winner.
Single winners (>0.1 seconds difference):
Chrome: 7
FF: 1
IE: 6
2 winners (=0.1 seconds difference):
FF, IE: 2
Chrome, IE: 2
Chrome, FF: 2
Dead heat: 4 (=0.1 seconds difference)
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
The number of sites loading fastest isn't a very good measure, I daresay nobody cares about the number of tiny wins but would be more interested in the overall picture. However totalling up the loading times shows a broadly similar picture anyway:
(Obviously GIGO applies heavily, and various comments show various criticisms, but putting that aside...)
Chrome 1.0: 88.32
FF 3.05: 95.62
IE8: 88.3
Again IE8 comes out in front, albeit to an even tighter margin to Chrome, and FF is shown doing poorly.
Also of interest, especially for constructive use, is how much faster the browsers are in relation to each other for specific pages. There's better statistical analysis but a simple [result-average]/average shows:
(/. doesn't seem to like tables html formatting)
Web Site Chrome 1.0 / Firefox 3.05 / Internet Explorer 8
google.com 20.00% / -5.71% / -14.29%
yahoo.com 35.22% / -18.24% / -16.98%
live.com 1.36% / -0.39% / -0.97%
msn.com -29.79% / 23.83% / 5.96%
youtube.com 9.38% / -0.24% / -9.14%
microsoft.com 3.98% / -5.79% / 1.81%
wikipedia.org -17.75% / -8.99% / 26.74%
blogger.com -4.02% / 33.54% / -29.52%
facebook.com 2.91% / 0.97% / -3.88%
qq.com -7.13% / 7.31% / -0.18%
baidu.com -3.89% / 0.92% / 2.97%
myspace.com -43.65% / 46.30% / -2.65%
wordpress.com -28.39% / 19.10% / 9.30%
ebay.com 2.27% / 11.59% / -13.85%
sina.com.cn -17.30% / -3.87% / 21.18%
mozilla.com -5.88% / 12.50% / -6.62%
adobe.com 2.81% / 1.41% / -4.22%
aol.com 14.54% / -2.53% / -12.01%
amazon.com -23.28% / 21.23% / 2.05%
apple.com 4.71% / 27.56% / -32.27%
soso.com 22.49% / -0.50% / -21.98%
xunlei.com -5.39% / 9.68% / -4.29%
163.com -0.07% / -0.87% / 0.94%
google.cn 26.22% / -22.26% / -3.96%
ask.com 14.81% / -6.35% / -8.47%
Pffft. Amateur. I run FF typically for a week or more at a time. Sometimes with hundreds of pages open.
Must be nice having a system with 32 GB of RAM. ;)
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Other than perhaps initial IE startup, Firefox outperforms IE by miles. If you use Firetune, which tweaks mem usage and adds a couple other nice features - along with an abundance of 1st class addons, Firefox is the best browser for speed, security, backing up, and just plain fun. AdBlock, Noscript and a few other addons help to enhance Firefox's own built-in security. What's not at all mentioned was the hardware - which has a defined impact on the experience while browsing. I'd even go so far as to say that Opera is much better than IE, as is Safari on Windows - With IETab Firefox can change itself to emulate IE, so pages that only function in IE-land also can work underneath Firefox. The developes at Mozilla also actively listen to their user-base, while M$ does pretty much what they want - much like GM, even though people wanted MPG and low cost cars, it still chose to pump out SUV tanks.
bwahahaha! I don't have access to IE 8, but I do have access to IE 7, FF 3, Safari 3, and Chrome. I have never gotten the feeling that IE 7 was faster. It *is* more stable (on my machines) than Safari and Chrome, on Windows, but not FF3.
Firefox all the way!
...I say that I'm faster than a Cheetah. Damn I'm fast.
Games? Here's a dollar, kid. Go buy yourself a nice candy bar while the adults talk.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
It's not the "non-standard" addons you have. I only got flash player and some adblocker, and I can say i have exactly the same problems you describe. And yes, I do feel like YouTube (or any other flash heavy page) has some bad impact on its performance, so maybe the flash plugin has a problem. Considering the amount of ram it uses after a while, maybe it's a mem leak problem.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As Linux based operating system usage is growing slowly but surely, it is irrelevant whether IE8 is faster than the competition (and we are talking tens of milliseconds, judging from the Microsoft table), because at least that competing product is available for Linux systems, while IE8 is not. Even if it is twice as fast, it is still a hard choice for those of us who are long used to navigate our Gnome and KDE desktops doing the same things people with Windows do. Not everybody will switch to using Wine+IE8 for that, and also it is not sure Wine will even run it at this point.
But then again, maybe IE8 under Wine is faster than native Firefox under Linux, so I may be eating my hat.
For all it is worth, Firefox has its share of problems, and I am a programmer. They have done so many strange decisions, like statically linking Cairo, polling stuff in the code instead of getting on with tickless kernels, disregarding laptop computer specifics with the aggressive idle hard disk and CPU usage etc. It will take months to clear that mindset and meet those problems face to face, instead of being stubborn about it and explain that "this is the way we do it".
In their report, they state their video capturing approach is only accurate to 1/30th of second (the frame rate). Since all their measurements are accurate to within +/-0.033 of a second, I would think that makes their averages also only accurate to +/-0.033 seconds. (statisticians correct me I'm wrong) Some of these numbers are within that tolerance, (i.e. Google, Live, Mozilla) and if they were counted as ties, IE8 ties Chrome 9 to 9...
Because MS knows that Joe the Plumber probably only ever GOES to 25 sites, so they could conceivably hardcode or partner with those sites SPECIFICALLY for IE. We're going back to a Compuserve mentality here. Since most computer users out on the Internet are retards who don't know the difference between Word, Windows, and the Web, its a clever marketing/design hack, but hardly indicative of better/cooler code.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Adblock Plus rules. It is the new Internet. Sadly, not known to most, and probably hated by most content providers (naturally). It is true however that it shaves off halves, if not more, from loading times.
Then you have the NoScript, which shaves off another half of what is left. But NoScript is manually configured, and is hence not very usable, since you do not notice that there is something wrong with a NoScript blocked JavaScript ridden site, until something breaks and you have to click the "Temporarily allow all this page" or make it permanent for your favourite sites. Anyhow, hardly usable for novices.
Thing is, as a luser I don't care about 'rendering time'. Sluggishness starting up the app is way more annoying...
You can't say "rendering is the most important thing" or "speed is the most important thing".
The most important thing is whatever is causing the user a headache at the moment. That is dependent on thresholds, of which for any single factor there will be three (in order):
(1) unusable to usable
(2) unacceptable to acceptable
(3) meaningful improvement possible to meaningful improvement impossible.
If any parameter of quality is unusable, improving that parameter trumps any improvements to quality measures that are usable or acceptable. If any parameter is unacceptable, improvements to it trump otherwise meaningful improvements to things that are acceptable. Meaningless improvements, either because something is better than it needs to be or because the improvement is tiny, never matter.
You have to put all these things together. If IE fails to render a website you need usably, it doesn't matter at all how fast it is. If it renders the site unacceptably, then you aren't going to use it unless the only alternatives are spectacularly slow. If IE and Firefox render the site about the same, but IE renders it twenty milliseconds faster, the difference is literally a blink of an eye, so rendering speed in this case would be effectively the same.
Many of the differences in the data are in the "blink of an eye" scale, and don't signify anything. Most of them seem to be matters of less than half a second, which we'd only care about if the speed was really, really bad all around. We can see this by looking at the outliers in the data.
A quick look over the data makes sina.com.cn seem like the most significant case, with rendering times ranging from 5.48 to 8.03. If you used that site, those speeds would be usable, but not acceptable, and a 2.55 second improvement to an 8.03 second load time would be most welcome. However that is just one case (in which IE happens to lose); given its outlier status in the dataset it's probably not worth making much out of. Other outliers favoring IE could probably be found.
Aside from sina.com.cn, in this data set speed differences would either be imperceptible (google.com, 20ms); the worst case would be well within the acceptable range (apple.com loading in 3.07 seconds), or the difference in load times meaningless on a percentage basis (163.com load times ranging from 14.75 to 15.02).
Given this dataset, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that there is no practical difference in load times between browsers. If this is so, a user should be interested in differences between browsers in the ability to render content correctly. This is a less straightforward question than speed. I haven't been following IE recently, but there's been a bit of a conundrum historically in that past versions of IE have had lousy standards compliance but many web pages have been designed so that only IE works.
Oh, by the way, we haven't even talked about security. For prior versions of IE, security has been the dominating concern.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Shouldn't these guys still be in the "Make it work" step of the "Make it work, (then) maker it fast, (then) make it nice" motto?
woohoo, now I can get viruses even FASTER!
this thing can populate your machine with virues, trojans, adware, scamware and other Microsoft products faster than ever!!!!!
still can't spell CSS
uhh, IE8 (according to 'their' tests...) just barely beat Chrome, and they're testing a version of Chrome that will be long improved on (Chrome Dev 2.0 destroys IE8 right now - and its a Dev build!) by the time IE8 comes out. Stupid.
Blow up my plane? Nuke ten of your airports.
Instead, if IE developers really wants my attention, they'll surpass Mozilla and Safari in proper CSS rendering. How fast browsers render pages is secondary to that standards support, especially when no one browser clearly and consistently blows away the competition in speed (as shown in this 25 browser test).
The summary lists IE as loading some number of pages faster than the others. What about the average times for the brwosers? After all, IE could load more pages faster, but absolutely suck on a few pages, while another browser loads them all in reasonable time, and is only slightly slower than IE for some of the pages.
Only linux users tend to worry about speed, and that's when they're running on a Pentium II.... ...isn't it a bit pointless to worry about your dual/ quad-core machine with 1Gb of video memory not rendering pages fast enough? It's not like I sit twiddling my thumbs on each page.
Again, like FF, this would have been a nice thing 5-10 years ago...
I don't really care about speed, who cares if a website takes 0.1 or 0.15 seconds to load. What I really care about is standards. Sometime in the future I would like to be able to write one CSS layout and one JavaScript without different exceptions for each version of IE. But I think I have to wait for another 10 years for that to happen since right now people are still using IE6 ...
And well yes, I do care about speed when it comes to JavaScript and IE7 is really slow when it comes to executing JavaScript.
Besides, I don't see how your comment can apply to an end user. IE7 is the standard that the web is coded to. Sure, I complain about it, but only when I'm doing web development. For surfing the web, IE7 is fine because everything is made to work with it.
Hmmmm... For years now my IE use has been limited to my parent's Windows box where the history list contains little more than the Microsoft Updates site and getfirefox.net. Apart from a handful of minor glitches I don't have any problems with broken web-sites while using non MS browsers that are anything like as bad as the totally useless IE only sites we had a few years ago. I think that IE's competitors have now reached a degree of market share where you can't ignore them anymore. Every web-application I have worked on over the last few years was tested on both IE and Firefox and most of them were also tested for Safari. Almost all of the web-applications and web-sites I use are certified for Firefox as well as IE these days and even those that aren't certified work pretty much flawlessly on Firefox and even Safari 4 Public Beta anyway. The last holdout among my favourite web-sites to assure complete Firefox and 'limited' Safari compliancy was a local news site that caved in to popular demand about two or three years ago, admittedly this was to some degree thanks to the Flip4Mac plug-in which, slow and bloated as it is, is still a lot better than WMP for Mac was.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Fast, Good and Cheap: Pick any Two
MS certainly didn't pick Good !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_triangle
Who has time to play games? After cheating on my taxes (and my wife), I have no time (or money) for games.
Sorry games are fun. Anyone who says otherwise is...well...missing something. Go play with your coin collection or something.
Yeah, I have to say that you are an idiot. Apparently you don't browse the web with Firefox, you just load it. Yes IE loads faster, but that is all it does faster. That is all it has ever done faster. It uses more memory than FF and it loads websites and run Javascript much slower. FF, even with a lot of addons, is at least 10 times faster than IE.
The Mind Is Speculative and Interpretive. So speculate all you want and interpret this 00101101 01001110!
But what if I need to pull up the current average price of Mexallon in Jita?
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
IE also loads viruses faster... F Microsoft
I run FF3 with Adblock and Firebug for a week at a time (reboot every Friday) at work. I experience none of these slowdowns people keep talking about and I open and close tabs all day long for multiple pages developed for both IE and web standards.
All this on a terribly underpowered corporate assigned 1G RAM XP box.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Explorer has real rendering problems to resolve. The speed issue, to me, is MS posturing but the rendering part is a very big deal. Why doesn't ms use the same engine as chrome, firefox and Safari and leave it at that. I am a web developer who goes crazy when dealing with Explorer. Morgan's post is spot on BTW.
"Never stop questioning" - Einstein
although it loads malware faster than ever before
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
When 25% of your traffic uses it, you can't ignore it. All you can do is spitefully send out an "X-IE6-Detected: You suck, upgrade you bum" header and an extra stylesheet to feed them your alpha-blended PNG's as shitty GIF's. Well, that and pull your hair out trying to get some JavaScript stuff working.
What really irks me is when I see *NBC news shows using screenshots where the browser is IE6. Hey Microsoft IE Team, go bug your subsidiary's and get them to upgrade! Some hot shot CEO from $BANK is probably watching and will make their IT staff "upgrade" from IE7 to IE6--after all, CNBC is using it so it can't be bad, right? Then $BANK=>$FED.Bailout($BANK.FileBankruptcy());
On that note, has anybody seen a webpage screen shot on TV were the browser was not IE? And does it make one an official nerd when you date TV shows by the style of monitor they use and the OS they are running?
If you didn't disable the page file, all the browser data is mirrored on disk so Windows will just reallocate memory from the browser, Eclipse, whatever to the game and page everything back in when you're actually using that program again.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
32 minutes? Well played sir, well played.
I have a feeling that I may work at the same place you do... except for that IE7 thing. Our standard is still IE6 unless it's a Vista machine. The time card site has javascript that detects your browser and kicks you out if it detects anything besides IE. IETab works well for that. ;)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The Mozilla infidels are cowering in fear!
"Those American [open source] losers, I think their repeated frequent lies are bringing them down very rapidly.... Baghdad[IE] is secure, is safe."
I do not reboot my computer because of stability. I do it to save money on my power bill.
Ive done the measurements. I use my home computer 2-4 hours a day. The other 20 hours it is off. Not using power.
Firefox's 'slowness' comes from its dns lookup. Also the fact that IE will do multi things on multi threads. IE times out a invalid request much faster than Firefox does. Has since netscape. Many many many sites out there have lookups that are bad. FF3 is better than FF2 in this regard but it is still noticable. IE times it out almost instantly when it can not get at a site. FF waits 30-60 seconds 'just incase'. It is why bumping the number of servers you can talk to at once with FF has such a nice speed effect.
What do I use? Firefox. Why? I really like those plugins.
At first glance, one would think you'd be correct--the browser should let the OS cache the DNS. However, the browser also caches webpages and media--both in memory and on disk.
Something tells me it is the browser cache that forces all the browsers into caching DNS. I'm thinking mainly of the most common use of said cache--when you click on the back button. My hunch is if you relied on the OS to cache your DNS, clicking the back button would be a whole hell of a lot slower.
I switched to Chrome precisely because I was always getting slowdowns and freezes on Firefox. I played around with it for a while and hoped the 3.0 upgrade would fix things, but it continued right on through. Not OFTEN, but often enough to bug me.
I spit my coffee all over my keyboard when I read this headline. That is the funniest thing I have ever heard. After 15 years in the IT industry using every operating system from win3.11 to Solaris as well as almost every browser (once you get past the GUI there are really only a handful of engines). I use Chrome at home Because it is wicked fast both to start up and to render pages. I use Firefox at work when I can. IE is most defiantly the slowest browser overall Chrome being the fastest I have tried lately. Maybe that is why Microsoft websites block Chrome. Admittedly the turtle that is IE8 I have at home is a beta version running on XP but still come on.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
Firefox certainly has a slow url bar, it freezes the machine for seconds when you try to access it. And on something like tv.coms boards is so slow to render the boards its intolerable.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Every OS might implement things different. How does the OS cache something like google.com:
sparky nginx # host google.com
google.com has address 74.125.67.100
google.com has address 209.85.171.100
google.com has address 74.125.45.100
Will the OS give the browser a different IP each time the API is called? Will it pick one and use it for a while? Is the behavior different on each OS? Who knows!
When you are a cross-platform browser that has to cache content, implement keep-alives, and do other crazy things, I bet it makes a hell of a lot of sense to cache DNS lookups yourself.
"Fun"? Unix terminals are "fun". Now get the fuck off my lawn!
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
a browser detecting liquid nitrogen valve.
Seriously, is anybody going to switch browser because it loads a page two tenths of a second faster?
Plus, doesn't Adblock makes the whole "benchmark" moot.
No sig today...
my old laptop had 1 gig of ram and firefox was a serious memory issue. my new laptop has 3 gig and it doesnt matter any more. now i never have to restart it and run whatever extensions i want to.
some people need to upgrade their tech.
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-272792.html
Avg. with stdev:
Chrome: 3.53 +/- 3.52 sec
Firefox: 3.82 +/- 3.45 sec
IE: 3.53 +/- 3.45 sec
Quick-and-dirty (I didn't test assumptions) paired T-test returns the following:
Chrome-Firefox: P=0.11
Chrome-IE: P=0.99
Firefox-IE: P=0.054
You decide.
I know you are just trolling, but heck I'll feed you, you should be proud...
First of all, it is amazing how Microsoft's unreleased products perform so well on Microsoft's own tests. But I for one am a FOSS user yet would still love to see these things be true (though let's face it, at least this browser benchmark is a bunch of BS, refer to the rest of the comments for more info) MS actually doing an improvement in a new OS release would be nice for a chance. Even though I don't use dows directly, I will every once in a while have to use it, being at work or at college or some public computer, improving windows performance is a good thing.
If windows 7 is really faster than XP (which I kind of doubt) it would be very useful, to me since I run windows on a VM to compile and test stuff for it and to use certain hardware that refuses to cooperate, like my scanner.
Regardless, some actual competition from MS' part instead of the "I will sue you!" or the "I'll push-users not to take you seriously" memes from MS is good news for FOSS, because it will force FOSS to become better. I think Vista was making things way too easy and FOSS got lazy...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Looking at the mean (a more accurate measure of browser performance than simply a count of how many sites its best at), Chrome comes in first at 3.4s, followed by IE at 3.5s and Firefox at 3.8s.
Of course Microsoft is gonna say this. And it's absolutely no different than Firefox's slogan of "Faster, Safer, Better". Two of those statements are outright false, and one is complete opinion. Yet people let Mozilla get away with using this line without a single complaint. Apple does the same bullshit with promoting Safari, and we don't hear a peep out of people then either.
Bottom line is, don't be a hypocrite just because of some childish need to hate Microsoft. Apple = Microsoft = Mozilla. There is zero difference when it comes to a company wanting to make money.
I never thought of that. Thanks.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist" -I guess I should leave then
It is not IE that is taking long, it is all the spyware your system has to load every time you hit the IE icon.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
What could be more non-standard than Flash, a proprietary, binary blob format executed by a proprietary, binary blob plugin?
Well, that's because "IS" is a much shorter phrase than "Chrome and Firefox". I could say it faster myself!!
As I actually have to PAY for electricity, and I don't like to contribute to global warming, I DO shut my PC down when not in use, like when asleep or I leave my two story basement (bottom floor is actually underground) to go drinking.
One of the things I love about Linux is I'll shut it down at night (unless I have a big download), reboot the next morning and it's exactly how it was when I shut it down, with apps and documants I had open the previous night open when I start it.
I guess few people know of this feature, since y'all are so proud of the fact that you don't have to reboot.
Windows is a pain in the ass. Every time you boot it, you have to reopen all your apps and documents, and its registry is a little bigger.
Free Martian Whores!
Get a corp, noob! :)
There are actually corps that you can ask for a price check in any given system. It costs, but it can be well worth it when you got a lot to sell. 10% price difference is quite possible, and I do consider it a difference whether I get 500 or 550 millions for my ore, when I only have to pay meager 500k for important information.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Crud, ignore this... I entered a wrong number in my spreadsheet. IE narrowly beats Chrome, 3.5320 to 3.5328, though that is within the margin of error for such a test.
Sorry games are fun.
You should try games that aren't sorry, they're even better.
I can't believe you don't know what a Hasemalphaginnojinglanaporphomism is.
I dont know about your system but I only have 2GB ram and I can leave Firefox open with 20ish tabs and still play Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 just fine.
Good point, and Firefox can't touch IE in terms of damage caused by becoming infected with a virus
There, fixed that for you. You can download and inatall a trojan with any OS and any browser.
Free Martian Whores!
I love it. According to it's own tests, Microsoft's IE 8 is faster. And these tests are really objective right? It is easy to skew the results of any test in your favor. I wouldn't trust those results unless a third, disinterested and impartial party took up a comparison speed test between the three browsers.
I've never used that "feature" in Linux but when I set my work laptop to hybernate instead of shut down... it does just what you described... all apps open in the same place they were before. I don't think I've done a "real" reboot of any of my XP machines in months...
Collector's Edition
Sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie but I'll never know because I'm not going to eat it.
Today is an ephemeron, doomed to the crypt of yesterday.
IE sluggishness is so bad, that even though we aren't allowed to have any other browser on our computers, I use Firefox. That's right, IE is so bad, I risk disciplinary action to avoid having to use IE.
Same here... I managed to download and install Firefox to my work computer, but Websense does not allow me to install the flash plugin, for some reason (its installed in IE7, but not Firefox)...
No sig for the moment.
That was the first thing I thought of when I saw this article. Firefox with Adblock Plus loads everything much faster than plain Firefox or IE.
On top of that, it can typically begin rendering earlier, too. I've seen sites that don't render any content until the ad frames are all loaded and positioned in place. So you get to wait around until everything arrives before you see anything. But with Adblock Plus, that's not a problem. I'd personally rather have the meat of the content appear first, followed by proper formatting (if it ever arrives.) In other words, as long as the top of the page is readable first, I don't care how long it takes to render the bottom of the page.
John
>>>who cares about startup times. You actually close your browser?
Yes. It frees-up ~250 megabytes of memory for my Azureus bittorrent downloading which is, of course, higher priority. ;-)
I looked at these statistics, and I think it's ridiculous. We're talking about the difference of ~0.05 seconds between Firefox3 and IE8. A blink of an eye. Have we become so damn impatient that we can't wait that small moment in time? I remember when websites used to take 1-2 minutes via 28k or 56k modem. 0.05 difference is trivial.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Windows is a pain in the ass. Every time you boot it, you have to reopen all your apps and documents, and its registry is a little bigger.
Windows has hibernation too. shutdown /h should do it from a command prompt if you don't see it listed. Also, it may not be enabled by default. I usually do a shutdown of my personal machine as the only program I care about having open again is firefox, and that will save its tabs anyway.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
That has not been even close to my experience. On my work PC, a Thinkpad T60p, I can launch Firefox, ctrl-L to load a page, ctrl-T to open a new tab, enter an address, and have that loaded before IE7 *or* IE8RC1 even has opened up and loaded our Sharepoint intranet site.
Since IE7 came out IE has never been able to respond to opening the browser, then rattling off new tabs even close to as fast as Firefox can. Just my anecdotal $.02.
Why not email yourself a .zip file of portable firefox. If there's a will, there's a way.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Close? Reboot?
No, sorry, not familiar with those terms.
I *do* occasionally, accidentally click the big X in the top corner of the FF window.
But then I realise I didn't mean it, when it tells me I have 39 other tabs open....
Why don't MS compares IE8 with FF 3.1 and Chrome 2.0? All of them are in beta stage. MS know that ie will loose. How about 20% of ACID 3 test?
-- Simon said: Die!
Honestly, who cares about speed? With machines with dual and quad cores running at goodness knows how many MHz and as many GB of memory as you need this is completely irrelevant.
Can we have full W3c compliance with security in mind, please?
That is what matters frankly, all the rest is an aside.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Games? Here's a dollar, kid. Go buy yourself a nice candy bar while the adults talk.
This coming from the guy whose sig is "Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs."
...the fastest way to introduce new security holes into your system.
I repeated the experiment, only to be able to confirm Microsoft's findings.
First I said "IE" as fast as I could, ten times, then I said "Chrome" 10 times really fast and finally I said "Firefox" as fast as I could muster 10 times.
Saying "IE" 10 times was indeed the fastest.
However, I made a quite interesting further find: If I switch from saying "IE" to saying "Internet Explorer", it is suddenly at the bottom of the list!
My guess is that it is your plugins that are at fault.... I don't see that problem, and I have lots of tabs open for a long, long time - I don't even close the browser every few days, I usually just sleep my pc.
The only time I get slowness from FF is when I restart it with 50 or more tabs open. Really annoying if you have lots of multimedia open at the time. Especially when one tab is playing audio, and you can't find it.
It would be great if FF saved the state of the tabs, rather than reloading them. Either that or lazy load them after a restart. It would be nice to be able to see which tab sound is coming from, and perhaps even mute it.
IE is practically part of an OS. There, fixed that for you. (Oh, that must be my favourite Slashdot meme.)
Score: -1, Redundant
My UID is prime. Hah!
The "we are positive that Iraq has WMD's, let's go find them" school of benchmarking
It also helps to benchmark your beta or release candidate against two point releases back of your most feared competitor who also has a beta available. Why is this IE8 vs. Firefox 3.0.5 rather than IE 7 vs. FF 3.0.x and IE8 vs. Firefox 3.1beta? I think we know. FF 3.1 beta must eat IE8's lunch.
I would say that some folks just need to avoid bloaty flash crap. I have FF3 running on my Win2K Pro box, which is a 1.1GHz Celeron maxed out with 512MB of RAM, and I have zero problems surfing all day, and this is with a bunch of extensions(Adblock,Noscript,Downloadhelper,Downloadstatusbar,forecastfox,FEBE(must have IMHO) and cookieculler) and have no slowdowns or problems. Why? Because I avoid flash like it was the clap on that machine, that's why!
I learned a LONG time ago that Adobe=crap, and that holds even more true today. I refuse to allow Adobe Reader anywhere near my machines(use Foxit instead) and I only allow flash videos to play on my gamer rig. But even with a 3.6GHz HT enabled P4 with 2GB of RAM flash can still make FF(or even other browser, for that matter) feel sluggish. Flash just sucks, and that is not the browser's fault. But I have customers that are still using 733MHz maxed out on 384MB of RAM, and as long as they follow my rules about avoiding flash like the clap they have a nice experience on the web.
So blame Adobe for their bloated pig flash. Because as I have found with that 1.1GHz which has been faithfully doing its job for nearly 9 years now, for office work most of the tech out there is "good enough". It is flash and all the lazy coders that push the whole "throw more RAM and CPU cycles" attitude, and I'm hoping that as Netbooks take off this will change. It really is nuts to throw away good running tech simply because coders don't know how to write efficient code anymore. And I apologize if there are efficient coders reading this, but you do know you are in the minority right now, right?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Some people are still in college and only have enough money to eat ramen, let alone upgrade their machines.
1) If I don't allow FLASH, my Firefox runs for MONTHS until it gets too slow with all the add-ons or restart it to update it. Or my Mac OS acts up and I reboot or update it.
2) Start up time? who cares. If you do: Safari loads fast because frameworks upon which it depends are also used by the OS; which comprises the majority of Safari. It is not a result of anti-competitive behavior --unlike MS IE which was integrated to take over the web (the technical merits of doing so were extremely weak and not much better today.)
3) Failed rendering of VALID content does not count. MSIE CSS hacks invalidate the TEST (even if they are just to fix IE its not a balanced test to include 'optimized' data...)
4) Javascript. A whole world in itself. VALID DOM support without hacks-- has MSIE finally caught up with DOM2 yet?
5) Compilers. Different compilers and the flags can greatly impact results. Can't compile on gcc? Well, so much for a real comparison. Are runtime profiles used? are those similar? Not easy to really benchmark something is it?
6) How about somebody make speedboostIE.com which hacks into MSIE to run webkit instead-- making all subsequent surfing much faster! But seriously, its possible the ORDERING of the test pages and the length of test session impact the results (memory leaks + low ram for example.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I normally play games with about ten windows open among which Visual Studio and browsers the games run prefectly smooth.
Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. ;) Not to pick nits, but:
the same engine as chrome, firefox and Safari
<singing voice="sessamestreet">
One of these things, just doesn't belong here. One of these things is not the same. One of these things doesn't belong here, now it's time to play our game!
</singing>
(Hint: Firefox is based on Gecko.)
My blog
Yes. One of the reasons that people claimed to make the switch from Firefox starting from when it was called 'Phoenix' two name changes ago, was that it was faster than IE, even considering the added features (tabbed browsing, customizable toolbar)
My blog
Which HP department do you work for?
IE got faster? Cool! Congratulations, Microsoft.
Question: can it display web pages yet? People have been waiting for that feature since MSIE4.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Good point. Firefox 3.1 Beta is based on Gecko 1.9.1, which has various improvements in rendering performance, alongside compatibility with new tech such as the W3C Geolocation stuff
My blog
Well that's your answer right there.
Fresh install.
I'm sure MS has a buffer-overflow update somewhere that slows ff.
I play most of my games through my browser.
As we speak, the siren call of purple bubble girl waking up is drawing me back... back... back...
You leave your browser open while playing games? Doesn't that eat up memory and cause slowdown?
I just checked, Safari 4 beta has been running for 17 days and 12 hours. One of my old school video games (Starcraft) has been running 12 days. A VM running Windows XP has been up for 3 days. Total system uptime is 32 days.
If you get a system with decent memory management, no you don't have to quit your programs because of performance issues. I remember back in the day people at LAN parties being amazed because I would leave Photoshop and Illustrator running in the background while playing Warcraft 3 on a couple year old laptop.
It also has TraceMonkey, and the tests included JavaScript performance.
Some people are still in college and only have enough money to eat ramen, let alone upgrade their machines.
Sell the microwave you're using to cook the Ramen noodles and any hotplates you have and get one of the MacBook Pros with the Nvidia 9600M graphics chips in there. That way, you'll have a new computer and you'll still be able to cook your Ramen noodles on the MBP near the graphics chip!
My blog
We are in a recession, I need about $5 for a candy bar
Security always adds a little overhead.
This brings to mind the rule of 3.
Good, Fast and Cheap - you can only have 2 of the 3.
So IE is cheap (well, free with the OS) and fast. That tells me it is NOT good.
--
My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
Now, don't tell me you also reboot your system.
What part of "Windows" don't you understand?
...I don't even have a microwave . I have two pots, one big one for spaghetti and one small one for soups/ramen. Billions in bailouts for corporations, but Hell if a college student who doesnt live with their parents and works two jobs can get FAFSA or any other kind of college aid :P Let's not get started on that tangent though, grrr government and its bullshit priorities.
And in regards to what I use at home, I have a Sony Vaio I picked up for 100 at a pawnshop because it was virus ridden and I told the guy I'd have to buy a whole new XP and other stuff to fix it. He didn't understand a word I said, so I got a deal...then loaded Linux .
Yes, but have you ever seen the back of a twenty dollar bill... on Windows ????
IE is so fast at getting a machine infected with virus, trojans, spyware, etc. that I never use it unless it is my bank or credit card site and they frikking require it. And then I'm hesitant- because a fair amount of attacks have come from infected "trusted" sites.
I don't care if a web page loads in 1.2 seconds vs 1.8 seconds. I care a lot if I'm going to spend the next 6 hours reinstalling my machine.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm not talking about hibernation, I'm talking about shutting off the machine entirely. If your power goes out with a Windows machine, you have to restart every app and open every document when the power comes back on.
With Linux, your apps and documents are open just like you left them (except of course that you've lost any data that was held in memory, but that goes for any computer).
Free Martian Whores!
So you haven't applied Tuesday's security updates yet? I suggest you do so as soon as possible. It will require a reboot.
Even Windows does work without a daily reboot in the meantime. Personally, I've had uptimes of multiple weeks by now.
I know it's an old joke "you changed the position of your mouse, please reboot", but this isn't necessarily the truth anymore. It used to be that way, no doubt, but even they get better. Slowly, but they do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's hibernation, where the entire contents of RAM are copied to disk, and copied back when you switch on again.
The other option is Standby.
Grandpa? Is that you?
Yeah XP is a lot stabler than Win98 or Windows 3 used to be. They would give me a bluescreen seemingly randomly, but XP will stay up and running for months. Programs sometimes crash, but not the whole OS.
I suspect the underlying MS-DOS system made Windows 1/2/3/95/98 vulnerable.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Sum up the averages guys. Sad thing is that if you measure the pages on average, Chrome wins (albeit by less than a second). Then again none of it really matters since they're measuring a beta versus older versions. Meh.
Games? Here's a dollar, kid. Go buy yourself a nice candy bar while the adults talk.
Great Grampa is that you?
Insightful? Are you and the mods on crack? Where does it say that the competition doesn't used cached content? If anything, the word SYSTEMS in the last time you copy pasted indicates that even the other browsers used the cached version of the page.
This space for rent.
I know the feeling. Opera tends to do that after a few months.
How about they load Adblock Plus on firefox and then rerun the test with 100 random internet sites? I'd be surprised if firefox wasn't the winner by a large margin.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html
"Unfortunately, not every browser supports all of CSS1, and only those browsers which fully and completely support CSS1 will get this right. Despite some claims to the contrary, IE6/Win's rendering of this page is not correct, as it (as well as some other browsers) doesn't correctly support background-attachment: fixed for any element other than the body."
First of all, I was puzzled by some of the long (>5s) times required to open some of the websites on the top 25 list. I attempted it myself for a few of them. The first time is defined as going to that website for the first time ever. The second time is defined as going there after closing the tab and reopening the new one. I measure time until "Done" appears. WEBSITE CHROME: 1st 2nd M$ FF: 1st 2nd M$ adobe.com 3.5 1.5 9.5 4 1.5 9.4 qq.com 8 4 6.8 12 3.5 7.9 I do not have IE8 on my machine so it is possible that IE8 is also faster measured in this way, but their timings appear to be off by almost an order of magnitude. In the mean time please consider this report as being suspect, and do your own tests before deciding which browser to use. I know I switched to Chrome when I realized that I did not have to wait for 10 seconds to wait for wsj.com to come up in IE7, and that Chrome could load the page in under 1 second for me. So no amount of spurious studies will convince me of a fact that is not true (funny, for the longest time 'tobacco was not proven to be medically damaging' - surely tobacco had no impact on my grandfather who was a chain smoker died of cancer in his early 60s).
I love Firefox, but its memory usage is ridiculous. It slowly eats up all the memory on my Ubuntu machine (with 2 GB of RAM) until I shut it down. If Google Chrome was available for Linux, I'd ditch Firefox in a second, if for its exorbitant memory usage. I still can't believe that the team claims that the memory use is "normal and intentional". For fuck's sake, Compiz takes up less resources.
Do not forget Apple. They also have a fine history of faking benchmarks!
That's hibernation, where the entire contents of RAM are copied to disk, and copied back when you switch on again.
I thought that at first but he could also be talking about the session save feature the many DEs have.
Here is a document that explains how kde handles sessions (other desktop environments might do something similar). http://jucato.org/kde/kde-autostart.html
System requirements for flashplayer 10 for Linux, straight from Adobe's site.
Minimum Requirements:
Modern processor (800MHz or faster) & 512MB of RAM, 128MB of graphics memory
For "Standard" and HD playback:
Intel Core Duo 1.8GHz, AMD Athlon(TM) 64 X2 4200+ processor (or equivalent) & 512MB of RAM & 64MB of VRAM
Good God...that's more than many games.
Oh yeah, and SumatraPDF is all I'll use on Windows.
So you haven't applied Tuesday's security updates yet?
???
Last security update Apple lists was a month ago. I'll get around to that one eventually.
Everyone misses the point. We don't care how long it takes to LOAD a web site. For those on a typical home DSL line the speed of the connection determines how long a site takes to load.
What matters is AFTER the site is loaded and Javascript code is running locally in the user's computer. This makes web based applications possible, web mail, web calenders, web based office suites and so on. This is why Chrome matters
It really shouldn't be atrocious.
If you strip out the IE rendering engine from Windows (using a tool like nLite) then memory usage drops about 20-30MB. If you go to an explorer window without stripping it out, HTML content can pop up instant. With it stripped out, you get nothing.
IE shouldn't be taking any time to start. The rendering engine is already in memory. It just has to load the UI, and a few plugins.
Regardless of that... these benchmarks seem quite tailored. I'm curious which renders slashdot the fastest.
That was exactly my idea, the simplest reason is probably because IE8 was the only browser in the test that supports parallel loading of scripts:
http://stevesouders.com/ua/
New things are always on the horizon
I suggest you use the Firefox daily snapshot or beta, it works a lot better. It was actually compiled with the use of profile guided optimization
New things are always on the horizon
Yes I leave my browser on all day.
However I also reboot my system every day when I wake up to save energy and incidentally $$$$. Unless we are talking about a server why should a computer be on when you are asleep*? That is just irrationally wasteful and when aggregated over millions of users probably to the tune of wasting a who power plants worth of electricity a year, ie hundreds of thousand of tons of carbon. Your uptime bragging rights are NOT worth making global warming worse.
*Admittedly some people may be downloading torrents or doing distributed computing, but does that have to be EVERY night?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
You pay for pricing info?
http://eve-central.com/home/market.html
50 mil buys akit if tech 2 drones.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Agree, every computer I have run ie on, (ie6, ie7, ie8), whether it was P4 or dual core, it has run slowely. In loading pages, or creating new tabs. It seems to pause for 1 second before opening a new tab (or window on ie6).
you sound like someone who skipped "how to live life 101"so you wouldn't miss your precious video games.. wtf?
As I actually have to PAY for electricity, and I don't like to contribute to global warming, I DO shut my PC down when not in use, like when asleep or I leave my two story basement (bottom floor is actually underground) to go drinking.
One of the things I love about Linux is I'll shut it down at night (unless I have a big download), reboot the next morning and it's exactly how it was when I shut it down, with apps and documants I had open the previous night open when I start it.
I guess few people know of this feature, since y'all are so proud of the fact that you don't have to reboot.
Windows is a pain in the ass. Every time you boot it, you have to reopen all your apps and documents, and its registry is a little bigger.
Sorry, why is this modded as a troll? Mean-spiritedness aside, there are some great points in this post (mod half Troll, half Insightful). What's the purpose of leaving a computer on for hours and hours at a time when you know you're not going to use it? Do you do the same thing with the oven in your kitchen or the lights around your house? I agree with the parent - turn things off when you don't need them. Sheesh.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Not when you have 8GB of RAM. :)
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Linux boots slowly? Well yes, I suppose it does almost take half a minute to get to the login screen on my 630MHz laptop, and a horrifically slow EIGHT SECONDS to load the desktop and firefox!
Obviously I must run out and buy Windows Vista ASAP for its incredibly fast load times~
I'm assuming he meant for the VM, which is a Microsoft OS. Microsoft OSes have updates on the second Tuesday of the month (i.e. two days ago).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Actually there are other reasons.
See Raymond Chen's Why doesn't Windows 95 format floppy disks smoothly?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I wonder if they counted the ~3 seconds it takes IE to open a new tab and give you control of the address box...
Go to a big porn site (hint: "if it exists, there is porn of it") and load the tag list:
3min on a Q6600/Quadcore/2,7Ghz/Firefox
same system with IE: five seconds.
OK folks, move along, nothing to see here...
It runs faster really? Does it run on Linux because I don't have windows and I can't run IE. And no I'm not going to switch. All my programs only run on Linux and I can't switch. It would be a horrible inconvenience.
You forgot Apple in your recounting of picking some subset of data which optimised for benchmarking you insensitive clod!
Yeah, we do all have to design for the broken thing. IE4 was one of the best things that ever happened to the Internet. But since then, especially with IE6, it has been the worst piece of sh&^&*%^%*^t I've ever seen. What the hell is the point of having standards if you won't follow them? IE should have scrapped HTML and just used actionscript, at least it would have made sense. If I ever find the guy who made those decisions for IE, I'm going to beat him till he cries. Anyways, as far as speed goes, what's up with JavaScript in Firefox on Linux. It is butt-slow. I've seen benchmarks that show the same thing. Seems kind of ridiculous.
So now we can all get infected a small percentage faster than next leading brand!
... since I can't install it on my computer.
Loading a page fast and displaying it correctly are two different things Microsoft. Lets get our priorities in order first...
I have 4gb of RAM, 1gb which goes to Firefox and stays open. The remaining 2-3gb is for the game, minus the 512mb for video memory, which means I easily have enough memory.
:P
It consumes at most 10% of my cpu, but since I ALWAYS run my games in "highest" priority, the only issue I could have would be disk access issues. (I hear that Vista has issues playing games in highest priority, couple of friends were having issues at least and were forced to keep it to normal). I also run BOINC distributed computing when I game (taking 75% of my idle cpu cycles), and still have a smooth 40+ frames easily. If I don't set highest priority BOINC will cause jitters, but that's assuming I don't adjust the priority.
Now one can argue that disk access is an issue, which very rarely is, because I have partitions set aside for their own purpose (unless I apply a patch that fragments terribly). No issues EVER when I game, regardless of what else is running (did I mention I'm using a single, couple years old, Nvidia 8600 GTS?). Oh hi, I'm a gamer
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
It is not hard to beat firefox. FF is loaded with too much crap. That overhead slows it down. IE does one thing well, it knows to timeout and keep trying to download the webpage(s). Firefox sits and waits, until one hits the refresh button. Sadly, that bug has never been fixed in FF.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I havnt used IE 8 as after using firefox and chorme I hate IE... chrome seems to be the fastest.. and firefox 3.x slowest.. firefox 2.x was much faster then 3.x... there are a few sites which firefox loads better... there is one major problem with chrome... Chrome cannot handle high-end encryption.. While using online transactions, chrome is unable to handle the transaction at times.... and an error is shown.. this is the time i need 2 get to firefox... well cant say that chrome is best.. it has got problems of its own.. but it is indeed faster thn most....
My thoughts exactly. Sounds more like Microsoft pandering to the foolish to me. Personally, I can't imagine choosing a browser based on the speed it loads pages at. What I find important is that the browser is secure, friendly, compliant, and easy to learn, which is why I use Firefox.
I feel for you. My work allows us to use Firefox, but doesn't retain any of my settings (I know there's a word for that, but I can't remember what it is). Fortunately, they also give me a generous amount of server space, so I have Portable Firefox installed on my desktop so I can use that and keep my settings between sessions.
I'm with commodore64_love on this; tailored or not, the average difference of about 0.05 seconds is irrelevant. This isn't a race. You would have to be loading over twenty pages before the difference began to become noticeable, and how often is it that you do so in rapid succession? Basically, my argument is saving a few seconds over the course of a day isn't worth the time to argue over.
Be fair, if you make it load all the bulk nobody needs, i.e. a typical Windows startup, Linux is pretty slow. That you can't take the crap that you don't need out of the Windows startup routine isn't the fault of Mic... well, wait a sec...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I totally agree with you, hell I went through the same thing back in the day.
My point is that Firefox is a modern browser with modern features designed to work on modern machines, and saying that it doesn't work on older machines very well (which it doesn't) does not really add much to the argument.
Especially when you have alternatives like Epiphany and Opera out there.
Best of luck with collage, try not to get malnutrition and try to sneak a few beers in here and there.
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
It's amusing when you get a "troll" mod, and it's a 1 instead of negative. You're right, I wasn't trolling, you SHOULD shut stuff down when you're not using it.
I suspect whoever modded it "troll" was a teenager who was sick of his mom nagging about leaving "every light in the house" on.
Free Martian Whores!
I've never heard of the "loading twenty-five pages" benchmark. Is that a new one?